Eric's Worlds/Adepticon 2019 AAR

Now that we're all done learning about vegetable gardening and jogging, I suppose we should talk about Armada. I guess. I heard some kind of event happened? Oh right, Worlds.

I was lucky enough to make it to day 2 of Worlds (coming in at 6th place at the end of day 1 and falling to 17th place by the end of day 2 after reaching table 2 and getting slapped back down, haha) so I've got seven games to talk about! I'll try to cover them fairly quickly, but first we need to talk about the fleet I brought:

8 ships what up? I don't believe anyone else had 8 ships at Worlds.

Time to talk too much about which plastic spaceships I think are dreamy

Name: Rieekan Street Sharks and the Slicey Bois
Faction: Rebel
Commander: General Rieekan

Assault: Most Wanted
Defense: Contested Outpost
Navigation: Solar Corona

MC30c Torpedo Frigate (63)
• General Rieekan (30)
• Lando Calrissian (4)
• Ordnance Experts (4)
• External Racks (3)
• Admonition (8)
= 112 Points

CR90 Corvette A (44)
• Turbolaser Reroute Circuits (7)
• Jaina's Light (2)
= 53 Points

Hammerhead Scout Corvette (41) x3
• Slaved Turrets (6)
• Task Force Organa (1)
= 48 Points (144 points total)

Hammerhead Torpedo Corvette (36)
• External Racks (3)
• Task Force Organa (1)
= 40 Points

GR-75 Medium Transports (18)
• Slicer Tools (7)
• Quantum Storm (1)
= 26 Points

GR-75 Medium Transports (18)
• Slicer Tools (7)
= 25 Points

Total Points: 400

During Regional season I was largely sidelined due to scheduling issues (having a toddler doesn't help) with other nearby Regionals and my commitment to running our Chicagoland Regional (shout-out to Ron and Pastimes Games for making that a reality, on a side note) so I was allowed some room to daydream about running an SSD at Worlds. As it became clear that the SSD wouldn't be available in time for Worlds, I had to give some serious consideration to what fleet I was going to run with only about a month's worth of time to practice and refine it. I'd been playing a variety of different fleets since last Worlds but the two I had the most experience with were both squadless - Vader Cymoon LMSU and Rieekan MSU, similar to my last Worlds fleet.

I wasn't exactly thrilled about the situation given due to Imperial two ship becoming even more of a thing (ugh, I hate two ship but that's an article for another day), heavy squad builds were becoming even more prevalent than they were before either due to two-ship fleets themselves or in response (as the best way to kill squadrons in Armada is with your own squadrons). Given squad-heavy as an archetype has outperformed since wave 2 it was already likely to show up to Worlds in force and the meta was developing in a way to make it even worse. I didn't really have the time to start from scratch with a squad fleet that could compete against expert-level Rieekan/Dodonna Rebel squad players or Thrawn/Sloane Imperial players, so it was going to have to be one of those two more practiced fleets. That said, I feel like Rieekan MSU has the better matchup there and I made some changes to squeeze in two Slicer Tools GR-75s, which help in squad matchups (even with Thrawn, but not nearly as much) and the fleet was altered to do better at long range, which has become necessary as more Raddus and squad-heavy builds proliferate. Plus two of my buddies were already bringing some version of Vader LMSU and I wanted to do my own thing.

So anyways, I can break down the fleet to kind of explain the thought process a bit:

MC30c Torpedo Frigate (63)
• General Rieekan (30)
• Lando Calrissian (4)
• Ordnance Experts (4)
• External Racks (3)
• Admonition (8)
= 112 Points
This is a fairly standard Admonition flagship build and I went with External Racks to save points and because it's not uncommon for this ship to get one round of actual combat (usually later in the game) and/or act as a finisher against a ship that's lost its shields and/or brace token(s) due to tussling with the other combat ships a round or two ahead of time, so the burst damage helps. Plus it means I'm never left in the awkward situation of fishing for crits, which can occasionally backfire. I tend to put this ship behind the Hammerheads group to dissuade people from getting too close and it allows me to burst forward and put the hurt on things once it's safe. The big threat to a Rieekan MSU fleet is someone getting the jump on Rieekan early and with all the Morna, Maarek, and Jendon everywhere, Admonition is no longer as safe against squads as it used to be (given you're not canceling hit+crit bomber dice, just a single hit or crit die with 2-3 dice being rolled per attack), so keeping Rieekan safe early on was essential. Good news for me is Rieekan survived all 7 games, in most cases never taking any hull damage.

I went with Rieekan because I feel like a true MSU fleet nowadays likely should default to Rieekan given how much powerful single activations are prioritized right now (ships activating 4+ squads, large ships throwing tons of dice, Raddus ships blowing things up, etc.), keeping your small ships temporarily on the board can keep you swinging (and keep enemy ships trapped) where other commanders would've just watched your fleet fall apart. It also makes me much less finicky about getting first player, which is comforting when the Pryce bidding wars are getting up to 20+ points and I just don't have the stomach to compete with that.

CR90 Corvette A (44)
• Turbolaser Reroute Circuits (7)
• Jaina's Light (2)
= 53 Points
Your basic CR90A with one of the most efficient titles in the game. Speed 4 is extremely valuable for putting pressure on lifeboats, carriers trying to hide, and things trying to run away.

Hammerhead Scout Corvette (41) x3
• Slaved Turrets (6)
• Task Force Organa (1)
= 48 Points (144 points total)

Hammerhead Torpedo Corvette (36)
• External Racks (3)
• Task Force Organa (1)
= 40 Points
This group is the meat of the fleet in terms of combat activations but it's still pretty cheap (less than half the points). 3 Slaved TFO Hammerhead Scouts can lay down some decent firepower at long range, especially when coordinating with one another and/or the CR90A, and the Torpedo initially acts as activation padding and a TFO node but later on is happy to rush forward to Rieekan zombie block and/or throw some con fire Ex Racks into enemy ships.

Normally I'm not keen on Slaved Turrets, but given the very wide front arc on Hammerheads and the fact that their side arc is a blue die they tend to only get the one attack in, nearly always from the front. Con firing for 4 red dice with a 2-die reroll from TFO gives them better long-ranged punching power than an ISD-II (which has the 4 red dice but usually lacks a reroll mechanism unless under Vader). The shots add up pretty quickly.

GR-75 Medium Transports (18)
• Slicer Tools (7)
• Quantum Storm (1)
= 26 Points

GR-75 Medium Transports (18)
• Slicer Tools (7)
= 25 Points

The two slicey bois, identical except one of them is Quantum Storm. They do a lot for nearly no points - provide activations, add flak support, slice the bejesus out of things, block as Rieekan zombies. They're swell. Originally they were a fourth Hammerhead Scout and a 3 point bid (for a fleet of all combat activations), but I'm very glad I made the change to include them.

Assault: Most Wanted
Pretty straightforward - I've got a flotilla to target with it and A LOT of long-ranged attackers. Most Wanted has been a staple red objective since flotillas came out. It's boring, but it works. The main downside is Raddus fleets will typically select it and you won't have a good target for it but that's the risk you have to take. The alternative option would've been Opening Salvo but I get a bit antsy about that even with a ton of ships on my side of the table.

Defense: Contested Outpost
Another common objective, I've got enough of a gunline to hang out near the station and hold it for the first few rounds even if the Command value on my ships isn't stellar (9 total Command in the fleet despite 8 ships). It also gives me more control over obstacle placement (4 of them total) and stops the station from healing, which helps against squadron fleets. Rieekan can also do some fun tricks with zombie flotillas blocking large ships from making it to the station, which is something my gunline wants to have happening anyways but also buys me some breathing room to score more station points.

Navigation: Solar Corona
For the record - I miss Salvage Run. It's a great objective and scoring up to 80 points off of it is sublime. Salvage Run normally works great, but Strategic and Raddus can complicate your plans to harvest all those tokens plus the dust clouds are favored by two-ship to hide their Quasar on a crucial round or two. I don't want to enable any of those fleets, so I shied away from it and took Solar Corona, which is less exciting but more reliable and less capable of being flipped on me.

Points considerations
The only other thing I wanted to mention is generally it's tough to score a lot of points off this fleet. Unless you destroy the flagship, you need to destroy two ships (only one of which can be a flotilla) to get a 7-4 (and that assumes I score no points in return). With most of the ships being in the 53 to 40 point range and the flotillas coming in at 25 and 26, there's not a big fat target that's easy to get to. With the whole fleet being maneuverable speed 3 and about half of it being speed 4 (Quantum Storm counts, kind of, as speed 3+1), everything is capable of running for it if they're almost but not quite dead.

Why MSU though?
I'm well-practiced with it, I guess. Plus I enjoy the speedy little combat ships. Not to mention I'm a bit of a contrarian and I enjoy bringing things the meta isn't really focused on running or beating.

Let's talk about the games already
Sure thing, chief. I'll keep the summaries pretty short and include pictures when I remembered to take them.

Game 1, Cory Benson

Roughly the end of round 2 and the demolition derby is already on.

Cory and I laughed a bit about how even though both our similar fleets were very unlike the tons of Sloane 2+1 fleets and Thrawn 2-ship fleets present at Worlds, we somehow hit one another round one. I've known Cory for years now online as Ardaedhel, one of the best players of tons of MC30s, so it was nice to finally meet him in the flesh.

He was running (by my recollection):

• 3 MC30s with Assault Proton Torpedoes, Ordnance Experts, and Skilled First Officers 
• A Rieekan flagship MC30 equipped as above but with Lando officer and the Admonition title, very similar to my own flagship
• GR-75s with Comms Nets

Cory had a huge bid of I believe 27 points. I had a bid of 0 points. Cory chose to go first and he chose my Solar Corona. He deployed in mirror formation spread out in the middle (a good formation for speed 4 MC30s to be able to run over to help their buddies) and I deployed on the left. The short version is it was a bloodbath on both sides. His MC30s danced in to combat and caused a lot of trouble for me and my Hammerheads ganged up on them and blocked them as best as they could. By the end of the game I was able to chase down a straggler or two and he had blown up most of my ships, leaving both of us with our untouched Admonition flagships and a single GR-75. Due to his unspent points of bid, that meant I had destroyed about 20-odd points less than him, so it was a 5-6 loss for me. It was a fun game and I'd say overall my favorite game of day 1 (no offense to anybody else I played, you were all great).

Game 2, Colin Bielat
Colin is one of our Fair Game regulars and we groused a bit about how no matter what happens, there will almost always be Fair Game on Fair Game violence at any tournament we attend as a group. It's almost preordained at this point.

Colin was bringing a slightly different Thrawn 2-ship fleet with:

• ISD-II with Thrawn, Pryce, Leading Shots, Relentless, and ECMs 
• Brunson Squall Quasar with Boosted Comms
• The squads were your standard Morna, Maarek, Jendon, plus Jumpmaster, Mauler, and 2 Firesprays. It's a somewhat unconventional build (and an odd number of squads), but it had a lot of Rogues, which meant even on non-Pryce rounds I had to approach with caution.

He chose Most Wanted, hoping to smash through and run away before it became a problem for him. He deployed conservatively in a corner, not wanting to get swarmed by deploying centrally. I deployed in the opposite corner on my side very similarly to my Solar Corona deployment in other squad games (pictures of those coming below, I forgot to take a picture this game). I chose his ISD and my dumpster flotilla as the Most Wanted targets. He had some difficulty deciding on a Pryce round given we were very far apart from one another and he was starting at speed 1. He chose round 4. This would prove to be an unfortunately crucial error, as I was able to step on the gas and draw a bead on the ISD with all 3 Scout Hammerheads and the CR90 at the start of round 4 and with Most Wanted, I focus fired it to death before Pryce let it activate. After that, I hunted down the Quasar the subsequent round and tabled him. He destroyed the Most Wanted flotilla and Jaina's Light, giving me a 10-1 win.

Game 3, Billy Wilkins
Billy is one of the hosts of Outer Rim Job and he had a neat custom Lando upgrade card, looking all fancy. My regular Lando was jealous.

This is a few activations into round one.

Billy's fleet was (again, forgive me if my memory is fuzzy):

• Raddus on a Torpedo Hammerhead with just Hondo
• External Racks Ordnance Experts Hammerhead
• GR-75 with Slicer Tools and Quantum Storm
• GR-75 with Comms Net
• CR90B with Jaina's Light, Engine Techs, and MS-1 Ion Cannons
• Profundity Armored MC75 geared up for DEATH with Leading Shots, External Racks, XI7 Turbolasers, Electronic Countermeasures, Boarding Engineers, and the aforementioned very fancy Lando.

So not exactly like this, but kind of like this. Plus I'll take whatever excuse to get Billy Dee into an article.

He had a bid and chose to go first. He chose my Most Wanted. With Profundity and Jaina's Light set aside, this left me without a great Most Wanted target (which is common against Raddus) so I went with Raddus's flagship as the best bad option. It was worth the most total points and I was gunning for putting pressure on Raddus anyways to force a drop earlier if I could.

He dropped in round three with Profundity and his Jaina's on the left and his Jaina's went after mine, double ramming it to finish it off (which then became a Rieekan zombie). Profundity activated later, taking out a Hammerhead that had activated earlier and was doing its best to get away (not surprisingly, it died, but if it had a chance of surviving I was going to take it). The rest of my fleet ran for it and took out both of his flotillas and eventually his flagship in the process, netting me a 6-5 win. I almost regretted putting some pressure on his other Hammerhead that was trying to sneak by after getting a little bruised when its side arc + con fire + External Racks rolled 3 hit+crits and a single hit on my own Torpedo Hammerhead. Yikes. One more damage and that would've been a dead Hammerhead and a 5-6.

It was a non-ideal game for both of us: my fleet doesn't have a great center of mass to drop Raddus against and if he had dropped in a more target-rich environment it was quite likely I would've chewed up the MC75 through weight of numbers. Conversely, his fleet doesn't have a lot of points I can grab assuming he Raddus drops more conservatively (which he did, which was likely the right call).

That said, I liked his Raddus drop configuration and I can see how it would be mean against a rival large ship. He can drop in the MC75 and Jaina's both double-arcing a target, pop Hondo to give Jaina's a nav token (for the double ram) and give the MC75 a squad token (for the Boarding Engineers). At that point, Jaina's should activate first, con fire, and trigger MS-1s at least once, probably exhausting the very-common ECMs on a large ship and stripping some shields, then getting hull damage on the victim through double-ramming. After that, the MC75 activates, uses Boarding Engineers to flip up those facedown ram damage cards, and drills into the exposed hull zone with its XI7s, hopefully locking down the brace naturally due to ECMs being exhausted. It's not a bad build at all given the proliferation of large ships we've been seeing lately and the MC75 can tank at least one shot to the face while keeping its prey locked in place.

Game 4, Thomas Gall
I met Thomas and his son Ian two Adepticons back, and while I didn't play them (...that I remember?), I believe John may have. They're good people, Ian largely watches quietly (to ensure he's not influencing the game) and his father Thomas is very polite and laid back.

Thomas, middle, and Ian, left. (Edit: this picture was originally incorrect, it is now correct)

Thomas brought a Sloane 2+1 fleet with:

• Sloane on a Kuat ISD with Avenger, Boarding Troopers, Leading Shots, Strategic Adviser, and ECMs. I'm sure there was an ordnance upgrade but I don't recall what it was.
• Quasar-I with Flight Controllers, Boosted Comms, Expanded Hangar Bays, Pursuant, and Brunson
• Gozanti with Hondo, Boosted Comms, and Comms Net
• Maarek and Jendon (hetero life mates), Morna, Howlrunner, Ciena, and 3 Interceptors. Lots of anti-squad muscle.

On a side note, Sloane 2+1 was not uncommon at the event as something of a counter to all the Pryce 2-ship by simply out-muscling the enemy squads and this fleet was somewhat typical of that in that it had A LOT of anti-squad firepower.

Thomas thought on it for a while and decided he didn't want to face all the metal(/plastic) I was bringing AND have to deal with my objectives, so he chose to go second. I had to choose between (as I recall) Fighter Ambush, Superior Positions, and Advanced Gunnery. I chose Advanced Gunnery, hoping to be able to use last+first to minimize the worst of it and net some extra points off the ISD if I could gang up on it and destroy it. If I misplayed it, though, a Sloane Boarding Troopers Avenger Kuat with Advanced Gunnery... yikes. Even at medium range the front arc of that thing is scary for everything but Admonition and even Admonition would die if it was caught at close range of the front arc.

We deployed as above (I remembered to take a picture prior to the ships activating), with me deploying inward from the outside flotilla into my not-quite-prescribed-but-the-basic-idea-is-the-same "fanning out from the corner" deployment when going up against heavy quads. I selected my CR90 as the Advanced Gunnery Ship and he selected his Kuat.

The short version is I played it fairly cagey early on, slowing my inside ships down and allowing my outside ships to catch up. It kept me out of squad attack range for the first two rounds and I got my CR90 into range at the bottom of round 2 to hit the Kuat's side and front on round 3 (due to Advanced Gunnery), which was then followed up by the Kuat being forced into the guns of all the Hammerheads, stripping its shields and blowing its brace prior to being pounced on by Rieekan himself at the end of the round and then destroyed top of round 4. I then hunted down the Quasar for a tabling, getting a 10-1 victory for the loss of Jaina's (those squads wanted revenge and they got it) and most of the shields and one hull damage on a fleeing overworked Admonition (who jumped on the Quasar for the next round before speed 4 blasting out of there).

We talked about it a bit after the game and it was a bad matchup for Thomas from the get-go. Sloane typically has issues with MSU in my experience because she just can't bring enough muscle to bear on enough ships and her defense token spending isn't as valuable there. She also tends to dedicate a fair amount of resources to hunting enemy squads and I brought none, plus there's the issue with not having a lot of Slicers defense (Pursuant did help, though). I'm not sure he should have given me first player, but I'm not sure I would see much of a change in the outcome if he had chosen first for himself.

End of day 1
I was in 6th place out of 94 original participants, which was quite good considering my personal goal was "make it to day 2 at all" and several skilled players (including fellow author John, press F to pay respects) I knew didn't make the cut.

Don't even look at me, look at all those very good players on that list!

Round 5, Daniel Unzeitig
Daniel is from Poland and as I recall he took first in two of the Regionals held there and goes by "the Black Admiral." No pressure, me, haha. Daniel is extremely good with his squadron game, right up there with Nate Coda. Plus he was a super nice opponent. Great way to start the day.

Round 1, fight!

Daniel was running a Dodonna squadron group of absolute destruction that looked a bit like:

• Dodonna on an Assault Frigate with Boosted Comms, Adar Tallon, Flight Controllers, and ECMs
• Yavaris Nebulon-B with Flight Commander and Fighter Coordination Team
• Hammerhead Torpedo with Hondo
• GR-75 with Comms Net, Leia, and Bomber Command Center
• GR-75 with Quantum Storm, Comms Net, and Toryn Farr
• Ten Numb, Jan Ors, Gold Squadron, Dagger Squadron, 3 generic X-Wings, and Dutch

So we rolled for it and Daniel got initiative (his fleet also being 400 points). He gave it some consideration and chose to be second player so we would have to play his objectives. He had the unholy trinity of Fighter Ambush, Superior Positions, and Precision Strike. I chose Precision Strike. On a side note, I generally recommend Precision Strike when presented with the Unholy Trinity (although Fighter Ambush is fine if you're also squad-heavy), but that's especially true when going no-squads. It helps with my fleet that I've got 4 ships with contain tokens, 2 with scatter tokens, and my flagship can cancel crit dice and has two redirects, so generally it's tough to get crits to "stick" to hit the hull.

We set up as above with me tucking the obstacles into the corners and him setting up a triangle of rocks in the middle. As the game progressed, everything but his Hammerhead tacked right and his Assault Frigate and Yavaris stayed slow. I also largely tacked right, but I sent two Scouts out on my left to see if I could pick up an easy kill on the Hammerhead. That didn't happen, so they swung in hard right later on to gang up on the Assault Frigate. In short, I was cagey and noncommital for the most part in the first 2 rounds, dice started flying in round 3, which got one hull damage to stick to Yavaris. Jaina's was destroyed afterwards, but it pulled Ten and a friend backwards into the back field to shut down Jaina's from being a persistent threat to Yavaris and the Assault Frigate. Round 4 Rieekan's flagship destroyed Yavaris with a double-arc to the flank I set up late round 3 and moved on to the Assault Frigate, which was stuck behind Toryn Farr's flotilla (a measure Daniel used to keep it from moving forward while keeping its speed above 0). I was also able to destroy the two flotillas but the squadrons claimed the life of my Torpedo Hammerhead. Between the MC30 and the flanking Scouts on the other side, round 5 saw the destruction of the Assault Frigate from 2 Scouts and one angry double-arcing Rieekan boat and that was basically the game (as we ran out of time and furthermore his Hammerhead wasn't going to be catchable by game end anyways). I also had 8 Precision Strike tokens to Daniel's 6, so that earned me a 7-4 win.

Daniel and I chatted a bit after the game and he wasn't sure what he really could've done better and for the most part I agree with that. Apparently Poland really doesn't have fleets like mine and I tend to give non-Thrawn/non-two-ship heavy squads a tough time due to overwhelming the ability of the squads to deal with enough ships quickly enough plus the Slicers. He could've come in a bit more aggressively early on but it ran the risk of hitting the Scout gunline and a Slicer GR earlier, causing some issues with getting two full Yavaris squad commands off (which he was able to do). He could've chosen to go first, but I'm not really sure what the safe objective choice would have been and due to Rieekan I'm not really sure it would've helped him a lot.

Round 6, Norm Weir
Having barely beaten Norm at Worlds last year, I knew I was in for a tough game. You shouldn't take former Worlds champs lightly, folks.

I did not take a picture, but I remember most of Norm's fleet because it had a clever trick, which I'll get to in a bit. He brought:

• ISD-II with Thrawn, Brunson, 7th Fleet, Quad Battery Turrets, Leading Shots, Early Warning System, Boosted Comms (...not 100% on the Boosted Comms there but I'm pretty sure)
• Gladiator with 7th Fleet, Hondo, Projection Experts
• Maarek, Jendon, Morna, Bossk, Dengar, Mauler

Norm had a decent bid and chose first. He selected Contested Outpost. We scatter obstacles about and I place the station off on my left flank and deploy to contest the station early and often with a blob of dudes. He sets up the ISD across from me and I figure "hey, even with EWS I can wear that ISD down before the squads mess me up too bad." I was wrong.

So the trick of the fleet is once something gets at long range, the ISD can camp at speed 0. With the strong squadrons buzzing about and Quad Battery Turrets triggering, it can still kick out a good amount of punishment. Counter-attacks hit Early Warning System, 7th Fleet, Brunson, and the Projection Experts Gladiator passing shields over plus any native repair dials (with Thrawn covering squads and the like). The only way around this is to speed up to medium or close range where your attacks deal enough damage to make speed 0 troublesome, at which point the ISD can speed up again and now you're dealing with more dice and those squads still. I didn't immediately recognize the trap and once I was in it, it was too late. I ended up getting 4 Contested Outpost tokens to Norm's 1 and bagged his Gladiator, but he got the CR90, a flotilla, and all the Hammerheads but one. 4-7 loss to me. Close to a 3-8, but not quite.

Now that I know the trick I'd be interested in seeing how I'd do in a rematch, but I have to say I was impressed with the trick. It's important to understand that Norm has something of a reputation for fleets that hit hard and bug out afterwards to score points and then deny their opponent a solid chance to score points in return (in our game last Worlds that's more or less how his fleet behaved and I couldn't catch everything before it ran away, winning only due to the Salvage Run tokens after we traded some casualties). I hadn't even considered that he might go to speed 0 because that's just not how he is "supposed to" operate. It's a very clever way to use your own reputation as a disguise for what your fleet intends to do so I was impressed.

Round 7, Ryan Rhodes
Ryan goes by Rikash on the internets and would be my final match of the day.

Recognize that deployment style yet?

Ryan brought a fairly standard Thrawn 2-ship:

• ISD-II with Thrawn, Pryce, Gunnery Team, ECMs, Leading Shots, Avenger
• Quasar-I with Brunson, Flight Controllers, Boosted Comms, Squall
• Maarek, Morna, Jendon, Dengar, Mauler Mithel, Black Squadron, Saber Squadron, basic TIE Fighter

With a 14-point bid Ryan chose to go first and selected Solar Corona. We deployed as above. I like to take the station and hide it in the corner when I'm player 2 against squad-heavy in case you hadn't noticed 😜. No easy obstruction and free healing for you! He chose Pryce for round 2.

The game came down to one event that pretty much sealed it. By the end of round 2, I had created a "bowl" of ships to trap the ISD in a Hammerhead/CR90 shooting gallery on round 3 (given with the ISD's central deployment I couldn't slow down enough to make Pryce go off too early). The plan was dependent on the bowl being deep enough on the left to not enable the ISD to escape by hopping over it (which was achieved by layering the flotillas) and the Hammerhead on the thin far right end of the bowl not getting killed by squads on round 2 when Pryce activated. He'd need literally perfect rolls from Maarek, Morna, Morna again (thanks Jendon), and Dengar to do that. I'll be fine.

Spoilers: I was not fine. Perfect rolls happened. Womp. With the Hammerhead Scout dying round 2, there was no way to stop the 2 ship double tap hit and run so I just ran for it, killing just Saber Squadron (thanks, External Racks) at the cost of all my Hammerheads before everything else was a safe distance. That's a loss for me 3-8, putting me at 17th place at the end of it all. One place shy of the fancy dice, boo. We also forgot to apply Solar Corona which is more on me than on Ryan, really, but when you hit your 7th Worlds game in 32 hours, you get tired and miss things. That's life. It might have saved a Hammerhead, maybe two, for a little while but I doubt it changed much. It's impossible to say for sure.

After the fact, I was wondering if my plan was more foolish than I'd originally guesstimated so I sat down and crunched the numbers. It turns out there is a 17.5% chance of all four of those squadrons getting all damage (Morna basically has about a 50% chance with rerolls of getting 3 damage) and I was the lucky guy who got that 17.5%. One less damage and the game would've gone fairly differently. Ah well. To Ryan's credit he played well and was polite about crushing me, haha.

Team game on Sunday

You can see John's painted ships over there on the right, the HMC80 is shiny.

Not much to report other than team games are always very silly. John and I teamed up with an Ackbar fleet (him) and a Rieekan CR90 fleet leaning on Intensify Firepower (spread across both teams) against a Hammerheads Antilles Shields to Max Intensify Firepower superfriends team-up. It was a blast, we somehow won (I had my doubts there for sure early on), everyone got a double-sided Jan/Valen and John and I won fancy spot gloss double-sided CR90A/Bs for winning. Yay!

The end
Kind of. I came in just hoping to make it to day 2 and I had more success than I imagined I would (briefly getting to table 2 for my game against Norm before being cast back down), and I had a lot of good games. I got to meet even more people I previously only knew online, I took a number of the uninitiated out to one of my favorite restaurants (the Kuma's Corner not too far away), I got some neat swag, etc. It was a good time.

It was exhausting, though, and I was glad to come home to my son and wife, who I missed very much. I'm still recuperating a bit, but things are back to usual now.

Me and Alex in his Star Wars shirt at story time.

The kiddo playing with the cat using a tape measurer while the missus tries not to laugh in the background.

John is currently dissecting a lot of the fleet data from the event and I've got some thoughts as well, but that will need to wait for a later post. It was fun meeting all of you at Worlds, and hopefully I'll be back again next year!