Round 1 vs Jeremy Chambers/John Hendrix:
It was kinda nice to get this game out of the way in round one but at the same time it was a little worrying because we hadn't really tested our decks yet and my test draws the night before were all a bit concerning because the deck didn't seem very fast to me. Without the typical AUtO -> Sam -> Dave start, I was worried it wouldn’t quite have the same consistent card advantage. After we started, we were even more worried about it since John had no Heroes to start and I didn't have many good attacking options, but I do think we both had Scattered Sheep so we were able to hit some Heroes from their hands to level out the playing field a little bit. We pretty quickly figured out that they were running King Noah (I'm curious to see their full lists so hopefully they post ‘em), which we more or less prepared for by preparing for Throne and building our defense around Overwhelmed by Philistines. Since meek Noah is purple then ObP is CBN against him. While we didn't have much offense in our opening hands, we did have defense and John's Teacherous Land. TLand is undoubtedly the best card in Teams and drew so many cards throughout the day. That, plus our opening draws got us to the offense we needed to start rocking and rolling while our defenses held them off before they were able to get their combo going.
Full win: 5-1
Round 2 vs Rob Smith/David Smith:
Rob and David ran some counter-heavy Genesis decks which certainly would have stomped Daniel Eyes with intro-prep CwD and I think All the Curses. After that game John and I were pretty glad that we decided against Daniel Eyes. It was still a little difficult to play around, but a lot of the offense works around CwD and we also had some Doms for early answers when we needed them. David also dropped a Mayhem early on that, in hindsight, they realized probably hurt more than helped since it shuffled away some of Rob's defense that would have been helpful. They were running some animal stuff on defense which can't really be taken advantage of by Elijah. Counter-heavy decks like theirs rely on having a bit of time to fully set up the offense, but we got going so quick that they didn’t have much time to do so.
Full win: 5-1
Round 3 vs Shon Seivers/Owen Dong:
Shon did a great job of helping out Owen, who is a newer player, and the two of them ended up taking third which shows how good Shon is to play his own deck while helping Owen learn and how good Owen is by picking things up pretty quickly. I believe they ended up adjusting their own Type 1 decks for Teams so Shon used his Teal offense while Owen ran some prophets. Of course there's a good amount of overlap there so the decks naturally fit together to some degree. Shon and Owen had a strong start with The Tabernacle, Storehouse, and House of Prayer all out by Shon's first turn, which meant both of them had access to most of the GEs
they needed and they also both had some counters out too. Shon also got out The Afflicted and False Prophets + Birthing Pains right away to make putting down characters costly. Again though, TLand put in work in this game and gave John and I significant card advantage as the game progressed. Elijah is also a pretty big fan of TC ECs like The Afflicted and False Prophets so once we got him going, there wasn't much they could do.
Full win: 5-2
Round 4 vs John Michalizsyn/Emmanuel Echavarria:
John and Emmanuel were running Daniel decks (no surprise there Emmanuel...
) and I believe one, if not both, of them was/were running a Daniel Eyes version. Fortunately John E had Moses in his opening hand, so after Emmanuel decided to go first, he only got to Foretelling and then Moses came down on John's turn right after. Emmanuel was able to pick up a few cards from it throughout the game, but I don't think John M was ever able to get to Foretelling. The funniest part about this game that I remember was when John E blocked John M's lone Michael with Ananias, so John M couldn't play any of his enhancements and was being ignored. John E decided to take the opportunity to reserve Emmanuel's Foretelling with Stricken, but he realized the next turn that Ananias was also ignoring Foretelling so it was protected from Stricken and we brought Foretelling back out. I'm pretty sure that was the first time I've witnessed a benefit from a character being ignored while in territory now that ignore is essentially mutual protection. Anyway, we got some other blocks similar to that one thoughout the game and our offense worked pretty well to avoid their defense or at least limit their options enough.
Full win: 5-1
Final Results: 4-0, +15 LS Differential
I get why some people don't enjoy Teams, but I personally think it's a lot of fun and I really enjoy synergizing two decks to see what combos you can come up with.
