Wow, this past Saturday was such a great day of playing Mage Wars! Six bold Mages braved yet another winter snow storm to come out and try to dominate in the arena. I would like to thank them for making this tournament a truly enjoyable experience. I also need to thank Karl at the
Games Keep for allowing us to use his store to run the event. He has a great store with an insane selection of games. If you are ever in the West Chester area you need to check it out! Another big thanks goes out to the guys at the
Not Just Another Gaming Podcast (NJAGP). They are a podcast about boardgames, RPGs and geek culture. The guys sent us a ton of prizes to give out at the event. They gave us so much stuff that I had to save half of it for the next event! Go check out their podcast! Now! Finally, I want to thank
Arcane Wonders for supporting the tournament by sending out a gigantic batch of promo cards. Still got a ton of them left over for the next event too!
Here is a list of the players, their mages and the final standings:1st Tom L. (
tom): Necromancer 13 points
2nd Rich (
ringkichard): Air Wizard 7 points
3rd Tom C. (
wtcannonjr): Necromancer 6 points
4th Tom J. (
not on forum): Priest 5 points
5th Doug (
not on forum): Necromancer 5 points
6th Ed (
Roundman): Beastmaster 4 points
Here are the matchups and results:Round 1tom (necromancer) v. ringkichard (air wizard): tom modified win
wtcannonjr (necromancer) v. Tom J. (priest): wtcannonjr modified win
Roundman (beastmaster) v. Doug (necromancer): Roundman modified win
I was a little disappointed that none on these matches finished on time. I am pretty sure all six of us were playing non-agro builds and that led to all of us timing out. I know my match and one of the other matches was one turn away from finishing though so it wasn’t too bad.
Round 2wtcannonjr (necromancer) v. Roundman (beastmaster): wtcannonjr modified win
tom (necromancer) v. Tom J. (priest): tom win
ringkichard (air wizard) v. Doug (necromancer): Doug modified win
This round saw the first full win. Not sure how close the other two matches were to finishing.
Round 3wtcannonjr (necromancer) v. tom (necromancer): tom win
Roundman (beastmaster) v. ringkichard (air wizard): ringkichard win
Doug (necromancer) v. Tom J. (priest): Tom J modified win
Finally we get two full wins. I think by this point the players knew to pick up the pace a little bit and were more familiar with their spellbooks.
My experience at the tournament:Round 1Ringkichard and I have played each other twice before this. We were each 1-1 going into the game so we had joked that this was the big grudge match. Our match started out slow with a build-up of forces. Ring spent his time pumping out 2 hydras, an ooze from his Gate to Voltaire and a wizards tower. I spent my time putting down skeletal knights, some skeletal sentries, some deathfangs, Mort, a Deathlock and Idol of Pestilence. The two most important factors in the game were my Cloak of Shadows and an untimely advance of one of Ring’s hydras. The cloak prevented Ring from easily pulling my necromancer away from my horde of skeletons and into the hydra pit. Once it became apparent that that wouldn’t work, Ring decided to advance his hydra into the zone separating our creatures. He did it early enough in the turn so I was able to swarm it with skeletons. I think he was counting on the hydra’s counterstrike to deter me from attacking. Unfortunately for him I didn’t care all that much because I figured Mort would be able to repair most of the damage done by the counterstrikes. At the end of the turn I had killed one of the hydras and wounded the other. From there, the skeleton’s just chased down the wizard and took shots at him whenever they could. The game ended in a modified win but I do not remember the difference in life totals at the end. It was an awesome game and a wonderful confidence builder because I know that Ringkichard is such a great player.
Round 2This round I played my buddy Tom J. He is relatively new to the game and was playing with a spellbook I put together for him so he wasn’t too sure of how to play it. Despite those disadvantages he gave me a very good fight and managed to get me down to about 10 life when his priest finally succumbed to the hordes of undead. The highlight of the game for me was when he summoned Selesius, the East Wind in my start zone on turn three or four. Didn’t expect that and it definitely sent me into panic mode. Luckily I was able to weather the storm by hiding behind my skeletal knight and using my other minions to chip away at his health.
Round 3So it came down to the two undefeated necromancers. My entire strategy of poisoning the enemy and wearing him down over time has been thrown out of the window. I decided to take a page out of the wizard’s book and try to form a pit of creatures and plop wtcannonjr’s necromancer in the middle of it. The problem was that he had the same anti-teleport protection from the Cloak of Shadows that I enjoyed. Both of us started the match with nearly identical openings until we began summoning creatures. His book was based around zombies while mine is based upon skeletons. I think in the end this favored my mage a bit more because he couldn't use bloodthirsty against my creatures and I was able maneuver around more easily due to his inability to double move. The turning point in the game was the turn my necromancer used the final action of the round to move into the zone between our 2 mages despite it being occupied with several of his zombies. On the following round I had initiative, but wtcannonjr cast a wall of bones separating me from my legion of skeletons during the first quickcast phase. I countered by teleporting his necromancer to the zone next to my skeletons then I stepped out of the zombie pit and cast my own wall of bones to stop his zombies from pursuing me. After being separated from his creatures I just had to run him down with the skeletons. It did take me a while to finally kill him as wtcannonjr had some clever plays that blocked off my pursuing creatures and I learned a couple of new tricks to watch out for.
Here are some pictures of the event:Well, I will try to add these if I can figure out how to post them!
You can view the photos over on BGG.
If you want to see my Necromancer’s spellbook,
take a look at this thread.
