I had a local legacy 1k yesterday. I played turbo depths but only managed a 2-3 record.
Quick run down of my tournament yesterday on Turbo Depths
Vs Slow Depths ✅❌✅
Vs Snow Miracles ❌❌
Vs Goblins ✅✅
Vs Snow Miracles ✅❌❌
Vs UR Delver ✅❌❌
Round 1 opponent was not super practiced in the deck and mistimed a wasteland giving me the win.
I never had a real chance in round 2. G2 I made a call to employ an ESG as beatdown and got them to 3 life before they turned the corner
Round 3 was all but a bye. They had no defense for a 20/20 and Elvish Reclaimer does a decent DRS impression against Goblin Lackey
Round 4 I had some bad variance in game 3. Opponent was an Arabian Knight and was a real pleasure to play against. He also had some sweet WAR Ashiok tech out of the sideboard.
R5 I won game 1 pretty easily. Game 2 he had an early YP$ and all the answers. Game 3, I lead the game to a point where I felt I needed to go for it. He was down to 4 cards and had 2 mana open. He had surgical, brazen borrower, daze and FoW. Overpowered my protection and got me
All in all I felt pretty good. I played Blossoming Defense over Not of this World because of signings which was suboptimal. Oko&Teferi were rough but I had chances and thought I put myself in the best position to push through but it didn't work out. Can't wait to play some more.
Bonus: Picked up the other 3 Strip Mines I needed for super cheap and FBB Japanese to boot!
Prior to coming to Grand Prix Vegas this year I set myself a goal to make day two. I’ll say up front, as the event approached I did not believe that this goal was realistic. I had my daydreams in which I started out the event 9-0, got a feature match and a photo on the mothership. But when I was honest with myself I did not believe I would reach this goal. This would be my third time at GP Vegas…
They had 60 people prereg and another 60 or so show up. This is proving way more popular than initially thought. Looks like we're going to be facing some delays since this was supposed to start 10 minutes ago
Trying something new with my writing. A gonzo tournament report from my latest pinball adventures.
Canadian National Pinball Championship
A first-hand account
It’s twenty-five degrees below zero in Edmonton—with the sun up. The Uber Driver is telling us how there’s nothing to do in the city except go to malls. The world's largest one is in west Edmonton, and it’s probably the subject in dozens of travel blogs. There’s a water park there that has the kind of waste water concentrations a virologist could only dream of, but I’m here to play pinball.
I check out of the conversation to leave it in the hands of the more neurotypical passengers. I'm nervous in the way a girl gets when she hasn't studied for a test she knows she needs to ace. (More below the cut)
We order dinner while we’re still in the car on the way to the hotel: bindhi masala and aloo gobi, dishes that they definitely won't fuck up. It won’t arrive for another 2 hours. They fuck it up. We discover that the primary flavour of food available in Sherwood Park is bland, but again, I’m here to play pinball.
We watch the Pitt and go to bed, alarm set early and nerves calmed by Gorilla Glue #2. This will be my last night without pinball dreams for a week.
I wake up an hour before my alarm and shower. At breakfast I see Polly-Jean; she looks about as tired as I feel.
We eat together along with Gaby from Montreal. Gaby is decked out in pink bloomers, pink leggings and a neon green motocross jersey. Pinball has a few of those. The “Lucky Colour” types who are not content in wearing anything but our favourite colours when we have to compete. For me, it's a colour Pantone would call Sakura Blossom, but most people would just call it pink. Pink sweater, pink undershirt, pink socks, pink trainers, hell, even pink underwear. The brightness is a gird against bad luck. The femininity a gird against—well, mostly against men.
The high femme frills that Gaby wears on her bloomers contrast against the shape-flattening butchness of MX gear. There’s a sort of unspoken understanding that we’ve adopted aposematic patterns for the same reason. Bright colours and outfit composition ward off unwanted attention in the arcade by signalling queerfemininity.
Then I see Gab’s boots. They’re like two Maltese dogs dyed the hottest pink, and then turned into shoes. Pink faux fur moon boots. If not for being quite so tired, I might have an opinion on how gaudy they are—they’re not, they’re incredible—or maybe how absolutely shit they must be in the Montreal winter mud—that part is true, she informs me later while we’re casually chatting. Instead, it's just silent admiration that’s stirred in me.
I bring food back to the room for my wife, and before I can get comfortable, it’s time to get our ride to the tournament.
Doors open at 9, and today we’ve jumped all the way up to -15. We have 30 minutes for warmups, and some 32 machines on which to warm up. The Open division players had Wednesday and part of the day Thursday to warm up. The women get 30 minutes. We know this is how it will be at every tournament that we don’t put on ourselves. It won’t change because the old boys club still runs things. The men who get off yelling at women for a full 15 minutes over a suggestion of how to improve things. Those women get called difficult. At nationals, we sure as shit won’t be the ones to complain about it and get labelled difficult by the cadre of Sharpes that run the IFPA by fiat. We’re just trying to focus on winning.
I play 6 games with the goal of picking my OLD and MID games by weeding out the bad luck machines in my typical choices. My NEW is going to be Pulp Fiction because it’s basically like playing an extra Mid.
First up it's Harlem Globetrotters. Everyone hates this game for the same reason everyone loves it: it’s skill testing. I put up 250,000 on game one, then move to Pro Football to see if that jives with how I play. It does. Kind of. Pro Football is less about you playing well, and more about relying on your opponent having no clue how to really succeed on such a weird game. If you can shake someone by disrupting their normal game sense, you’re at an advantage.
I play Sorcerer, and Eight-ball Deluxe. I hop over to Ice Fever and immediately have to write it off. There’s a custom ROM on that machine, and all my notes were for the standard rules.
The typical strategy on Ice Fever is a repeatable sequence of: alley pass to light the spinner, tap pass to the left flipper, and let that thing rip. A heady kind of revolutionary stuff; a classics game where the strategy is “rip the spinner”. I see why they changed it.
There's something very white-hat about the people who make pinball ROMs. This one was made by a guy named Ron. Ron would likely not be starting this from scratch. Instead, in all likelihood, he pulled the EPROM chip, put it into the adapter, edited a few lines of code, then called it a day. That’s still more complex than most people are willing to go with their customization, so kudos Ron.
The custom code changes the gameplay to a far more complex loop of “knock down the drop targets and then hit the captive ball” but the game rules don’t actually say as much anywhere. If you don’t know from Ron, you’re shit out of luck. And, nu, I don’t know from Ron.
I play Wild Card for my last warm-up, and realize then that I have fucked up pretty massively. I look over at Pulp Fiction, and notice for the first time that the NEW bank games have Lightning Flippers on them. That’s an extra quarter of an inch of space I haven’t practiced for down the middle. It’s not demoralizing. I fight back that feeling because I need to be at my best. Comport myself well, play the best I can on every ball I’m given. If a half quarter of an inch on either side is really life or death for my gameplay, that’s a sign that I need to just get better at the damn game. I’m just not going to let it get to me.
It gets to me. I lose on Terminator 2 having forgotten to check my notes—missing the skill shot twice and losing by the moral equivalent to two skill shots. I lose again on Pulp Fiction, having gotten absolutely nothing started. Flashbacks to when I first started playing pinball and hated Pulp Fiction play in my head. Remember when 100k was a good score for you? Flashbacks to before I could regularly million it. It’s getting harder to recover as we move onto my opponent’s second pick, Stars.
Under most circumstances, I’m pretty good at Stars. It’s a simple game: light stars, rip spinner, points go up. Maybe it's the residual Gorilla Glue gumming up my brain, maybe its G-d punishing me for my confidence, maybe its just some shitty puck luck, but I drop Stars again barely having had ball time to get anything going. Three games down and three losses. Neither of us are playing well; I’m just playing worse.
We’re on Harlem now. It’s my pick over Pro Football for this round because I wanted a game I could feel confident on. Feeling that little spring of having a game I’m pretty alright at up next in the lineup, and knowing for a fact I can put a good score on it at this venue, I’ve got hope. This is where I start the reverse sweep, come back and win 4 in a row. I hope. I’m going to work hard for it and just keep playing my game.
Ball one drains. Ball two drains. Ball three drains. I take back 1 game with a score of 29,900 vs her 27,000. It’s pathetic. It’s embarrassing. It’s a win. This one was for you, Red Klotz. Call it a win for the Generals.
I take a heartbreaking drain on ball three of Godzilla with everything in the world set up to just start going. Two multiballs, a mode, a mini-mode, and a ball save are all waiting there on the table from my first two balls. The jet bumper decided my tournament was over, and that was all. Icarus swiftly brought from the lofty heights of a lucky set of games at provincials.
I promised myself that—no matter what—I would thank my opponent for the games, and I did live up to that standard. It’s the thing I’m most proud of from that day of competition, but at this point I was out of the running to be women’s champ.
There’s a checklist Chili Heeler gives Bingo in The Show (S2 E19) that sticks with me when I’m dealing with the emotions that come with a 2nd round exit. Chili tells Bingo that her method is to first, have a little cry (check) pick herself up (check) dust herself off (check) and keep going… the show must go on (check). Sure I had to use coping strategies from a kids tv show to square myself, but I got myself square in time. I had B division to play out.
I pick my three games, my opponent picks her two. We play three of them before I close out with a win, only one game played on my bank. This time my pick is Sorcerer. Folks don’t quite know how to get their heads around sorcerer, but if you’re a flailer with quick reaction time, you can make it work. It’s about skilful flailing. I also pick up wins on Johnny Mnemonic and Wild Card. I’m in the quarter-finals of B division and women’s competition is done for the day. One more win and I secure a top 10 finish. I just need to survive another 10 hours of pinball first.
He's running Snaps + Ironweave in the mirror, which is pretty interesting. Not having AB at all means that when I play Sigil of Suffering with double Channel Lightning Valley in play I draw 2 cards (pretty good). I lost to Burn Up // Shock on a Snatch pumped by Lightning Press for exacies. Yuki sides Lightning Press out into aggro, so I wasn't playing around it. I definitely should have been tho; he had 1 in hand and arsenal with no action points and I still beat a blink anyway. Oof.
