My head is pounding. Bettye's food tastes as amazing as usual. This WoW TCG is hard. Really, really hard. I've played Magic since I was 10, but I have rarely ever had headaches this bad playing that game. Guess I just haven't used my brain this much in a long time. In Magic you can only play lands for resources and attack the other player (or planeswalker(s)), but in WoW you have to determine what card you are going to row turns in advance, figure out the best attacks, and decide when it's time to start racing. There's so much to think about, and that's why it's an awesome game. I was so tired yesterday that I passed out on Ryker's baby pillow, which is undoubtedly covered in drool and vomit and milk, during Dawn of the Dead.

After an almost two-year hiatus, broken up by the Worldbreaker prerelease DMF LA, I managed to find a great core deck (thanks to Deck Doctor Dan) which I went 7-4 with, and 5-1 the draft portion with. When you consider my 3-40 (maybe slightly exaggerated on the low side) record at Draft Camp, I'm pretty proud of my draft record today.

I honestly have no idea where this blog is going since I am tired and my head is pounding, but bear with me a little longer, I beg. After losing my first draft round to Andy Hoang, I put myself on coming in at best 18th place if I won out. I was able to do just that, but fortunately/unfortunately my prediction was off. I ended up in 19th thanks to my miserable tiebreakers (lost round 1 to not knowing what his deck was trying to do, turn 4 Devouring Plague didn't help after I had blown something up the turn previous with Cromarius. Naturally, he was in the DMF on Saturday). Thanks for nothing, opponents.

I can't say I feel bad about finishing in 19th place out of 300 something runners, especially because I haven't played and really had no expectations coming in besides trying not to completely embarrass myself. I do feel awful for Tim and Brad, however. I've never seen these big WoW tournaments end with TWO players missing the top 8 on tiebreakers, despite having the requisite amount of wins. It happens in Magic Pro Tours, but those are rigidly set at two eight round days. I'm not exactly sure why Cryptozoic decided to cut the 12th-round mid-tournament, but it seems like that play came back to bite them. Or at least bite Brad and Tim. It's a monstrous drop-off from top 8 prizes to 9th-16th prizes, and their deck seems to play really well in a best-out-of-three format when you get free mulligans (although I'm sure the Egg players would love to have the ability to Paris mulligan).

Tim cruised through draft day to yet again 6-0, but apparently that's just not good enough anymore. I won't pretend to understand the logistics of tournament rounds or anything like that, and maybe some people would have missed on breakers no matter how many rounds there were. I'm simply saying that, in my experience, I haven't seen two people miss on breakers before, especially not when one went undefeated through day 2. Maybe there needs to be another draft so that Constructed doesn't count for almost double what draft does (11 rounds of core vs. 6 rounds of draft). I honestly don't know.

What I do know is this: I miss playing WoW TCG and wish I could play it more often, but there's no community in Hawaii. I miss the friends I've made through this game. I miss competing in these huge tournaments and doing well in them, because, really, "what you think, I sold 'em all?" I miss the ish-talking with Rob and Niles and Tim and Kirk and the crew (and just the regular kind of talking to them as well). All of it. You guys have it so good. Enjoy it.

And I have to come clean before I end this. I told some of my opponents that this was my first tournament, which wasn't exactly the truth. NACC was my second Cryptozoic tournament after DMF LA. I'm not sure if that affected the way they played, but I'll take it if it did. Suckers :P.

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