Back to Basic (Middle-earth: The Wizards only) Tournament
30 September 2000
Murphy Mania, Delft

 

The pictures and the text on this page do not (necesarily) match, but are put here to get a taste of the event.
Murphy Mania is a small gaming that's held in the dutch city of Delft every year. Just like last year, Marco Aarts had organized a Middle- earth tournament - the only CCG event at the con, by the way. Last year, it was a single alignment wizards only tournament, this year, the deck building restrictions were even more severe: only cards from the basic set, Middle-earth: The Wizards (promo's included), could be used.

It was quite an interesting challenge, building a ME:TW-only deck. Lots of extremely useful cards from later expansions didn't exist back in the ME:TW days and therefore weren't available for deck construction: Marvels Told (corruption!), Forewarned is Forearmed (Assassin & Slayer), Smoke Rings, An Unexpected Outpost, etcetera. So, everybody included lots of corruption cards, Assassins and Slayers in their hazard decks, "just like in the old days".

To protect myself against corruption (so I could play with Balance of Things/Ren/Traitor, without shooting myself in the foot) I decided to play an old fashioned "Hobbits in Eriador" deck.

11 people had shown up; not as many as last year, but a good turn-out nevertheless. I was especially pleased to find out there's another Middle-earth player living in Leiden (Eline Kattenberg); in fact, she lives in the same building as I do!

Anyway, the tournament:

Round 1, vs. Rick, who played an Indiana Jones deck (i.e. one big, strong company that's supposed to play several resources per turn). He was off to a great start (unlike me), but his Gildor (bearing a major item) turned out to be a Traitor and killed Glorfindel (bearing Rescue Prisoners) on turn three! 8 MP's down the drain! I also managed to influence away a faction and an item (part of my resource strategy) later on. 4-2 win for me, mostly due to Rick's bad luck; as far as I could tell, he was a good player with a sound knowledge of the rules.
Round 2, vs. me old mate, Gerard-Pieter (GP). GP played a deck featuring lots of cool underrated cards from The Wizards: Great Road, Misty Mountains, Horses, Fellowships etcetera, combined with Troll hazards! And it actually worked! Last turn, he went after me to try to steal my Gollum (he had no allies) but on the way there, lots of corruption cards, Balance of Things & Ren made sure he had to tap everybody in support for the corruption checks. Annalena (bearing Orcrist, I think) still failed hers, became a Traitor and attacked Radagast, who had to use Sacrifice of Form in order to survive. 5-1 win for me.
Round 3, vs. Rob van Gansewinkel, who also played hobbits! Lots of bouncing hobbits at the character draft and we both ended up playing with backup characters: Rob had Thranduil, Bilbo and Frodo, I had Aragorn, Robin Smallburrow and Merry. Aragorn and Thranduil both got corrupted (guess you can't trust anyone but a hobbit in a ME:TW-only game), Frodo got killed, and on top of that, Rob's Radagast got wounded while facing The Stones' auto-attack. Rob only had at about five MP's left, while I had more than twenty, so when I called the council, or when time was called, I don't remember, Rob forfeited. 6-0 win for me.
Round 4, vs. Wim "I wonder if my cards perform better if I give them some coffee" Heemskerk, who played a very odd deck with Elrond and Galadriel. It worked like hell! I'm starting to think Wim's able to build a tournament-winning deck using region cards only. Mind you, he was quite lucky too. My Radagast failed a corruption check before doing anything even remotely heroic (OK, he played the Elves of Lindon, but how heroic is that), while Wim even didn't lose a faction to my Muster Disperses with only one free GI! My hobbits bravely went on playing MP cards without Radagast's help and managed to gather a decent amount of MP's; not enough to beat Wim, but enough to only lose by a couple of MP's. 2-4 loss for me.
Wim (21 tournament points) won the tournament and got a limited edition One Ring card, a dutch Test of Form, a Wizard's Companion book and a ltd. edition booster pack. Ard van Kessel (18 tournament points, 2nd place) got a puzzle (The Way Is Shut), a dutch Test of Form and a ltd. edition booster. I (17 tournament points, 3rd place) got a Radagast mithril miniature (how the hell am I supposed to paint something that small, I'm still wondering) and a ltd. edition booster. The other participants all got The Wizards boosters (either unlimited or German) too, and English promo cards were also available for those who didn't have them already.
All in all, a very good tournament - too bad about the coffee incident, though. Thanks, Marco, for coordinating, thanks Rick, GP, Rob & Wim for being splendid opponents and thanks Wim (again) for excellent prize support (even though he won most of the prizes himself).