I headed into Mind Games in the city for their Shadespire tournament on the weekend with much anticipation given several delays to it being held. Disappointingly, only five people attended, likely due to the weather in Melbourne having been somewhat terrible. For the tourney I took an aggro Steelhearts Champions list shamelessly stolen from John over at Can You Roll A Crit. I’d only had two practice games, but the deck seemed pretty straightforward to run, and with John’s series of articles on it I had a basic understanding on how to best use it.
Round One
I played Jailyn round one, who was also running Steelheart’s Champions. He was a younger player and somewhat inexperienced with the game, so his decks didn’t seem to synergise well. I won two games against him, both with the same glory count of 13-2.
Round Two
I played Bailey with Farstriders this round, and was a little surprised at how aggressive they played, given my only other experience was against a control-style deck that used a lot of positioning tricks. The games were very tight and I became quite tense at points as I tried to work out the best positioning and card use turn-to-turn. I lost the first game with the glory score at 5-10, managed to win the second game 10-7, but succumbed in the third game 5-12 as Bailey had the measure of my force by then and played beautifully.
Round Three
I was paired with Gavin this round who was also running Farstriders, although I think he was slightly less practiced than bailey with the force. The round ended up going to three games, as I won 10-3 the first game due to some amazing dice throughout, but went down 6-10 in the second after Gavin worked out some of my plays and the dice evened out. For the third I managed a 10-3 win, due to some exceptional luck at key points, such as Brightshield surviving an attack from his remaining fighter during the second action phase before she then too him down with my next action.
Conclusion
I had a lot of fun, and thanks to each of my opponents for the enjoyable games we played. I came second in the final standings, with Bailey taking first place for the day, however given the relatively small turnout we all ended up with an excellent selection of loot regardless (thanks to Stu and at Mind Games). It would’ve been good to have had more players turn out (and some non-Stormcast forces!) but getting an earlier than expected finish was good and let me get home and squeeze some hobby in that afternoon. I’m enjoying Shadespire more and more as I dig into it and am looking forward to my next game already.
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