March Madness: Round Four Results

And we’re down to eight teams, people! The weak (and just plain unlucky) have been weeded out, the games are getting more intense, and one bad draw can still toll the death knell for your favourite decks!

Who moves on to the final four? Will the Brotherhood brutes continue to beat the crap out of everyone? Can Team Superman finally earn the respect that Cliff thinks they deserve? Read on and see!

Checkmate win over Big Brotherhood
When is big not big? When you don’t get the card draw, the right characters to power-up, and your opponent has three Checkmate Safehouses to surprise you with. When an all-out assault only nets you a single stun, you know you’re in trouble. Ahmed, realtor that he is, kept his folks nicely supplied as once again Checkmate rolled out all three Kings and thumbed their noses at the Master of Magnetism. Checkmate swarmed over the Brotherhood, with Alan sticking the boot in at the end. Checkmate, still the most consistent deck in the tournament, moves on.

The New Brotherhood win over JLA
Spud sez: Pablo and I both wanted JLA to win, but it was not (HA!) in the cards. JLA missed some drops, but TNB didn’t get a copy of its ongoing until turn 5, at which point Elongated Man replaced it… into another copy. 5 was TNB’s init, and they smashed Julia Carpenter into Black Canary, stopping her from readying for the turn. Considering she was wearing the team’s only Nth Metal and was its largest character, and next turn was JLA’s swings, that really hurt. She was kept anyway because the other options just sucked, and her effect exhausted a TNB character the next turn when Batman swung in. But by that point JLA was at like 9 endurance, and the mutants didn’t need to do much more than team attack a few times, and JLA went down to stun damage. Basically, both decks drew kinda poorly (TNB with no TNBs, and JLA with no powerups and a tiny hand due to underdropping), but apparently a bad TNB draw trumps a bad JLA draw.
Pablo sez: I wanted to see the good guys win, but TNB continues to smash face. I didn’t draw TNB until turn 4, I think, and it got replaced by Ralph on the first attack. Unfortunately for Spud, it was replaced by another copy of TNB. Granted, I couldn’t flip it right away thanks to that pesky Field of Honor, but I had accounted for that when declaring the attack, so I still got the stun. The following attacks decimated the JLA board and it was pretty much game then.

Kree win over Thunderbolts
The deck people were thinking would walk all over the map just couldn’t handle the Kree swarm! Even managing to get an unreinforced swing through 3-drop Ronan, combined with a Team Tactics to get to 42 Attack, wasn’t sufficient to put the blue-skins out. The Press engine was in full effect, Dr Minerva working her mojo to keep the troops pumping out in regular order, while the Thunderbolts floundered with only a single Team Tactics, as opposed to the three or four they’ve been able to go off with in earlier rounds. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, Kree move on!

Green Lantern Corp win over Team Superman
Pablo sez: I only caught parts of the game, but Carrie played the GL swarming strategy very well. Arisia made an early appearance, and I noticed there were a couple of Light Armors on the board early in the game. I believe the final score was close, 2 to -4, or thereabouts.

Honest to goodness transcript:
Gdaybloke: If you have any notes/comments/feedback on the Green Lantern/Team Superman match, I’d appreciate it
Gamerette: oh dude i’m not even sure i’d remember
Gdaybloke: I’ve just been writing a couple of sentences about each match. Do you remember if you missed some drops, or stuff like that?
Gamerette: just that it was damn close
Gamerette: well carrie knocked me down the first turn because i missed my one drop
Gamerette: but then i made my two (the doggie) and three and walloped her with a couple of pumps.
Gdaybloke: Krypto! Yay!
Gamerette: then she had me until the last few turns when i hit her hard again (don’t remember how) but i didn’t have enough of a board and she ended up hitting me to the face when she returned my attacks after i had used up all my chars in the last turn.
Gdaybloke:  See, and you thought you didn’t remember anything!
Gamerette: lol