It all started with Starcraft. “You’ve not enough minerals” and “We require more Vespene Gas” being shouted at me as my butt loads of little drones try to tirelessly keep up with my consumption rate. The concept “No Rush 15 Minutes” was permanently ingrained into my young mind. You don’t need junk units when you had 15 minutes to build up insane resource generation before pushing it into massive behemoths of destruction! (Those are primarily Carriers if any one is lost and each one had 8 little “star fighters” that come out and mess shit up).

(if you realized that this was Starcraft 2, you shush!)

Fortunately, little me learned at some point how laughable it was to project my wants on to others. If I wanted to have insane resource gen and win off of it, i had to learn to cope with aggression and not go balls to the wall. There is a balance involved with going ham on money to overrun your opponent with all the fancy things that money can buy and actually being alive to get to that point. It all boiled down to learning to be hyper efficient and have just the right amount of everything in order to defend the opponents attack and leave them struggling to then keep up with your superior forces. Let’s get to the list so that those of you who only came for that can get it and be on your way, but I like to think that my story telling is serviceable enough to get most of you to read until the end.

Yeah, i did it. “No Posting Until 9-3”. It was more troll than anything else, but then I was like FML, I’m going to have to have this written up by 9-3 and that wasn’t much time for recovery after the event. I’ll talk about the torture of events later on if I remember.

So you may be wondering what is up with the deck name. We originally got to play it with Military Camp so I’d just shout out “WONDER TWIN POWERS ACTIVATE, FORM OF A….” when i did it. Alright, so i didn’t really shout it out, but that is what i thought about.

Pre – Nova Main Event

After coming off of a terrible run at NA Champs (went 5-0 then 0-3 to miss cut) I was feeling like I absolutely had to crush at Nova. I was super happy for my teammates as well as all the looper community members who made cut, but it still didn’t change the fact that I felt dejected and that I blew it with what I felt was the best deck going in. It’s much easier to make adjustments once you have a better understanding of the meta and the changes I had made were to better operate with less resources against some of the decks that were problematic for the old version. The prior version was more resource intensive and Chopper eating up my resources to 0 and leaving me without removal options there was pretty brutal in the two matches and I still didn’t feel out of it, but I wanted to shore that up, so I added 2x EMP and moved on, because it was use-able in most matches and I just needed a bit of time. Past that, I adjusted the deck to operate on 1 less average resource per round so that if things were just ugly or a character died, I wouldn’t be hampered too badly. We arrived at Nova and this photo absolutely epitomizes our dynamic:

I ended up playing in a Trilogy event which started about an hour after we arrived and got situated at the hotel and the stream for that and the other games can be currently found on the Chance Cube Twitch (you’ll have to check their Youtube after the twitch video expires). I was reminded of many things during the course of that event and I think it got me ready for the main event. After I was done with the event i went to find the other guys and they were eating at the food trucks which was great timing because i was famished after that grueling Trilogy run. This was the absolute best food truck food i’ve had at Nova. 3 for $10 tacos, pulled pork… YUM!!! … so scrumptious that i ended up getting another 3 and got a single blackened fish one at the behest of BobbySapphire. There was one pitfall though, i ended up eating the entirety of a lime piece that was sitting on top of the taco. I was like “oh, what is that taste… lime juice… not exactly what i expected” then i looked down and saw the other lime pieces and felt the rind as i voraciously tore through it. I couldn’t find the pieces with my tongue so i just downed it and move on. It wouldn’t kill me, right??? I did remove the other 2 limes before ravaging the other tacos though and I enjoyed them much more, but that might be due to not having to worry about if i should spit or swallow.

We go back to the hotel and I jam some games with Serdapi as he wants me to beat him into submission for his decklist choice, which was exactly what happened. We go to the bar to get something to drink and end up deciding to run a Sudden Impact because it has to be good against the 3 wide meta with all of those 3 sides I have in deck, right!?!?!?! We each take turns ordering cheesecake slices every 6 minutes (1 each) as it became a sort of peer pressure and they looked delicious. Dapi got the check and thought the guy hooked us up because the cheesecake wasn’t $18. The poor guy is blind and thought “Cheesecake|8” was “Cheesecake 18” and I cracked up when he told me, because we would’ve been robbed with how small those slices were. We separate our ways to our hotel rooms and I was shacked up with NJCuenca and he wanted to watch something to fall asleep and then put Bob Ross painting on. I’m not sure if he did that in general or if he saw it off of the shared Loops Youtube recommendations, but he had no idea we watched it while I was doing commentary. I covered my head a bit so that the TV light wouldn’t keep me up hopefully but I quickly passed out after good ol Bob was making snow and beating his tool.

Nova Day 1

I woke up early like normal and chatted on discord to which BobbySapphire was around as well. Somewhere along the line (before or after) I created my Music playlist and ended up with this:

After going through it, I came to realize that whilst i thoroughly enjoyed the songs, they were foreshadowing a story of pain and doing the same things over and over again. I created a new playlist instead and it was a much more adequate telling of my expectations.

It was a bit painful to listen to at times due to them not gelling together well, but I went with the power of suggestion. The best of which was the second one and I could only listen to it one time before i’d lose my mind. For those of you that aren’t familiar with it, it’s based on this scene, but has some trippy music like skrillex got a hold of the old genesis game sound track. BobbySapphire and I met up for breakfast while the other two late risers slept. The Cinnabar at the Hyatt does 20% off during Nova for attendees so it brings the $22 buffet to $18 and is hard to beat when you need to loan up for a while.

The breakfast of wannabe champions (at the time). Bacon and eggs keep me fueled for the rigorous shuffling of cards and the ever-shifting mental war going on between me and my opponent and for that I want *Insert Bacon Provider Name Here* amazing Bacon and *Liquid Egg Provider Here* for my energy needs. Call me companies, i’m available for advertising *insert wink here*. But seriously, keeping your energy levels up is super necessary if you want to make long runs and be less susceptible to stupid mistakes that some times come along with undernourishment. I hung around talking to people while waiting for the event to start and played some Keyforge which probably left some people tripping balls that I played. I straight murdered game 1 with some savagery, but then lost a close game 2 that got stolen away right from under me. The event started before game 3 went down. I had considered playing in the Keyforge event, but decided against it as I only picked it up to play with a friend and still have no clue what cards are in the game so I wouldn’t do well enough and didn’t want to tire myself out for Destiny. Andelwo, the Wave-stopper Lord General and Kaigig, Shelter Advocate are my two preferred decks, and no, I didn’t spend tons of money on them, i only got 2 boxes of each set and these are both from base set. I only played with Andelwo, because Kaigig seemed crazy mean to do to a guy that I wasn’t sure if had a competitive deck or not.

I’ll give a brief run down on the games, but Round 4 and 7 were on stream if you want to watch (linked Chance Cube Twitch way back in the write-up).

Round 1: Bye – Yeah, I had a bye card and turned it in. Boom, greatest alive, won before we event started.

Round 2: Luke Magnuson – eAphra, 2x Executioner

So oddly enough, I’ve played against this deck when their cousin ran it last year at Nova and I played him in Round 2 after my bye. It was a pretty close game back then and it was again this time. I ended up winning by about 2 actions and it was pretty scary. His goal is to snowball off of w/e kills he can get and he handed me Aphra’s life, so i took it. Luck could have very well ended up on his side and this could have been a loss for me.

Round 3: Adam Landon – Kylo Rey

I went bananas with Entourage in round 1 and had out 7-9 resources worth of supports. The sheer weight of all of those dice ended up burying him in advantage and it ended quickly even though I think he got to kill a guy.

Round 4: Kevin Long – Satine Droids –

He’s a Looper and told me that the videos detailing how to play the deck were very beneficial and he’s gotten very few reps due to lack of time but was able to watch the videos and he was thankful. I appreciate the support and was glad that I could help. This match was on stream so I won’t talk about it.

Round 5: Jack Bromell – Palp Watto

I mulled away Entourage because I wasn’t going to play that into a deck with Desperate Measures. I threw some indirect at him and he put it all on Watto and shielded palp. I ended up killing Watto on two and then started pushing damage in to Palp. I smelled a Fatal Blow coming for the life of my 3po and mitigated his 2 melee on his character die and he immediately flipped his other character die to a 2 which would be a questionable play normally if he didn’t have it, so i jammed in my 3pO (r2 was dead) and I resolved whatever i kid before his life was forfeit, to which he did get hit with the Fatal. I squeaked out the win that round just barely and was likely to die during the next.

Round 6: Jon Magnuson – Kylo Rey

Alright, I’m 5-0, it’s just like Gen Con again. Loop by Paperwhite being the theme song for the team is foretelling of events to come. I must break free of my destiny and destroy this man that I teamed up with for Artifact (F for Artifact). He does a lot of fancy shit with Power from Pain and some other spice that hasn’t really been seen used in KReylo decks. I buried him in Entourage advantage and was just pushing whatever damage that I could get round 2 because I couldn’t string together the direct damage sides to kill one of the characters through his consistent amount of shielding, but we got in for heavy damage. The next round he rerolled into oblivion trying to ataru strike twice and only got one and then was pretty much dead. The next round rollout got him easy picked and he scooped it, because he couldn’t race with what was left. We did it, I’m in Top cut, and all the pressure is off.

Round 7: Kyle Warren – Chopper Droids w/ a twist on card choices

This is also on stream so you can watch it there.

Round 8: Chris Terwilliger – Han Droids w/ a twist… elite R2

We both throw some damage at each other and put guys into range to be action cheat killed. He doesn’t have the action cheat Round 2, but I did and things just got pretty ugly. He still gets the kill on my guy if I’m not mistaken, but my deck operates just fine with a trade, where as both other droid decks (Han and Chopper) struggle with damage after the first character goes down. Both of those decks have much better focusing potential in comparison to Satine though so they have different drawbacks.

Waiting around for prizing: Drew Warren and Kyle Warren duked it out on stream for Round 8 with Kyle being the only undefeated. Older brother vs Younger brother in the Satine vs Chopper Droid – Off!!! Drew did what all big brothers do and pushed Kyle’s shit in. Unbeknownst to them though, the family scuffle ended up pushing Kyle to 3rd place on the standings, with Drew getting 2nd place, and vaulting me straight to the TOP. 1st Seed BABY, BOOYA…. but wait… FML, 1st seed always gets wrecked in top cut… NOOOO!!!! Take it back!!!!.. wait, I get a mat…. I’ll take my 1st seed, thank you very much!

To Be Continued

You’ll unfortunately have to wait for the continuation, but if you’ve enjoyed my story telling, then it is best that it gets split up so that I can adequately portray the journey and the the struggles as well as joy that come with every moment. On the next episode we’ll continue from the Rooftop Bar and my team staring death in the face.

~HonestlySarcastc