I planned an entire week around Worlds and had a comped flight and stay due to my win at Nationals (US Grand at Nova) so there is a lot to write but I realized as I was writing this that I didn’t take a bunch of photo’s in the madness, so let’s see what I can scrounge up.

Day 1

I arrived at MSP airport on the Tuesday before Worlds. I was solo and half the team / their accommodations weren’t in until Wednesday. BounceWithout (teammate) and the other Australians were shacked up pretty close by so I ubered over to them to jam and eat dinner, as well as invited GameSlayer (Noobrainer) because he needed to borrow some cards for the events (which i didn’t get back so he’ll have to ship them to me). I put in the wrong address for the uber and had to walk a few blocks to meet the Aussies. I tried to talk them into some Mexican food, but there were apparently some fears of pooping their brains out and we instead opted for some pub food. Man was that depressing, but the food was serviceable and we were talking about meta and we had built a Yoda Hondo deck that we thought could be some insane last minute swerve to ruin the meta. I posted about it in the Loops Discord and it looked like people were going to lose their minds. I played my Aphra deck because getting reps against my actual deck is usually a waste of time for my opponent with games continuously looking ugly as I either jammed multiple droids Round 1 or was spitting out Delve Fists like it was my job. The deck is quite good and consistent, but I tend to not audible late unless I’ve been brewing hard to break a meta.

Day 2 / 3

Day 2

I was roughly on the list below, but I had some workable slots, the last one being whether to run a 2nd Flank, a Flee the Scene, or a Free Fall. Yeah, I said it… FREE FALL. Flank was better all around once we got set up, Flee the Scene for the games where I have to jam fast or want to throw out my important dice, get them mitigated and end the round, and Free Fall being that “WTF, who runs that!?!?” card that sets up amazing tempo with Fickles and opponent’s rolling out Fist first whilst also putting up their Forsaken. I ended up with 2nd Flank for the main event.

I jammed it into my pod games to get a feel for playing with real cards and overall against the decks running Desperate Measures. The theory was that I should have crazy percentages against the non-DM decks, but then be in an okay place against the DM decks (40/60 maybe) and hopefully use skill to pull that closer. Pods were a lot of inconclusive testing because I didn’t play against a DM deck except maybe 1-2 games in 5 pods, but I felt okay in those matchups. It’s pretty exhausting playing fast and 4 of the pods were played with reckless abandon.

Day 3

I agreed to play the group 3v3 with Serdapi and Biggy and the tournament required the 3 of us to play different formats: Infinite, Standard, and Trilogy. I was instructed to play Standard and just go 6-0 in swiss and they’ll handle the rest. I had some crazy scary games, one of which, where I had to claw back from my Round 1 ending with both of my Entourages getting Desperate Measured against Aphra and I ended up getting to Falcon the next round and just amass tons of shields while trying to build a board state of anything that would show up. I did end up going 6-0 for the event, but the team as a whole ended 5-1. The 4th and 6th rounds were against the same opponent and we lost the initial battle, but won the war the 2nd time around. I think we went out with ABG to Eagle Street Grille and got some food. Much of my event life revolves around trying to be cheap and get the most bang for my buck food wise whilst it also being good.

It’s hard to go wrong with Buffalo Chicken Mac and Cheese … even though I feel like I’m wasting infinite money on some “loaded” pasta. It makes me happy and also hurts my soul at the same time.

I should have been getting testing in against 4-Lom and Aphra, but i also don’t want to waste the teams reps so I honestly don’t bother getting them. I know the plan and I figure that I’ll get through swiss fine, then hope to just avoid it in top cut.

Day 4 (Friday)

I had planned to go disc golfing with Eric Wainright for the 2nd Annual Destiny Disc Golf World Championship (he won last year and I was runner up), but I ended up having to be a grown up and set up / man the stream because both Reflex and BobbySapphire were playing Day 1A of the main event, so I cancelled. You can watch Day 1A here. I think I do okay with the stream set up as a whole, but I also make sure to accidentally kick the stand for Dice of Failure’s setup, because our luggage bag was next to it and I have “restless foot syndrome”. After like the 3rd time they fix it, then they tell me what I was doing and I move the bag and go whoops. I never checked the equipment because it was all the same stuff that I used the week prior and Cuenca was going to bring me the power cord for his Camcorder. Whilst setting up, I realized that he brought me half of the power cord and when he passed it to me 2 days prior, i had never checked it (my own fault). I had quit, I was done. The world didn’t want me to do this shit so I go with fate and tell the guys and start to put the stuff away. One of the guys (Serdapi I think) shows up with a power cord from Matt Alvis’s friend and I go back to work setting the stuff up and then ForeverFett from ABG shows up with one too and it really shows how great the community is. The stream goes live a bit after the Round 1 players start and i get the hand cams in after I think. Many rounds later, we pack up and head over to the Destiny Worlds Meet Up.

There were a lot of people there… way too many. I’m starving, the place is packed, and I don’t want to have to struggle my way to the bar front to get drinks and what not, so I hand out the drink tickets I have to some of the hardest people working the content creator scene and we end up meeting a couple of the other guys at Surly Brewing Company for food. The food came fast, but it hurt my wallet and I wasn’t super content with it. Pham absolutely loved it and probably bought 3 times as much food and shared it with the table. The pizza store was apparently on the 2nd floor and I definitely would’ve head up there if i knew. The dessert was absolutely scrumptious though. I can’t remember the name to save my life but it was like some apple spiced baked thing with ice cream over it. I’m cheap with food, not with dessert.

Day 5 Main Event

It was time to see how things go in the main event and I was feeling pretty good about needing to go 5-2 to make top cut due to having a bye. I didn’t do a great job of writing down my matches but my first loss was against Chopper on the dice of failure stream around Round 4 or 5 I think. I was pretty upset with myself about that loss because there was some confusion as to which guy he had hit so I opted to move the damage to who he said his target was. Unfortunately the damage originally being on R2 and not on 3po like he said it should have, actually messed up large chunks of my round and sequencing. I really wasn’t sure which guy he said originally and I didn’t mind moving it, but it really messed up a lot of what I was doing, including the Chewbacca Blaster in hand that I could no longer put on my only ready guy in good faith because he was the one with damage now. Yes, I know I could have called judge and due to the damage being there for a full Round it would have stayed, but I make it a point to try to make super clean play and I don’t want a single questionable thing being added to my name or causing a feel bad situation for the other guy if it was indeed my mistake. I still fight it out with an alternate line of play and I end up losing. Not a big deal, but I do feel like I’ve gotten soft at that point and I end up being super glad that it didn’t cost me top cut, so it’s all irrelevant.

In the 8th round, I’m already 6-1 so the pressure is off and I’m playing against a 4-Lom so I try out some alternate lines of play that get me beat down hard, but there was an interesting spot where my opponent plays a Bounty and get’s a resource from his Nightsister Lair to which I tell him that he got one already off of his sentinel messenger and he assures me that I’m mistaken. It’s already a lost game so I tell him that I’m going to take a minute thinking about stuff and I’ll scoop anyways if need be. I run through the events in my mind and I really think I’m losing my shit at this point if I’m taking the wrong damage and not remember the full round of events that took place. I inquire as to if he knows the card he saw on the Sentinel messenger (he said he whiffed on it) and that he doesn’t need to tell me what it was, but he says it was an Imperial Officer. We finish the round up and I stop him and tell him to check the top card of his deck to see if it’s the Imperial Officer.. it wasn’t, he apologizes and removes the resource. I call Judge, tell him my opponent cheated me and he got disqualified without prizes and kicked from the event. Okay, so I lied, he doesn’t get disqualified and no judge was called and the resource was beyond irrelevant, but I’m super happy that I’m not losing my frigging mind when he confirms that he was wrong.

Loops Dinner

I rush to pack up all the stuff because we had the Loops Dinner and needed to high tail it over there because we were already an hour late. We get there and some of the guys are already there and got the Michigan game tossed on the television. We had a super solid spread of food (in my opinion) and the Tex Mex rolls were to die for. The quesadillas had onions in it so even though I got them to remove the tomatoes when I ordered, I feel like i failed. There was enough cheese to smother it though, so whatever. I felt bad for running away from the World Meetup so fast, but I was pretty happy at ours. I guess the difference between 70 people and 200 makes a world of difference as to my comfort-ability.

Day 6

I grab breakfast at the convention food place for the like 4th time and it’s really hard to go wrong with a Bacon Egg and Cheese. For $6.50 it wasn’t so bad of a deal. It and the smoothie place were the MVP for the hungry players that didn’t want to go far away.

Back to the event and to setup the equipment again and get it set up before I have to play my match. Shit is hectic and I NEVER want to do this again. I want to chill and relax and we tried to setup commentary with ArrowBrooks stuff, but it all got jumbled up and I had to run over to my seat to play because I don’t want to get a game loss or lose any match time.

I jam through Entourages and w/e supports as my opponent didn’t have Desperate Measures any where in sight and then I Ewok Ambush kill his Aphra and he later tries to play the Desperate Measure without the yellow to spot. I win the game and feel pretty good about being up a game in my “bad match”. Game 2 I see my opening of upgrades and removal and there weren’t any supports so I throw the whole thing back looking to find a Hired Muscle, Crait, or Entourage and my hand comes up with 4 removal and a Fickle. I jam Falcon and ask if he has the DM because I’m just not in a good place to do anything else, he has it and beats me down and we go to game 3. Game 3 I try to play out small stuff and get DM’d twice and beat to hell. Time to rush over and fix the stream stuff, I don’t even care that I lost, not right now at least.

I see what the ABG setup ended up as in the crazy moments and go and fix all the stuff. ABG wasn’t setting it up, so it being shit at the time had nothing to do with them, as much as just not enough time in the day and I didn’t get it handled properly and let Inception try to finish it, but he wasn’t aware of what I was planning, nor that ForeverFett didn’t disable the hardware acceleration and was likely streaming a black screen with voice lol. I get that fixed up, we go through most of the event but we stop at Top 8. I already knew one of the players didn’t want to be on stream and ABG was going to leave so giving them their stuff back made sense and we bowed out early. I was exhausted and honestly never watched another match besides the ones I was streaming. We headed out somewhere around Top 4 to pick up food and get back to where we were staying.

Day 7

Reflex misplaced his wallet and we tore the place apart trying to find it before taking the uber to the airport. It didn’t get found and we go to the airport. I get pulled for my protein powder clumping and all my stuff gets super checked and I get felt up (and not in a good way). Gonzo is eating a Subway meatball sub and it looked and smelled absolutely delicious so after they get on their flight (mine was 2 hours later) I go and get one for myself and it was as delightful as I had anticipated, Yum!

I later regret how I played the matches and even saying that I’ll stream and do stuff. It’s SO MUCH work and it really does get in the way without a bunch of people doing it together. It’s a super hard balance and next time I’ll really have to figure out if I want to just focus on playing or streaming. Top 64 isn’t bad, but for me it isn’t enough. I’ll be back next year and I plan to crush souls and show no mercy!

~HonestlySarcastc