A few weeks ago, I wrote:

My first chance at attending a regional event is just over week away, when the first regional of the year will take place in Seattle.

My goal? To attend and have fun.

So.. how did it go? Was I prepared? What was my deck? ... Yeah, I know, I got buried under work and skipped the blog for a bit.

So.. the week leading up to the event I did some trading, but not nearly enough. Then I did some borrowing, which filled in a couple gaps I had in the deck I wanted to run. Then I got a meager amount of testing done on it, and off to regionals I went.

Out of 39 participants, I placed at 16th for the day, netting me a neat EA card for the effort. I went 3/3 on the day, losing to Mazar, Daspien and Ozzati.. I took out a Nathadan, a Rotun and um.. damn, I can't remember what my first opponent had as hero.. only that every one of his allies was Elusive. Its almost as if he had sorted his collection into two piles: Elusive and everything else.. then grabbed the elusive pile and said 'Damn, I build a fine deck!'.

So, recapping Regionals isn't my strong point.. But the basics are: I got up, made my son get up, we got ready, grabbed our stuff, headed into Seattle. Finding parking wasn't as bad as I had expected, and we were within 1 block of the event.

We registered, then sat waiting for the Yugioh kids to start their stuff.. then we started. My day was basically alternating between Win/Loss.

So, in retrospection, I wasn't nearly prepared. My deck, while not sucking entirely, wasn't trim or lean. It has an assload of bloat, and worst of all, not a single Fury in it.

Still, for my first event, coming in the middle wasn't bad, and it put me ahead of some folks that I had thought were going to do far better than myself. And not that their misfortune pleases me, but rather, I was pleased to find that I wasn't as bad at this as I had feared.. it was a bit of a confidence boost knowing I could manage to hang with the upper 50%.. if only making it to that level by half a body. ;)

So, the next Regionals is Feb 23rd, and I still haven't settled on a deck. I love the hell out of hunter, but my common sense side is saying 'Hunter isn't what it was.. its too expected, its soft now.." and I am considering netdecking what could be a better deck.

Now, when it comes to netdecking, I normally defend the hell out of it.. for some folks, the best way to learn of how cards interact is to see a decklist then look up all the cards they are unfamiliar with and see why they are in the deck. For others, its an easy path to a slightly better than 50/50 chance to win a game. For me, I try to work on my own decks, which I will flat out state suck, and then tweak them a bit based on netdecks.

Case in point: This weekend at Game-A-Lot was our weekly constructed game. I dropped $5 to discover the mage deck I built wasn't good. At all. I annoyed folks with it, but as far as win conditions go, I was all over the place trying to figure that out 0/3 on the night and the mage deck retired in shame.

So, I asked a couple of the resident 'pro' players for some help and one of them gave me a tentative "hypothetical' list to work from, for a warlock deck.

Having just recently finally gotten around to setting up MWS, I built it and tested it 14 times before I tweaked it. It was ok.. winning just over 50%, but not much over. So, I went to test a theory that one of the resident guys had, that you could substitute in any hero and 16 abilities and make it work. So i went with Ona Skyshot and my wins went up to over 65%.

However, in doing that tweak, I changed out the hero, 16 ability cards and the 'secret tech' portion of the deck since a hunter deck won't be able to capitalize on that bit.

The new hunter deck is playing very well online, and I am likely to test it out over the weekend, if I can get a couple cards I am still needing.

Short of it doing well, I will go back to the original Warlock design and see if I can get that tweaked a bit more.

So, no point in blogging with some relevant points:

-When preparing for a bigger event, play-play-play-play! You need to put some serious decktime to good use. Learn what to expect from the deck, decide on what paths are open and what to look for to spot them.

-Relax: First game, I was so nervous I pelted my opponent with flying cards when a shuffle escaped my hands.

-Think before acting: I can't stress this enough, nor can I claim to do it often enough.. what I can claim is that when I took a moment to look at the game board, and THINK about what the best trade at anytime would be, I did much better than when I was racing to finish my turn.

-Don't name your kid Richard.. my first opponent was a younger player named Richard, and the entire time we played I had to fight the urge to jump up and say 'Just play a card Dick!' when he seemed to take forever to play. Mind you, this wasn't him thinking before playing, but rather, him reading me the flavor text on EVERY card as he played it.

So.. upcoming week is a quest to find 2 more Fury, 3 Silencing Shot and maybe Hemet's Elekk Gun x3 or x4. Oh, and 2 Rapid Fire.

Hunter deck tip: skip the Bloody Welcomes unless you want to put some in the sideboard. Load up on Trophy Kill if you are anything other than Survival. The 1-3 drops you see shouldn't slow you down much, and being able to kill that turn 6 drop with just 3 resources is pretty damn sweet.