Subject: Team Dickhead Paris Report From: "Brian Hacker" Date: 1997/04/16 Hello all, Once again a tourny report coming from across the hemisphere. Team dickhead dropped into Paris a week before the tourny and stayed on till a couple days after. The experience was rewarding in many ways. Here's the inside scoop. Saturday: Team dickhead drops 22 bills at Vegas just hours before going to Paris. Yes that's right 2.2 g's, 11000 francs or 2200 dollars, take your pick. The worst luck I've ever seen at a casino. Oh well, we thought, we at least worked up some good karma for Paris. Sunday: Arive in Paris. Paris is warmer than expected and quite beautiful. Unfortunately Sunday is gay night at EVERY club in the city. So after making our rounds, we go to the hotel and pass out. Monday: Go to the Queen after a filthy session at a peep show that can't be printed on a PG newsgroup. Queen is the premier Parisian gay man's club. (For those of you still wondering, no team dickhead is not gay, none of us are) Queen is a huge jumping discoteque well worth it. By the end of the evening, we are all exhausted and eat our 6:30 breakfast at our hotel. That is after I hung out with Tetka, a french model I met there. Hi Tetka!!! Tuesday: We decide to go to a casino in the north of Paris. We drop in and are told that the castino is everything we could want but we can't get it because of our attire. Guess orange hair isn't big in Paris. We quickly establish a regiment for our trip. Sleep till the afternoon. Eat. Go to discoteque. Tuesday we have another filthy session at Le Cureix, which we can't tell you about and then scour the town for clubs. Wednesday: Start playtesting. Get bored quickly and leave to continue regiment. Go to La Scala, a club for toddlers and infants with horrible music. Blah! Thursday: Meet up with all our cross-country friends and begin to playtest. I meet up with Herr Long and playtest a bit with him before working with Baxter. He shows me a three color deck with a good mana curve, I show him preferred selection. All in all a good trade. Go back to the hotel to show Truc "Loong" Bui the white/green/red deck that Baxter and I worked on. He likes it and we put it together for him and me. Daddy U (or the unknown magic player) puts together a red/white blaster deck. Pretty decent but doesn't have any advantage over a red/black. Super Z puts together "Mystere" a deck that seems to have everything in it but what makes sense to be in it. We rag on Zila until we fall asleep at something like 3:30. Friday: The field looks just like we expected. Black/red is in full force, bloom, and straight red are also there. We learn that the foreigners have some of the jankiest ideas ever as we encounter the field. Truc and I fear running into the jank today, as we figure it will get weeded out by Saturday. Our nametags have nothing under our name so Truc writes L.B.C., Cali, John writes Southside, Cali and I write CPT Cali. While I intend this to mean Compton, California, everyone calls me Captain Cali throughout the day. Oh well. Here goes my first day: Round 1: Play straight red. Show him honorable passage. 2-1 Cpt. Cali Round 2: Play Black/Red. Show him Scalebane's Elite. 2-0 Cpt. Cali. Round 3. Play the jenny craig deck, where all the creatures are overcosted and fat. Lose horribly after torching the dude out first game. He calls over a judge to acost me for having one foreign mountain in my deck. I happily replace it. But here is Catino informal warning 1. 2-1 Foreign Jank. Round 4: Play another black red deck. Show him a miraculous recoveried Scalebane. He shows me everglades. Not pleasant. 2-1. Cpt. Cali. Round 5: Play yet another black red. Play the brazilian. Close games but honorable passage with the elite saves my behind. 20th after the first day for Captain Cali. 4-1-1. John goes for 4-2 but crapped out on tiebreaks (blah!) Loong Bui goes 3-3 and meets way too much jank to make it. Super Z slides into the second day with his piece of crap which we rag on him about for another several hours. Day 2: Round 1:Play Sterla Benking(sp) I play my first bloom player of the tourny. He beats the daylight out of me first game. I take a mulligan and draw five land and a wall of roots in the second. Great! Looks like its going to be one of those days. We dance around and he tries one turn too early to go off and I draw my hall of gemstone. I put it out but I still haven't drawn one of my seven enchantment removal. He kills my hall and I make a clutch pull and draw another. I put it out and ride it to victory. Sterla still hasn't seen any enchantment removal and I so I talk while sideboarding as if I don't have any. The Third: He prosperities for six and I disenchant his squandered resources in the third. I manage to get the hall out and torch off all of his wall of roots. I win but my was it close. I feel very good and Sterla seems discouraged. He ends going 5-0 after this and makes the final eight. A very impressive finish. P.S. Paul (a english judge) checks out my deck and proxies out the cards that are damage and I receive informal Catino warning number 2. Round 2. Captain Cali dies horribly to yes, the chronotag. Kurt Foget, my opponent, a very nice gentleman took me down because of the silly thing. I feel o.k. after the loss, because I knew that my deck would lose to that sort of thing. Round 3: Beat up on straight black. Win in less that 15 min due to scalebane elite. Round 4: Lose to John Chinook playing bloom. My draws could not have been worse and he crushes me 2-0. Round 5: Beat John Saso from No. Cal. Feel bad as he loses the first game to due to tardiness. I let him go first in the second and he slaps me silly. I win the third in a close battle. Go find out what all the hubub is about in the Chalice-Immordino match. Charlie sees me and says "Hacker!!" pointing to the door. Oh yeah scouting's illegal. Informal Catino warning number 3. Round 6: Beat Graham Thompson from Scotland. A very nice guy, he draws poorly both games and I avenge his victory over Truc the first day. All in all not bad. 4-2. 13th place. I feel happy with the performance. Super Z shows up all of us with his stunning finish. 4-0-2. We ride him more about his deck and then go out. Super Z goes home to sleep. Frank Gilson, Marc Chalice, Truc, John and I go out with Brian Wilson to the Queen. We all get in without hassle while Chalice gets told "This is a gay club." Pretty funny. We have a good time and my orange/blue hair with pvc jacket gets me some attention and I end up getting my lip sucked off. We leave at 3:30 due to overcrowdedness and head back to the hotel. Super Z gets up on time but gets lost on the metro and loses the first game to Darwin Kastle due to forfiture. We figure he dropped 23 g's as he would have beaten Long more than likely (his deck after sideboard is nothing but discard and efficient counters) and had 53 pro tour player points if he lost to Justice. Oh well. Congrats to Mike and Mark and everyone else who did well. Team dickhead continues its streak of 4 straight pros with a player in the top eight. Not bad for a four man unit. We look forward to the hick/neck challenge in N.Y. and beating everyone down in qualifiers throughout the country. Good luck Alien on your bid to make it to the big apple. For the 7-up report, check out Pikula's excellent report on Paris (just don't ask about Worth's flight out), Hacker Team Dickhead