April 23 was the eighth and final night of the regular season for Season 12. As such, it would decide who got that juicy top seed position and who would play A and B. We were on the randomly-chosen bank Calliope, the “adventure” bank, sparing us another night of South Park.
The night stands out in my mind because I nearly doubled my previous personal best on Game of Thrones. I got Blackwater going on Ball 1 (contrary to my usual GoT strategy, “just try to lock one ball per ball”), started hammering the hell out of the battering ram and shot whatever else I could. This ended up with my shooting one more Super Jackpot after multiball ended and the announcer voice was giving the final two seconds of a countdown. My group (Lexi, Lupe, and Jon) were all very excited by this. I rarely look at the score while playing as I just find it distracts me, but Lupe blurted out “You’re over a billion!” I was stunned because I have never broken a billion before. My previous best was in the 600 millions somewhere. When Ball 1 ended, Jon began shouting that I was the new queen and that he would gladly bend the knee to me. I think he was more excited than I was! Although I got another Blackwater going on Ball 2, I didn’t do anything like that Ball 1 and ended with “only” about 200 million more on the next two balls. That score earned me top game for the night on Game of Thrones and I can thank it for the fact that I edged out Josh by 1 point for the season. For my troubles I earned the right to play Danny instead of Mike first round. Yay?
Speaking of Jon, he told me again how much he loved the Critical Hit format we used for the March Hare Madness tournament and asked when I would run another one of those tournaments. I had to tell him that I was only planning to use that format for March Hare Madness, once a year, since I like to rotate formats for my charity tournaments. He asked if he could borrow my cards to run his own “just for fun” tournament and I said that as long as it was a day I could come that would be just fine. He said that he would also need my help drawing people to the tournament because, as he said, “you know how to get people to come.” I laughed at his overestimation of my sway, but of course I will do what I can. (Our next official charity tournament, by the way, will likely be in July. It will be the annual round robin tournament known as Rocket Robin.)
The other notable occurrence that I’m aware of is that Mike finally took the Grand Champion on Theatre of Magic back from Joseph, who had held it for at least two years. Joseph’s old score was around two and a half billion, and Mike knocked it down with 3.6 billion in his league game. Mike says Joseph gave him a death glare that he’s sorry I didn’t capture with the camera (although I’m not sure I would have wanted my lens shattered).
The Smackdown tournament for the night was on Deadpool, of course, since we are trying to get our league players on the Stern Deadpool Boom leader board. The league has been well represented so far. SummerSlam has subsequently taken over the job of giving Boom entry opportunities, so we will go back to picking a random Smackdown game for finals and Super-Ball/Zen night. Interest in SummerSlam has been surprisingly high already, with a lot of competition for scores, considering that it will run through the start of August. Mike won the night’s Smackdown on Deadpool and Pat came from behind with a strong third ball rally on The Beatles in the Undercard division.
The league season will be officially over after tonight’s final playoff tournament, with trophies going to the top three in each division. Will we have a third Lansing champion or will Mike defend his title? We’ll soon find out! See you at 7 pm! (And don’t forget you can check the regular season finishing positions on our league’s Google doc, here.)