my ignominous defeat at the braintree qualifier was not a sufficient deterrent to the east coast super trainer showdown. ech and i had big plans for promoting zeo there, and he was coming all the way from calgary to attend so whether or not my playing was up to par, i knew i was going to have a good time....

preparation for this event didn't go as smoothly as planned tho...all the tcg practicing i meant to do somehow never got done. ech had a great idea--make a fake promo card to hand out! we thought a lot about what pokemon we should do...we wanted a neo basic pokemon that we both liked. we just loved nyuura and we'd pretty well settled on that. then the english names were released. ugh...sneasel?! what were they thinking?! now, we were never ever going to make a card with the words "purity and echidna's sneasel" on it, so we had to think of something else. we thought about lugia and a few others but ech thought unowns would be a really cool idea. that sounded great to me, so he got to work on it. i really didn't do much on this one, he did the unowns and the card, all i did was the background.....take a look!

ech printed about a hundred of these up on his printer, (which is a really nice one by the way) on some great paper stock. he then brought them out with him and we spent about 2 nights assembling the promos using a really biiiiiiiig stack of energy cards (including a bunch from the gym challenge challenge) we watched my tape of the banned episodes which were a lot funnier due to all the rubber cement fumes....at any rate we thought we were ready. i mean we had like a 100 of these things!! that was gonna be plenty!! little did we know.....

so anyways we figured that pre-registration was the way to go. so off we went friday night to sign in...we got a little bit lost. we knew generally where the meadowlands expo center was, but we couldn't find it!! i suggested we start looking for kids in ash hats. we couldn't see any in ash hats, but we spotted a likely looking group and asked them. they pointed out the way. there was a giant pokemon banner hanging on the building...eh heh heh.....how'd we miss that? anyways, we headed on up the stairs and were pleased to see no lines whatsoever. in fact, there were ests personnel standing here and there directing us. it was so incredibly organized...i really have to hand it to wizards on this one. anyways we got to the first check in area and funnily enough the person checking me in was someone who remembered me from the braintree qualifier! it's the hair. so we checked in, then went and signed up for our age bracket. and that was that! now we could sleep in a bit in the morning.....we decided that we ought to try and get some pre sts pics to put up on zeo, so we did. we peeked through the big curtain and took a look at the floor. oooooooooooh....it looked so cool! we could see the main stage, and the different gyms, the stadium setup and the wizards store. we managed to snap off a few pics before some sts people came over and gently shooed us away...

we went back out into the line up area, and took a few pics of the card displays there. we took a pic of our unown promos, and a few people wandered over to see what we had. the first promo went out to...i think his name was michael...he had a bunch of cards to trade. i traded for a first ed rocket's hitmonchan, since i only had one and ech was trying to get it away from me to complete his set. now i had one to trade with ech. anyways a few others came over to see our unowns, we handed a few out and they were greatly admired. that really psyched us up for the real thing tomorrow....

so we went home and finished the unowns, got our decks together, arranged our fakes in our binders, sorted out the cards we wanted to trade....all that sort of thing. we finally finished everything up and got to sleep....it was going to be a bit of an early day tomorrow....

the day of the sts we woke up, got ready, and headed on up. we managed to avoid getting lost again and got to the meadowlands in plenty of time. we waltzed on through the pre registered door and headed into the main area. we got our t-shirts...yeah! free t-shirts!!...and then got our wristbands. i hate having things on me so the wristband was seriously driving me nuts after a few minutes. we had about 20 minutes before we needed to report to the tournament area, so ech decided we needed to go find the neo genesis info.

we walked around the whole floor...nothing. so he asked an sts worker. she didn't know, but she was really nice and went and asked some one else, then came back and told us. so we headed off that way. oooh, there it was! it was in a case outside in the lineup area....behind a velvet rope....oh well. we stepped over and examined the case. fortunately for us, team hoax was agumented by our new publicist, vash. wizards was no match for three of us, and we got a lot of great pics before they came and gently shooed us away again. hurrah!! we now had about 10 minutes til the tournament started. so we headed over to the tournament floor. now, we had brought my ibook along. so we plugged the digital camera in, transferred the neo pics, and quickly wrote out an update. then vash, bless his heart, headed off to kinko's to complete the update and ul it for all the world to see. of all the sites that claimed to be updating live, as far as i know zeo was the only one who really did it....live...during the actual event. we were the first to have pics of the neo set, and for the longest time we were the only site to have 'em...a lot of the other top sites posted links to our coverage! thanks guys!!

anyways it was nearly time to start the tournament....ech and i checked the pairings and were relieved to see that we didn't have to fight each other. we weren't sitting anywhere near each other tho. we went to our respective places, and waited and waited and waited. it seemed to take forever to get started, and the pa system was hard to hear. those are the only two real complaints i had that day tho.

finally we got started. it was a pretty short match, my opponent got his deck up and running right off the start. i was stalled on basic pokemon....i couldn't draw em or the trainers i needed to get them, so i had a very small bench against a strong offense. it was fun tho, everyone i was sitting near really seemed to be enjoying themselves.

we reshuffled ourselves for the next match. eh heh....i got basics, but not enough energy to fight back....awww i was down by 2 already....

next match things took an upturn....my opponent had a streak of the same bad luck i had, and she only had one basic... a scyther. i had....erikas bellsprout. poison managed to take out the scyther before it could power up enough to take out my 'sprout.

all right, so i'd won one and lost two...oh well. we took a break and wandered about the floor. vash was back from updating. we were pretty happy about that. got something to drink and a bite to eat, and back to the tournament.

as i'm typing this im realising i don't really remember things in very good order. so i've probably gotten the sequence of things a bit mixed up. oh well....

i had the good fortune during 2 of my matches to sit next to the pojosama himself...he seemed like he'd be a fun opponent since he was so laid back about the game. he was playing a fun deck, like me, rather than a take no prisioners kind. anyways after the match ech came over, and we introduced ourselves. ech gave him one of our unowns and even tho i'm sure people were bugging him all day long he talked to us for a bit and posed for a picture. we were lucky to have vash there so we could both be in the pic. it was a great pic of our new acquaintance but an awful picture of us (it provided some of the more mean spirited members of pa! forums a great deal of entertainment in the form of making fun of us) we decided to put it up anyways because it was really nice of him to take the time to talk to us. anyways we'd told him about the neo genesis pics we got, and he did put up a link to our place from his. that was pretty cool.

now, we'd heard at the beginning of the tournament that ken sugimori was going to be there. wow! he was going to sign autographs. well, naturally we wanted in on that action, but the drawback was he was only gonna do it for 2 hours, and during the tournament. ah damn, what to do? well, vash came through for us again. he volunteered to stand in line for us. fortunately they were allowing 2 signings per person. so we searched thru our binders looking for cards. i settled on a here comes team rocket holo, and ech went with a w stamped pikachu promo. vash stood in that line for 2 hours, and barely made it to the table before sugimori left. but he got us the signed cards!

now let's see....my fourth match....i'm pretty sure i lost that one too. there were eight and i'm having a hard time remembering which was which. if anyone i played remembers feel free to email me and remind me :D...i think it was lose, lose, win, lose, lose, win, lose, win. if i really sit and think i can probably remember which was which.....oh well. a few stand out. mostly the ones i won. the first win wasn't a real fun one because there wasn't much play time. the second win was more fun at first, because it was pretty even, but then my opponent hit a no energy streak. i had my rockets mewtwo out and fully charged....he kept energy removaling me but i kept adding it again, and his poliwags weren't much of a match for psyburn's 60 damage.

the next fun match i fought was against a grass deck. my opponent said he'd put it together in fifteen minutes...well it was a pretty effective deck i say. i hit a no energy streak and the game could have been over really quickly. but he decided not to attack for several turns to give me a chance to regroup. alas, no energy is no energy, and despite ray's gentlemanly behavior, he defeated me. it was a fun game tho and i enjoyed playing it.

i was lucky in not playing against any of the really cutthroat players....i played for the most part against people who were enjoying the game. i was really grateful for that.

now after the seventh match (which i lost) i was approached by a photographer from one of the local papers. it's the hair, i think. anyways he took a couple of pictures of me, and some of our fake cards. he interviewed ech and i for a bit, and this made us late for the final match. but, publicity is publicity i always say.

my third fun match was the final one...i was five minutes late, and my opponent had already drawn a prize. whew.....i sat down and hurriedly shuffled my deck. (i have small hands and ech gave me these nice black card sleeves, so i have lot of trouble shuffling. one of my earlier opponents showed me an easy way to do it, but its not exactly fast....) then we started playing. man...for the first time all day my deck was perfect...i mean i got the right pokemon for the start, i got energy to make them go...i got alakazam and tentacool going, which startled my opponent since he'd never seen that combo. damage swap cowardice kept my weaker pokemon alive long enough to evolve into the real deck players. it was a close match, we'd both drawn prizes, and time was running short. then right at the end, he hit a no energy streak, which gave me the edge and the win. it was a great match tho.

all my opponents were great, thanks for the matches, all of you!

well, once you've lost 2 matches at one of these things i think you can pretty well kiss your chances of finishing at a high place goodbye. i wasn't really expecting to win tho so i didn't care. now that the tournament was over, it was time to do some of the other activities....like erika's challenge! i did that and got beat pretty early, but hey it's a free booster! then ech and i played a game over at sabrina's gym....it was nice to play him. we had a younger fan who'd met up with us earlier who really wanted to play one of us, but his mom made him leave before we were done.

we played in the gym for a bit, then wandered over to the trivia contest. ech got in the name the most pokemon contest line, but the time allotted for the contest expired before he got a chance to go. anyways the line turned into the flavor text trivia contest. so i jumped up and got in line too. ech won five rocket boosters by knowing the flavor text for oddish, and i won five rocket boosters by guessing the flavor text for seaking. whee! well, we had booster fever by now....we needed more boosters...we got em for erikas challenge, we got em for playing in the tournament, and we got them for playing in the open gyms, but we wanted more....many, many more....so ech informed the trivia contest guy that he could name more than 50 pokemon in 30 seconds. well....immediately a bunch of other people began claiming that they also could name 50 pokemon in 30 seconds. so they set up a new contest just for them....turns out there were only two people who could actually do it. ech did it the best tho. you could hear every word he said perfectly clearly, while the other contestant's speech was so garbled she could have been saying anything. anyways, ech was rewarded with a huge bag of boosters and goodies from the pokemon center in tokyo. way to go, ech!!!

by now we'd all realized that we were really, really tired. i finished up my submission for the create your own card thing, there was no one at the booth to hand it to so i put in on a pile of other ones and hoped for the best. i guess i should go look at wizards and see if its there....anyways, we headed for the car and drove back home, stopping off at wendy's for some dinner.

now, most people who won a big bag of boosters would keep them. not ech....he insisted we pool the boosters we'd each won and divide them equally. final count revealed 52 booster packs....a few were challenge, rocket, and jungle, but most were base 2. well, we didnt really want that many base 2...so what to do? exchange them of course!!

but could we find anyone else who wanted them??? that was the question...

now then...we had all this base set 2. we would rather have...well, pretty much anything. so, we put em all in a bag and headed out. we really would have liked neo or neo2, so we started with the stores that had that. software etc. was friendly, but they couldn't exchange our boosters unless we'd bought em there. we didn't want to lie and say we did, so we moved on. we tried comic book stores, toys r us...man, we tried everywhere. no one wanted it either!! imagine that....i mean, it's one thing if we don't want it, but it really sucked that the stores didn't want it either...

we put up a post at the pojo message boards even....we thought about selling them on ebay...we just couldn't come up with a happy solution to this dilemma. anyways, we were sitting in the food court of the westchester mall, contemplating trying toys r us again when i had an absolute brainwave. gamekeeper!! the nice people that gave me a cool porygon way back when. off we went.

well, we got to gamekeeper and ech got slightly fed up with me because so far he was doing all the talking. i can't help it! i get nervous asking people for stuff. anyways, we gave them our spiel, we got these base 2 boosters as prizes, we have a lot of base 2, would it be ok if we traded them for another kind of pokemon booster? we gazed at them hopefully. imagine our surprise when they said quite cheerfully "oh sure!" well, we were stunned. i mean, we thought we'd have these base 2 boosters like albatrosses round our necks for the rest of our lives....anyways we said we'd like gym heroes and challenge, please. they looked under the counter...oh no!! only three packs of challenge and no heroes!! things were looking bad again...oh wait!! there are boxes in the back!! oh, happiness!!

happiness soon gave way to absolute rapture as she returned from the back, carrying....boxes....of....first....edition....challenge....and.....heroes....

holy smokes! first ed for base 2! i will shop at gamekeeper until the day i die, i absolutely swear i will. those guys are the greatest. i wonder if they have a league....

anyways, we gleefully handed over forty packs of base set 2 and pocketed 20 packs each of heroes and challenge. oh man, were we happy right then. you have to remember this is like only a week and a half after the gym challenge challenge.....we'd just opened a whole box then. this was even more than a box!!

so we got back to my place and had an impromptu chat room to open the packs in....ech was able to almost complete his foils and rares for heroes, and i got some great cards too. we got shorted a bit in holos, but hell the packs were free, so we didn't complain too much.

well there you go. that's about it for my ests coverage....i might do a bit of editing and i'd like to add some pics, but i'll get around to that in a while. hope you enjoyed reading it!