[Final Twilight - GenCon] Alexis Finals Highlights

[daMoose_Neo]

By "popular request" (or a well placed suggestion), I've written up this actual play post about Final Twilight, and some of the cooler moments of our GenCon special event, the Alexis final tournament. Final Twilight is my expandable card game. Its been on the market since 2004, but we've slowly been growing. This was our first quasi-organized event at GenCon.

This event was held on Sunday, after some prelim events earlier in the week. We had a LOT of participants for Twilight events, but few actually came back so almost everyone who entered had the chance to fight for a deck. Game plan was that the winners come back Sunday and face me, with a special deck, for a chance to win a promo deck.

The matches are a bit of a blur, but I thought I'd share some of the cooler moments. I played it somewhat on the slow side (hope not too many of them are reading this!) so as to give everyone a fighting chance, as everyone who played picked the game up at GenCon.

My first duel I lost quite handily. The gentleman playing me, Mark, played a precon Kerra deck and beat me quite soundly. Alexis, the promotional Major character, counted as all factions in the game, which gave her the strengths of the different groups, but also the weaknesses. Kerra is quite good at slapping around the Undead, which proved strong against Alexis. In short, I was beaten, well ^_^

The second duel was against a younger player. He and his pals played earlier in the con and were quite excited to come back to play. Each player was given the option to go one round or best two out of three. This particular player almost went for one match while his friend convinced him to go two out of three, which was a good thing!
My opening hand was the worst part of the first match for my opponent. I won the roll for Initiative, so I got to play first which essentially handed me control of the board. On top of that, I drew an amazing set of spells:
- Dark Force Blast, pay 3 Moren (life) to deal 3 damage to your opponent, then I get to search out another copy.
- Lighting, pay 3 Moren (life), deals 2 damage to any character and 2 damage to your opponent. Since the player is represented by the Major Character, all 4 damage can go to the player, which I most certainly do!
- If I'm recalling correctly, I drew the Minor Character "Novice Mage", which gives me a character to control the board AND lets me pull a Spell card from outside the game. For that, I drew in another Lightning for additional damage.
- And, the coup de resistance, a little gem called Curiosity. A seemingly tame card, especially given its utility in other games. For 1 Moren (life), I get to look at my opponent's hand and pick a card, which I get to play at a 1 Moren (or $5). Using this, I was able to take a Temporal Suspension (2 Moren, take another turn after this one) from my opponent for another turn!

This turn ended badly for my esteemed opponent. From here out, my major character was well outfitted, using the new Dark Shield for a defensive bonus and Mystic Sword for an offensive bonus, with the added bonus of a cost reduction for all Spells I played. So my damage got cheaper and cheaper, and my opponent was slowly to recover.
As the game progressed, I ended up with complete control of the board, which prevented my opponent from regaining any new life or resources.
The nice thing about this round though: I SOUNDLY trounced this player, was one of the finer victories I've had playing period. I had good draws at the right time, my Alexis deck was built up just right so that I could really take advantage of the game (and the opposing player!). What was so nice about it wasn't the beating itself though, but how MUCH the player appreciated winning the following two rounds and the promotional deck. With initiative the next round, he was able to get a commanding lead on the board. While the first game was over in a matter of rounds, the second drug out quite long, and the third ended up a fairly decisive victory for him.

Otherwise, there were a couple other really cool moments in the matches:
- Against one of the other players, he was rolling badly in combat and down to next to nothing. He went after one of my weaker Minor Characters, Street Chemist, for control of one Location, Sealed Tomb. Had he lost the combat round, he would have lost the game. However, in a beautiful stroke of luck he won, killed my Chemist, and won the Tomb. With the Tomb's ability, he was able to clean out his discard pile of other Minor Characters and net about 7 or 8 life, which turned the game around for him.
- Against this same player, I ended up with an awesome play I didn't even see coming. I was pitifully low on life, to the point I couldn't play much of anything. I was thinking I would have to discard down at the end of the turn, until I realized I had a freebie in my hand: Curiosity, and Alexis was equipped with Mystic Sword, whose cost reduction dropped the cost to 0! AND, to make it even sweeter, I checked my opponent's hand, and they had a Temporal Suspension! Curiosity reduced the cost by 1 to 1 Moren, and the Sword's ability also applied, which ment I got a free turn!
- One of the other players just wanted to go one round. For the most part, even though I started out with another fast hand of direct damage cards, we were trading several blows back to back. Finally, we were both at 4 points- I drew a Dark Force Blast, cost me 3 life to play, and damaged the opponent for 3 points, bringing us both down to 1 life. He had originally joked earlier about deciding the match by one roll of the die, which is what this ended up being! Luck favored the player, however, and I lost the match. But it was a wicked cool roll to go out on!

All in all, I think the promo deck and promise of coolness helped heighten some of the weight on the matches, which made the uncontrollable portions of the game that much more tense. Could they draw a lightning at the right time? Did I have another damage card in hand? Or even worse, could I use Curiosity and swipe their awesome card before they could use it?
All around, an awesome event ^_^