by Pat Nevan

NC Dave with the kickass graphics again this year

A bit of Housekeeping first: Fatal 4Play is Australia’s longest-running teams event. Organized by my good friend NC¹ Dave Cunning: Measured Gaming stalwart, Stats and Ladders founder and all round solid dude, even if he did gyp me out of a Favored Opponent vote at Cancon earlier this year. F4P2 is rolling out on June 15th with a respectable 8 teams of 4 players each, and should be a good last hurrah for 3rd Ed.

I covered the event for the Craichouse last year in my standard never-quite-got-over-my-undergraduate-fascination-with-Hunter-S.-Thompson style, and it sort of went ok. Put the event over, put the team over, churned out the some content for my beloved Craichouse Patreons and the 8 or so other people who give a fuck about AOS Team Tournaments in Australia. I figured this year would be more of the same with even fewer fucks to give about a tournament happening two weeks before 4th Ed. As it turns out, fate had other plans.

Maybe not quite at the Bjork from the Northman² level, but I’m working on a theme here

At last year’s event we took a Measured Gaming team consisting of The Captain Joel McGrath, Frankie, Brownie and Myself. This year I figured Joel and I, given that we are essentially AOS life partners, would put the team together from the club, offering first slots to last year’s competitors. Easy peasy. So a while back I cast around in the Measured group chat to get the ball rolling, only to discover that Joel McGrath, The Captain himself, Supreme Overlord³ of Measured Gaming had gone with a better offer from a team of guys out of Canberra and Far North Queensland.

The population of Canberra represents a sort of cross pollination of time-serving bureaucrats and inbred, slack-jawed yokels embarrassed by the relative wealth, career success and physical attractiveness of their American equivalents from Washington DC and that part of Virginia they filmed Deliverance in. To say that the Captain’s clubmates and battle brothers were shocked by this turn of events would be a gross understatement. This isn’t one of those predictable episodic betrayals like Starscream turning on Megatron. This is a case of Optimus Prime deserting the Autobots to open a Craft Beer brewery and wellness center catering exclusively to Health and Safety Officers.

80’s Cartoon Optimus Prime as well, not the live action shitshow

Like all of history’s great betrayals, the shock was both immediate and ongoing. A lot of the guys simply refused to believe that their leader had tossed them aside like a spoiled ungrateful child reaching for a shiny new toy. I still don’t think some of the long term members have really come to terms with their childhood friend abandoning them, but it’s the younger guys I feel for the most. Betrayal hurts every time but, like the song says, the first cut really is the deepest.

For his part, the Captain refused to apologize or even acknowledge any real wrongdoing. Team Measured could go on with or without him. Nobody owed anybody anything and if he felt like accepting an invitation from some of his other mates, well, it wasn’t the end of the world. Which would be be a perfectly reasonable series of points but for one small problem: It was complete and utter gaslighting bullshit.

The ‘Captain’ speaks to his club mates every day of his life about everything from his thoughts on AOS, the length of time of he cooks his brisket for and the frequency and consistency of his bowel movements, yet he somehow neglected to mention he had thrown in with another group for the teams tournament. Did it slip his mind? Or was he a bit embarrassed by his dark deeds and looking to delay a reckoning? I think we all know the answer to that, and we all know who was left looking like a prize fucking idiot when it came time to putting the teams together.

And that’s the toughest part about these sorts of betrayal. Someone gets a better offer, sees a better opportunity, fancies a change of scenery and some other poor schmuck (or schmucks, in this case) gets left standing around like stale bottles of piss, looking and feeling like middle aged divorcees squeezing their saggy asses into a pair of Spanx and heading off to a suburban beer barn for a girls’ night out in a desperate attempt to convince themselves that their lives aren’t over.⁴

As I said, the first cut is the deepest, but I’ve had a long and bitter life time of wounds and I honestly didn’t see this one coming. If you’d told me the guy I won Australia’s first major doubles tournament with at Cancon four months ago would hang me out to dry without so much as a courtesy reach around a couple of months later, I wouldn’t have believed you.

Left to right: Myself and the Captain at Cancon 2024. Brothers in Arms.⁵

After the initial pain of betrayal I narrowed my response down to three options, in descending order of childishness:

1. Have an adult discussion with Joel about my feelings and my concerns with the affect of his actions on the direction of the club.
2. Accept his gaslighting bullshit, pretend nothing was wrong and and explode in some display of passive aggressive petulance at some point down the track.
3. Explode with a fit of rage, rally the troops to form a rival team and seek a bloody Revenge worthy of a Norse epic

And thus from the Ashes of Team Measured, Team Vengeance was formed to contest Fatal 4Play 2024. In all honesty, pickings are a bit slim in terms of current form. I’m well and truly off my game and the boys haven’t had a lot of match practice, but in terms of raw willingness to seek revenge on a world that has slighted them for far too long, “Spooky” Luke Ingram, Jason Brown and Stephen Binek have got the right stuff.

Hopefully I’ll be back next week with a bit of a list breakdown and more information on the tournament but for now I just want to reflect on the astonishing growth of Team Vengeance. What started out as an honest desire to seek retribution on our faithless leader and whichever no account craft-beer-sipping deadshits stand along side him has become something larger. A crusade of the jilted. A cause for everyone who ever got picked last, overlooked, spurned or slighted. A song for the dumped.⁶ For everyone who never quite got the invite to the cool party, or who didn’t dress right or listen to the right music or laugh at the right kind of jokes: Team Vengeance will be out there doing it for all of us.

Like I said I’ll be back next week, but until then:

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1. Not a typo, the NC stands for Non-Cunty Dave. If you are curious, there is indeed a specific Cunty Dave out there too. ↩︎
2. I would have said she was a Norn but wikipedia says Seeres? ↩︎
3. It says so right on his official club hoodie ↩︎
4. Not that all these things aren’t awesome, but I’m working with some poetic license here. ↩︎
5. No affiliation ↩︎
6. Shout out to Ben Folds ↩︎

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