Day 6 ended on a sour note. Being cross tabled didn't make me feel too good about the whole thing, and Daria was really disappointed in how she was doing.

Day 7 Turtle and I woke up really late (1330 when the event started at 1400), due to tweaking her deck and helping her with a philosophy paper the night before, we raced out the door, grabbed some french pastries on the way down to the subway.

Turtles day went better, she didn't get rolled, and actually got to play full out games of V:TES.

My day involved me getting cross tabled at the start of round 1, making one play mistake, getting cross tabled at little more before getting ousted.

The next game featured more cross table action, and my predator giving the game to pray by giving him one of my vampires via a hostile take over. Lots of fun.

Game three featured two other folks from Winnipeg, as well a Hugh, all four of us wearing team commonwealth t-shirts. Shy, my pray, the newest player at the table ate every line of crap the Hugh fed her. She blocks my attempt to gain intercept because she's afraid I'll use it on her, and doesn't understand or believe me when I explain to her that Hugh's deck is a massive bleed deck. Her response "You have 15 pool, he can only bleed you for 1 pool per minion, he hasn't shown a bunch of bleed yet."

So that turn he bled me mercilessly for 9, leaving me at 6, and the following turn he finished the job. A turn later he rolled through Shy, and not long after that he rolled the rest of the table.

Frustration was the order of the day. And I'm trying to keep this short, as if it were any longer, I'd be ranting. A LOT. When players are hideously stupid, and give away the game because they can't be bothered to see the game state, believe bold face lies, or can't be bothered to think about the consequences of their actions, it can leave a bad taste in your mouth.

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For what it's worth, I wasn't playing the best decks that I could have for most of the week. Turbo Barron was good, but it's a flawed deck that has known issues. (Deal with the Barron, and the deck gets rolled.)

My Akunease deck is a work in progress that I brought for fun, and I had some fun, but when I didn't get Sanjo in games 2 and 3 on Friday, it wasn't as fun without Sanjo.

Add to that 6 months worth of "ring rust" from not having played, and having a play group that doesn't play that actively has shown me a lot.

However Friday wasn't done... now we got to the fun part. Went to a local little hole in the wall to see the band Grady. Click here to check out their myspace. It's Gordy Johnson who used to front Big Sugar. Awesome, loud and rocking... or as they called themselves "The Loudest little Canadian Band from Texas."

Then we moved on down the street to the local goth dance night held a Sapphire. God I miss a grimy little hole in the wall goth dive with a decent DJ and decent atmosphere. I'll rant another day about what has happened to Winnipeg's goth watering holes.

In Montreal clubs close at 0300, and the next logical step is to get Poutine. If you don't know what it is, here is the Wikipedia article on it. We were out of bagels, and since everyone wanted bagels for breakfast we wandered to the bagel place for hot freshly baked bagels at 0400, and finally around 0600 got to bed.
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Day 8 - or "the main reason" for being in Montreal - The North American Championship.

For those of you wondering why I keep calling it the North American Championship, and it's not a "World Championship", I'll try to keep the explanation brief:

White Wolf knows who butters their bread. V:TES was kept alive during its brief hiatus from printing because of the fervent dedication of the European players. Those of you who are reading this from a back ground in either Raw Deal or UFS, have probably read the arguments about "why should only North America get to hold the world championship?"

White Wolf said the European players deserve an event too. So they hold two championships a year. The European Championships, and the event I'm at, The NAC.

I'm tried, fading, and needing to vegetate after today.
So I'll do a quick summary, and go into more details later....
First round .5 VP for making it to time.
2nd round .5 VP for making it to time.
3rd round get pwned by a vote deck that I couldn't catch.

At the end of the day I finish 37th, and fail to make the cut of 25 that move onto the second day.
I didn't make a play mistake. I see where I can make a half dozen tweaks to my deck to make it better. My biggest problem was that I wasn't able to put sufficient pressure to go forward.

I'm signing out for today. Tomorrow will be either catching the Bombers play the Alouettes, playing some more UFS, or going back to play some V:TES draft.

Next year is in Atlanta... I don't know if I'll do the week of nightmares again, I guess it'll depend on how we all qualify.

But yeah... bed...