Thanks everyone! John Hawker has a pretty nice ring to it. Steve's summary was pretty accurate. I kept losing the Hunter/Hunted roll and people kept putting me in my Phoenix Hawk IIC 7, so I just kept choosing map sheets that heavily favored IJJs. Steve and I were apparently the only two people in the bloodright who realized the potential of that mech. I also exploited the woodland map from map pack 6 a lot, which is a map that has so many good firing positions on it that Drew and one of his friends have banned it from their games. Between the Phoenix Hawk IIC 7 and the woodland map I started most games in a fairly advantageous position. My semi-final match against a Night Gyr A (the player commented afterwards that he felt like a target in a shooting gallery) and my game against Steve (he was smart enough to put me in a Cauldron-Born) were my two favorite matches. The final was pretty anti-climatic as it was decided solely by my ability to roll four head hits. Other GenCon highlights for me included coming in third in the open tournament (I was the only player to get six kills, but two players with five kills finished ahead of me due to them focusing on bonus objectives a lot more) and destroying both of Blaine Lee Pardoe's mechs in masters and minions. Between the canon event, Steve's alpha strike game (thanks again for running that Steve, I had a great time defending the lonely mountain), the open tournament, the bloodright, and masters and minions, I ended up destroying over 20 mechs while losing only one, so it was pretty much the best three days in terms of being good at battletech that I've ever had.
