My deck: I thought, since we were going to play One Deck games, a dwarves Indiana Jones deck featuring Radagast would be a good idea. I added Bard Bowman with a Black Arrow for coolness sake and I put King under the Mountain/Returned Exiles in the sibeboard, just in case.

Originally, I wanted to use a "grab bag of everything" hazard strategy with a few auto-attack enhancers, but during the last evening before the tournament, I decided, what the heck, it's hero only, I'm going to play orcs.

First game, I had to play Mathijs Kattenberg. Soon, we found out we were playing very similar decks: he too had a dwarves resource strategy and an orcs hazard strategy. Initially, his deck worked better than mine, but eventually, my orcs hurt some of his characters while I made kill points out of the ones he threw my way and, on top of that, Gloin took his aligned palantir and went his own way at the council. 4-2 win for me.

Next game, Ewoud Tan. Ewoud had beat me at the challenge deck tournament in Nijmegen, earlier this year, so I hated his guts. No, just kidding. ;-) He's actually a nice guy. He played an Indiana Jones deck too, with Beorn, Glorfindel and Gloin. Unfortunately for me, he played Radagast on his first turn. Luckily, I drew Gandalf in my starting hand, so I just had to do without Radagast's extra cards. All things went well for a while and we both got a decent amount of MP's, until I had the cards in my hand I needed to have a chance at killing Glorfindel & Beorn. Doors of Night, Minions Stir, Two or Three Tribes Present, Pierced by Many Wounds, Orc-warriors, Orc-warband, Orc-lieutenant... You get the idea. Both Beorn and Glorfindel got wounded, no-one died - too bad. Gloin came to the rescue but got eaten by Smaug on the way there and Radagast decided to go for a walk in the woods instead of waiting for the Free Council's decision, taking Ewoud's only ally with him. 6-0 win for me.

Having performed so well up to this point, I had to face my worst nightmare in round three: Wim Heemskerk . As you know (or should know) the closest thing to God on Earth is Wim Heemskerk at a Middle Earth tournament. So, knowing my lucky streak would end here, I sat down. We revealed our characters: he played Thrain, I played Dain. He played Gloin, I played Oin. He played Fili, I played Kili. Etc. No duplications. Neat. My first turn turned out to be a disastrous one; Balin played Marvels Told and rolled a 2 for his CC; exit Balin. Dain rolled a 3, fighting Mount Gundabad's auto-attack (without tapping, I needed a 4) and got himself killed. Argh! Wim didn't even have to play hazards, I was doing such a good job killing off my own main characters... Surprisingly, Kili and Oin did rather well on their own (Bard got killed during turn 2); they killed a cave-drake and a marsh- drake, they played Orcrist and the Emerald and Oin even succeeded in playing the Iron Hill Dwarves without any help! Meanwhile, Wim had an enormous Unexpected Party that wasn't really doing a lot except for walking to and fro between Irerock and the Caves of Ulund. Eventually, Oin felt Alone and Unadvised on my last turn and wandered off, carrying both the Emerald and Orcrist! 8 MP's down the drain! So, Wim won the game. He had 24 MP's, I had 21. Damndamndamn! We both agreed it was a very good game, and in the end, it turned out I was the only one of Wim's opponents who lost 2-4 instead of 0-6...

Last round, I had to play Kees Schipstra, another very experienced player. He had a starting company consisting of four sages (including Wacho!) and played with Riddling Talk. Unfortunately (for him), he rolled an unfair amount of 2's and 3's for his riddling rolls, but it was fun for me to see a different kind of deck for a change after all these Indiana Jones decks. He got the Iron Hill Dwarves before I did and I didn't get any other factions out either, so his faction MP's doubled at the council, while I had too much item points. So he won, 5-1.

Eventually, I occupied sixth place (out of 18) in the final ranking. I won two Dark Minions boosters, a nice Burning Eye badge and a dutch Test of Form (with art by John Howe). All in all, a very good tournament. I'd like to thank Marco & Natasja for organizing the event, Mathijs, Ewoud, Wim & Kees for being very cool opponents and Kees (again) for the Burning Eye Dice.

Yours,

Jean-Paul "The Sly Southerner" Keulen