This past week I had my Blood Bowl quarterfinal match. I went in with a full 12 player roster and 130k in the bank, which is a strong situation. I am playing dwarves while my opponent was running Chaos dwarves. The classic good vs. evil slugathon!
I knew going in that the best way to support the team long term was to save my cash, and be conservative with my use of the apothecary. The opposing team had a dwarf with Claw/MightyBlow, and that is dangerous. Best to play it safe.
I also knew that I wanted to win that damn trophy and that you don't win trophies by sitting back and taking it easy!
I decided to just go for it. I blew my entire bankroll buying a wizard, which worked out because my opponent was 20 Team Value above me.
So going into this game you would definitely expect me to win because our teams were solidly matched but I had a wizard to swing fortune my way. My opponent had better bashing though, so you would expect my team to get hurt more.
Those expectations would be right.
I received the ball and began the slow process of pushing the enemy team down the field. I knocked an awful lot of enemy dwarves over but just couldn't land any injuries. My opponent began to whittle my forces down, and early on I took a 'miss next game' injury.
Decision point. If I apothecary this, I have a good chance to run a full team for my next game, and have a better second half. But if I save the apothecary I can potentially mitigate a worse result later.
I went for broke and saved the injured dwarf.
This was a disaster as by the end of the game I had a good lineman at level 3 die, and my best dude at level 5 took a niggling injury. Catastrophe!
But although my opponent had great luck in injuring my dudes he had much worse luck in actually playing football. I managed to keep control of the game, despite my losses, and scored at the end of the first half. I started the second half down several players and things looked grim, but then I dropped my wizard's fireball on four enemy players and all four lost their coin flip and fell down. I went from thinking that we were a sure thing to go to overtime where I would continue to get murdered to me cruising to victory in a single moment. I grabbed the ball and ran off to score again, going up 2-0, which in dwarf vs. dwarf matchups might as well be infinity-0.
After kicking again I ran my team away from the opponent and let him score at will. Being dwarves he only managed a single touchdown and I won 2-1.
I got really lucky on the fireball. I also got lucky that my opponent's minotaur knocked himself down as the first play of a turn, and failed to stand up for multiple turns in a row. Basically I lucked out on winning the game, and my opponent lucked out on murdering my dudes.
So I advance to the semi finals against a team that is 440 TV ahead of me because of my injuries, and my last opponent gets to take his healthy team and wait for next season.
I even managed to roll a 1 for money at the end of the game so I can't replace my dead dwarves, and might not even be able to replace them after another game! I went all in, and got my win, but I sure didn't end up looking like a contender for first place.
Still, even if the expected thing happens and I get butchered in the semi, at least I made the semi finals twice out of two seasons in the league. That is a decent showing.
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