Thanks for the pointers everyone. Yes, I do hope to have more success playing this as P1. In this game I just never felt like I got into the game - as P2 against the red starter you’re always under pressure, but getting Arg out early and then maxing him on T2 added to that severely. I was surprised you skipped Tech 1 on turn 2 in order to do that (so much so that it didn’t figure in my calculations at all), but clearly it paid off, despite drawing a Gunpoint Taxman that you couldn’t play. In general I try to avoid situations where I’m possibly drawing into Tech 1/Tech 2 cards before the relevant Tech building is complete, but I can see now that I’m clearly being too cautious in that regard.
On @Jadiel’s point - he is of course correct, and I am embarassed to have missed that, especially in PBF format where I can spend a lot of time reconsidering my moves (and did spend quite some time on that particular turn). His play is certainly clearly better if only because it ends with a max Drakk, but I was initially not sure of the value of the extra card in this particular case, because it would involve me reshuffling and drawing into Tech 2 units before I had a Tech 2 building. (And only having the one Tech 2 unit in the next cycle, whereas it could have been 3 if I’d waited a turn to reshuffle.) I now see that this kind of thinking is really holding me back, and I need to ditch it - so that is one valuable lesson in this game. (This flawed thinking of mine was why I thought it was actually advantageous for me to kill your Technician Ogre, because I didn’t think you’d have teched any Tech 2s yet, quite erroneously.)
In any case, I shouldn’t kid myself that it was your Tech 2 plan that beat me in this game. MoLaC just improved your position from dominant to ridiculously so - even without it I’d have surely had no way back, with you having a unit and 2 heroes against my empty board and a broken Tech 2 building. I lost this game at Tech 0/Tech 1 level - and in fact it’s worse than that, in that in the whole game, other than MoLaC, you only used Tech 0 units together with heros and their abilities. You teched some Tech 1s and spells, but never needed to use them!
I agree that I need to improve how I organise my patrollers - but I will point out that it is something that I do think about. If I think something will certainly die anyway, and will be just as easy to kill in SQL as in Scavenger/Technician, I will patrol in one of the latter slots. But I think in every case in this game, when I patrolled something in SQL that I know full well you could kill, the extra armour forced you to either trade an extra unit of yours, or at least use Arg’s midband, in order to kill it. So it was a conscious attempt to try to keep your board under control while I build up to my powerful Tech 2 options. [And with Ogre at my T2, I was trying to protect Drakk - had Ogre been in Elite I assume you’d have left Ogre alone and taken an easy kill of Drakk.] Clearly it failed horribly, but there was thought behind it.
One final thing, you refer to this game as being one in which “Tech II units are really strong” - is there any game in which this is not the case? As far as I can see, every single spec has really strong Tech 2s - the jump in value from Tech 1 to Tech 2 seems vastly bigger than that between Tech 0 and Tech 1, or even between Tech 2 and Tech 3 (with the exception of Anarchy for the latter, perhaps Past too). I would expect at least 80% of games are decided in fights between boards involving Tech 2 (but not Tech 3) units/buildings/upgrades. And I was trying to get to Tech 2 quickly - I would have built Tech 2 on turn 3 had it not been for the fact that you could then have wiped my board and maintained a big lead in units/heroes, enough to still be able to do significant damage until your own Tech 2s came online. I really hadn’t appreciate how much Arg in combination with the red starter could put P2 under the cosh - I would have loved to have responded by midbanding Drakk, but I could never afford it because it was more important to get more units out.
Thanks again for the game, and for the advice. Good luck in the rest of the tournament - I’m sure your deck will cause big problems for players much stronger than me!