Hey Guys! Just thought I'd post up some photos and videos of the worlds I (and the ever-awesome Ants) took, and maybe slip a little commentary in between. This was my first ever global event, and I feel compelled to try and immortalise the memories for everybody to see. Also, I'd like to apologise for some of the god-awful quality of some of the photos - these were taken with a new digital camera I bought specifically for the event, and I was rather inept at fighting motion-blur and lack of focus. :( So, without further ado - Bayushi Bohbei's World Championships 2008!
Okay, so - to start off, Me and my companions (Seen below in the second
photo - Mark, Alex, and Dave (As seen on such cards
as the Yobanjin Alliance!)) woke up a little late on the friday
morning, and marched ourselves down to the event - only to be caught in
the registration queue we had (the night before) planned to try and
avoid. Dang. But! Rather than becoming disheartened, anticipation
merely grew as I witnessed the sheer number of players from all over
the globe had come to attend. Needless to say, it was a wait, but -
worth it.
After having pressed through registration and heading into the main hall, the venue was truly a sight to behold - Clan Standards were all over the walls, and the sheer variety of costumes was only to be bested on the following day. The atmosphere was electric and the sense of community was incomparable to anything I'd experienced before - we were all here as representatives to our clans and participated with a fiery enthusiasm that infected everything in the building.
So, following a brief stint prior to the event, the first round of the first qualifier for the worlds kicked off. Once again, I am forced to apologise to everybody, as I completely suck with names, and have yet to find a list of my opponents - so nobody in the photos can be identified. If one of you're reading this, -PLEASE- speak up and make yourselves known! Still - names are overrated, anyway! Right - Game One. Let's get it on!
My opponent was playing a Crane Honor-Gain deck, I believe. I say "I believe" because - well, I've only been playing the game for about four-five months, and I don't actually know many of the deck-types or specific ones on the market. :P Anyway. Great guy, had a fun game playing against him. He was courteous and respectful towards me, and - well, was a bit of a Crane, to summarise. :D Unfortunately, running Deception's Veil Dojo meant the honor/dishonor stalemated each other, and the game was destined to go to time and fall to a roll. Scorpion win the roll, and my score hits 1-0. Rock On!
Progressing to the second round of the first qualifier, I encounter a fairly funny Phoenix player. As in, literally - I got the fair few laughs from this dude's antics, and I enjoyed the game a lot - just free-and-easy turns with jokes all over the shop. He also gave me some pretty cool advise concerning Misdirection and Beirei's ability that I will wreak horrible vengeance with in my next Phoenix matchup featuring the elemental master. The game kicks off badly for me, ditching the first round of personalities and drawing Hisoka and Maru on the second turn. I buy them out on third, but am faced with a nasty set of holdings on the fourth - I do my best to hold the Phoenix back from their honor victory - until I realise he's playing out of the military stronghold, and Emori seems to want to smash my face with some sort of big rock. Emori promptly enforces this threat, and my shattered personality-drawing power doesn't recover. That makes it 1-1 for me, then! D'oh!
Clearly my games were on a theme of clan diversity, as I draw my next opponent - the Spider. Unlike the spider, the player was pretty sociable, and we hit it off pretty well. He was running a token-manufacturing plant out of the Black Silk Castle, I believe - but my primary concern was that delightful 0 starting honor the Spider sport. The game goes on, and I get a fairly good set of supporting courtiers to fuel my dishonor engine, and draw the right cards to kill the infamous Fatina, Jinsei and Saleh - a combination of Bitter Shadow and Hired Killers, I think. His honor gets whittled down, but he manages to form a fairly tight-nit set of tokens despite my efforts to lop-off the head of the jackal necromancers before they get started. I think I got him down to -15-ish before he managed to smash my last province. Had a great game, regardless - and my 1-2 result spurs me to drop out of the first qualifier and enter the second, granting me even more opponents! Wahey!
Now, the next match-up is one I never like - not because I'm resentful or biased or anything like that, but Cavalry manoeuvres always get on my nerves because I just can't defend that effectively against them. Maybe it's an experience thing, I dunno - but it's just a niggling annoyance because I just don't have enough movement tech to intercept those damn ponies! So yeah - Unicorn. Maru makes an early appearance again, but unfortunately it's not much good - the Unicorn stronghold (I forget the name) allowed for straightening of his personalities as a limited action. I mean, Maru's ability meant I used up his capability to do so, but the majority of the time he didn't need to anyway - Grr! Pesky Unicorn-ses. Still - start off the second qualifier on a loss, but remain confident it'll pick up with time. Yeaaaaah, about that... Anyway! 0-1.
Had a good game with the next opponent - albeit, the game resulted in another loss for poor ol' me! Dragon Ring-Honor (*flex limited deck knowledge*) with remarkable speed. I only manage to delay his eventual win by a couple of turns before Noritada and Masijiro secure the win. Even so, as I said - I had a good time with this game, and I left feeling fairly positive, even in the light of the loss. 0-2.
A brief interlude between the games, I encountered a mantis player called Lene. As I had promised to her and her personalised cheering section, I would like to make a public service announcement:
Lene is Still Awesome.
Moving on to my next match - unfortunately, my opponent didn't show up. Yes, I am afraid that I have decieved you, dear reader - my final win record was not from sheer skill alone. :lol: But luckily, my neighbour on the same table also didn't have an opponent - so we had ourselves a casual game to keep ourselves sharp for the next round. :wink: More pony-evilness meant that I was to curse the Khan's name once again for making such an efficient set of warriors that promptly gave my courtiers a royal ass-kicking - again. Dangit, where the heck is Tsimaru?! But the game did have it's advantages - nothing on the line meant nothing to worry about, so we had a care-free game of pony-riding and political back-stabbery interlaced with humour all the way. Still - a win's a win, I guess! 1-2.
My next game was a barrel of laughs, simply because the guy I was playing against was clearly just playing for the sake of playing. He distinctly gave me the impression fun came first, and it was infectious - I had a great game, bringing another Spider deck to -17 before getting crushed. Whoops! 1-3.
Following the theme of casual gaming for sheer amusement, my next opponent was pretty laid-back, too - and, I was pleasantly surprised to discover, was regularly a Scorpion player, so we had something in common. Sporting the green-and-insecticidal Mantis banner for a change, we hit it off, and unfortunately a strong military start coupled with a remarkable dishonor-inducing-and-abusing hand allowed me to net the game. To be honest - who can call Naizen betraying his clan to the highest bidder really "unexpected"? :lol: 2-3!
In-between rounds, I take some time to pop over to the Artist's Alley and say 'Hey' to Drew Baker and Steve Argyle - and manage to get a picture. Little did I realise, however, that when I said "take a picture", they thought I meant "sacrifice me". So, without further ado, here is Drew Baker sacrificing me to Argyle No Oni (Seriously, click the thumbnail - you have to see it to believe it) - who looks positively delighted to devour my soul. As my pose suggests, I was quite understanding about the whole thing.
Despite there being three rounds remaining, this was my final match for the evening - for which I'm quite glad, because it meant it finished on a great note. The crab player I played off against in this round proved to be an absolutely amazing player. Respectful, witty, and -very- forgiving to tiredness-induced mistakes. Not to mention this match had a comical solution - it turned out that my opponent had sat down at the wrong table, and my opponent had simply not shown up. Further investigation revealed that her opponent, too, had not shown up - so we both won! Result: 3-3.
At this point, I couldn't qualify for the main event and a large number of people had stopped coming to their matches anyway in favour of beer and good times, so I followed the trend-setters and headed out for a beer, abandoning my last two matches - given only people who got 6-2 or better were qualifying, it was a fruitless endeavour anyway. Still - heading to a bar that did -awesomely- sized beer mugs and having a drunken lecture with Ant concerning 'the good old days' of L5R proved to be an excellent way to prepare for the following day. With that - roll on, day two!
Day two has been affectionately dubbed by me as "Dawn of the Spider" - simply because of my eight games, half of these were spider! Not that I'm complaining or anything - Spider rarely gain much honor to fight back against Deception's Veil, and their 0 starting honor only serves to sweeten the deal - still, hordes of undead are not a task a set of courtiers are built to deal with, so it's only understandable they got smooshed a few times. However, having not qualified in either of the qualifiers yesterday, on day two I was taking part in the Second Chance tournament - the alternative storyline event in which the location of the temple of the Moon (I think it was the Moon?) was to be decided. Game 1 - Black Silk Castle Swarm. Much like one of my earlier spider games, it was a matter of luck that got me my victory - I had just the right tools in hand to kill off the necromancers early before they got into the sway of token-massing. Ten minutes left on the round, my opponent makes the decision he doesn't have much in the way of opportunity, and concedes honorably. 1-0!
My next game was against a more experienced player, but luckily for me - normally a Scorpion player! Having no time to create a scorpion deck for the event, he had merely brought a spider-breeder along, and after explaining he didn't want to cause any Scorpion losses, conceded the match. Appreciative for such an opportunity and humbled by his clan-ship, I accepted and we just played out a casual game to pass the time. Unfortunately, the undead munched on some courtier-corpse in the courts as they walked all over my army. Still, the honorable gesture of my clan-mate makes my score 2-0 after the second round of the Second Chance tournament. Thanks again, dude!
My next match-up is against a Vigilence Keep lion deck - and it's quite possibly the worst opponent to face for my deck. I counted my blessings, though - at least I only played it once during the entire weekend. It's ability to both gain honor rapidly and smashy-smashy my provinces basically neutered my military-switchblade element to stop honor-decks and my dishonor-element to stop military decks. It's like my cryptonite, for pete's sake! Even with an incredibly bad start (8 personalities dumped, I believe), the Lion pulls it out of the hat and crushed my scorpion insolence. 2-1!
Next - more ponies! Jeez, you'd think by this time of the weekend they'd have been satisfied with the giant horse-shoe print on my forehead, but they come back for more. This one was particularly devastating - a bad start on my end leaves me completely open to two Unicorn Shugenja-blitz, gaining force for having attached spells. Two shugenja perform two turns of one-manning a province each. Rapidity of this game aside, I still had fun, and my opponent was a barrel of laughs. I was chuckling a fair bit at the sheer helplessness my personalities had. I could almost hear Hisoka screaming like a little girl as the unicorn stomped him into the dust. 2-2!
By this point it became evident I must have been some sort of horse-killer in a past life as I continued to draw more Unicorns. Clip-clop goes my chances of victory as the horsies shrug off the mass dishonor they received and race to the finish-line. Provinces are lost with startling swiftness as Chaggy hits the table, powered by his own holding, The Khan. All in all, the game was fairly straight-forward, but my opponent was pretty understanding when I explained Cavalry manoeuvres were surely the work of some sort of demented Oni. A good thing, too - I spend Sunday roleplaying with this guy, and we had a great Crane-Scorpion Courtier double act going on throughout. 2-3!
Brian (one of the few guys I knew the name of - mostly because he was a fellow countryman I'd seen at a couple of Kotei's before the Worlds) had to be coaxed out from behind his protective table-number-allocation-shield to get this photo done. Luckily, knowing him to be a Spider player, a simple claim that an "easily influenced tainted samurai" was standing over there drew him out. It's all about knowing your enemy, Kids! Knowledge is Power! Anyway - the game. A unique twist - Spider's Lair Breeder with Political Aspects. Running Behina and Saya, the deck was designed to honor-run, with potential dishonor switchblade and undead protectors. Luckily, my military forces (composed of Yumita and Paneki) put enough pressure on provinces that nobody was defending them. On the last province, time was called, and Brian conceded the game under the impression that the continued assaults would cost him too much to keep up every turn with my dishonor dragging out his potential honor-victory. 3-3!
The next game - more spidery, breedery goodness. This game proves to be a bit close, but unfortunately the ghulish tidal wave takes all four provinces in one turn after some serious build-up. Dang. 3-4.
Last - and by no means least - was a Phoenix honor-runner - the first I'd faced all weekend, in fact! A fairly good start for my opponent sees a couple of the Ultimate Clan Pack cards running onto the field and going crazy with their traits. Gaining honor as rapidly on my turn as his own, my bad start hinders me, and his swift performance makes my chances to win slim at best, and rather than try and drag it to a roll when time is called, I concede. It was an enjoyable game regardless, and I got an opportunity to see a number of the clan pack cards in action. At the end of the second day, I stand on a lower-than-average 3-5.
Well - the tournament officially over for me, I take the opportunity to round up as many photos of the costumes going around as I can. And I've got to say - there were some truly spectacular costumes going around, and they all were equally commendable. Luckily, I -think- I got photographs of all of them - except, perhaps, the Ratling - but luckily, Ant managed to catch him on the camera's video during the ending ceremonies (see the youtube links below!). Still, they were most certainly worthy of notice, so - here they are!
Finally, the Ant of Win managed to catch the closing ceremonies of the championships - declaration of position, the costume contest, and the Largest Banner contest. Unfortunately, due to youtube apparently liking to darken my videos and the fact it was filmed on a digital camera - not a video camcorder - the quality is not amazing. But yeah! It's still here. I've only uploaded the first part for now, simply because it's quite late and the files to be uploaded are quite big. But rest assured - parts 2 to 4 will be going up soon!
Well, without further ado:
The World Championships Closing Ceremonies - Part One.
Still - I hope you enjoyed reading my report as much as I did remembering most of it! I'd like to thank the TO's and the Judges for their extensive and excellent service throughout the weekend, Drew Baker and Steve Argyle for signing my cards and not devouring my very essence, and Alex Jones for getting me to Karlsruhe in the first place. My first World Championships was a truly amazing experience, and hope that there are many more to come - for both me, and everybody else!
Bobby (Bayushi Bohbei)