The Chaotic Apostates defeat the Bay12 Champions in a close-fought 2-0 game.
Bay12 receives 235,000 gold due to team strength differences, and spends that gold on 1 wizard, 1 weather mage, and the star player Cindy Piewhistle (with her dangerous exploding pies.)
Apostates lose the coin flip, but the Champions decide to kick anyway; setting up Piewhistle on the field.
The first turn is a mixed bag for the Apostates - a high kick allows Graceful Grant to catch the ball, but the Minotaur howls insanely while the Troll just drools, wasting both their block actions. The Champions fight back, making some risky 1d blocks before Piewhistle throws a bomb/pie directly at Grant... who catches it! Throwing it back at the Halfling, the bomb is intercepted by the human lineman KingZultan, where it explodes, resulting in the Human's Ogre and Thrower being knocked down by the blast.
Piewhistle throws again in the second turn, despite two Apostate players covering her. She succeeds, knocking down the ballcarrier while narrowly avoiding being caught in her own explosion. The ball is retrieved by a Champion Blitzer.
Piewhistle finally meets her end on turn three - during another risky throw with two players covering her, one of the Apostate linemen guarding her manage to catch her bomb... where it explodes immediately, knocking down the player, but seriously injuring the star player, finally bringing her reign of pie-based terror to an end.
Turn four sees the Apostate Skaven put his horns to good use, knocking down the ballcarrier, although the ball ends up out-of-bounds and is thrown midfield, away from players from either team. The Apostate Dark Elf dodges away from the Champions' blitzer and picks up the ball, although he's entirely unguarded. Unsurprisingly, the blitzer that he dodged away from immediately runs down the Elf, knocking the ball from his hands and taking possession.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the pitch, two Champion blitzers find themselves too close to the side of the field and are pushed off. No injures result from this, but this puts the number of players on the pitch at a mere 6 for the Champions to 11 Apostates. The ballcarrier tries a risky -2 handoff, and fails, ending the turn early.
The Apostate Thrower finally retrieves the ball, heading towards the nearby goal line... suddenly, a bolt of lightning shoots from the sky due to the Champion's mercenary Wizard... but the attack ends up fizzling, leaving nothing but a scar on the pitch. The Apostates score on turn 7, although not before the the Champion Ogre, Toady One, manages to seriously injure a lineman (mirroring a SI which the Apostate Minotaur inflicted a turn earlier.)
First half ends with some fumbling of the ball, followed by a successful pass by the Champions.
The second half starts with a very aggressive play by the Champions, running their catchers into the Apostate backfield without support. One is frenzy'd out-of-bounds, while the other spends the rest of the second half covered by the Apostate Dark Elf and a lineman, unable to escape, but also too dodge-y to get splatted.
Turn 3 saw a lone blitzer with the ball passing the midfield line. This was dangerous, but less so then would be expected, as virtually all of the other players were entangled in a giant brawl in the middle of the field. The Apostate Goblin manages to mark the player, but unfortunately, a blitz from a lineman sees him effortlessly punched down by the blitzer ballcarrier.
Turn 4, the blitzer pushes off the Goblin, getting within four squares of the goal. The Goblin re-marks him, while the downed lineman gets back up and rushes twice to also mark the player. It's looking very unlikely that a Champion score can be prevented - only a single dodge or a 1d block are needed to score. Unfortunately for the Champions, they went for the block, and a skull, re-rolled into another skull, sees the mighty Goblin smack down the far superior blitzer, ending the turn and seeing the ball free.
After that, it was just a matter of the Apostates picking up the ball (reroll burned), handing off the ball (reroll burned), and walking the ball in for the second point after a lot of desperate defensive plays by the Champions that caused a lot of problems, but never managed to reverse the momentum of play.
Good game EuchreJack!