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Strategy Articles
Thunder Road: Racing in the Street
by Mike O'Shogay, Staff Writer
22nd July 2014
I have heard many times there isn't enough deck analysis and deck breakdown out there for players. Why did you use this card over others? and such... I plan to take a deck I have built and breakdown the choices I make for each card in the deck. I think all of this is good for newer players and players looking to get into more competitive Star Trek. Even if my decks are terrible, at least my reasoning is out there.
A little about myself…I’ve played Star Trek CCG since First Contact for 1E, all the way through the current day for 2E. We played casual in our play group for most of that time. During the Continuing Committee era we got more competitive and started going to tournaments.
As for what I have accomplished…not a whole lot really. Took 1st place on day 1 of North American Continentals in 2009, and placed 2nd or 3rd in some of the largest regionals from 2010 -2012. Is that good enough? Probably not, but I’m all there is right now for a complete deck breakdown.
Why listen to what I have to say? What have I accomplished? You might be asking yourself. Well, I’m putting out the reasoning behind the card choices I make, which I haven’t really seen done on this website before.
This opening might sound familiar…that’s because it is. I subscribe to the old comic book adage: “Every comic book is someone’s first comic book,” and as such I’ll start each article the same.
Starting with this article, I will be putting a section in where I give advice and tips aimed at newer players in regards to deck building. My goal is to get opinions from some of the best players in the game, to get their views on deck building as well as giving my own thoughts. For this inaugural edition, I have enlisted Kris Sonsteby (Lore) and Matt Frid (bandana8472) to give me their thoughts on this question:
“What is the single most important aspect of deck building?”
Kris’s response: “For me, it's always the mission skill matrix. If I can't get it below eight, I usually change missions around or even rotate to a different affiliation in order to avoid breaking the cardinal sin of attempting a mission after you should have already solved it.”
Matt’s response: “The deck has to fit your playstyle, #1. Look past the flavor of the month or the currently-winning deck and use what works for you.”
I think coming at this game from playing in a casual group so long and moving to more competitive play, I would say to disassociate the characters from the cards. Yeah you can bring a sweet DS9 deck with your Benjamin Sisko, Worf, Jadzia Dax, Miles O’Brien, and Julian Bashir, but unless you have a cohesive deck, you just lose to the deck playing 3x Davies, Pran Tainer, Altrean Seismologist, Grathon Tolar, Hologram Forger, and Kamala, The Perfect Mate. Be faithful with what you want to do with the deck, but don’t handcuff yourself to the personalities from the TV Shows and Movies. This is an attributes and resource management game. You want to maximize your cost/attribute ratios.
SIDEBAR BEFORE THE MAIN COURSE
In a Premiere only set environment, the biggest dilemmas of the day were Personal Duty, Pinned Down, Antedean Assassins, Recurring Injury, Captain's Holiday, Temptation, Center of Attention, and Assassination Attempt. These dilemmas really defined the format. If you couldn’t account for these dilemmas, you would be in for a very bad game. So this forced you to make sure you build for passing these dilemmas (an art long forgotten, as the meta has really pushed far away from this type of deck building). These really pushed decks to play cards just to beat these. Two level skill personnel were essential, like: Vash, Treasure Hunter who auto-passes Captain's Holiday and Authenticate Artifacts. Kamala, The Perfect Mate auto-passes both Antedean Assassins and Authenticate Artifacts.
In the early days you needed to have Treachery and Security personnel in pretty good numbers, as a few of the dilemmas just stopped you cold if you didn’t. With no Treachery Assassination Attempt is a random kill two personnel. With no Honor or Treachery personnel Temptation is a random three stopper. Unless you are playing with a bunch of Security personnel (or Ty Kajada, Relentless Investigator and one other personnel with Security) Center of Attention will kill one of your Treachery personnel and stop the rest of your team. A side effect of this dilemma is people playing a one-off Hand-Weapon in their decks since it helps pass Center of Attention, if you don’t have a lot of Security. Later, this strategy also helped pass Rogue Borg Ambush, if you didn’t have Intelligence since it isn’t a common skill.
If you didn’t put any personnel in with Biology or Medical, you would just be forever stopped by Recurring Injury. Pinned Down was an auto-stop one personnel for a 2 cost dilemma that could be played at a Planet or Space mission, which didn’t really exist then. Even though it’s random, it’s still really good. Personal Duty was great then and remains to this day a staple of the game.
This put these two level skill personnel (Pran Tainer, Altrean Seismologist and Grathon Tolar, Hologram Forger are just two more examples) and skill cheaters at a premium. Three of the best early skill cheaters were Elim Garak, Agent of the Obsidian Order, Comfort Women, and Shady Resources. Shady Resources was a staple in any treachery decks of the day. Comfort Women gave Cardassians a third set of skill cheaters to go along with Elim Garak, Agent of the Obsidian Order and Shady Resources. With the ability to gain any skill from a personnel in your hand, Elim Garak, Agent of the Obsidian Order was probably the strongest individual personnel in the game up until William T. Riker, Exchange Officer was printed in Necessary Evil.
Romulan Strength solvers, Klingon Strength solvers, TNG Science/Cunning Solvers, and almost every Cardassian deck were the best decks in the format. They had high attribute/low cost guys with a good skill spread. Cardassians and Romulans had access to all the good skill cheaters. Klingons had a ton of Security personnel, Honor personnel, and high strength even on their low cost personnel. TNG had skill redundancy. You could build a TNG deck that only required seven different skills and be able to have just tons of mission skills. If personnel were killed off, it really didn’t matter as far as getting the skills to solve missions, since your mission skill count is low.
You didn’t have Gomtuu Shock Wave, An Issue of Trust, Agonizing Encounter, Timescape, The Dreamer and the Dream, and Tragic Turn to worry about. All of these dilemmas influenced the ways decks were built over the years and really made just playing the Premiere set only a very unique experience. Was the game better off changing as these new dilemmas were released? I am not sure, as change is always good. But the Premiere set was a whole lot of fun on its own - to me it still remains a very fun environment.
IT’S THE ROMULANS AGAIN
I recently went over a Traditional Voyager deck. This time, I’m taking us way back to the beginning of Star Trek: CCG : Second Edition with a Premiere only Romulan Strength Speed Solver. This is the deck I won with at our very first Return to Farpoint Tournament, a few years ago. I only plan to touch lightly on this deck since it really isn’t very exciting.
WHAT A DILEMMA THESE ROMULANS ARE IN THIS WEEK
The deck I built uses a series of efficient dilemmas by themselves. Not really a whole lot of these combo with each other but they are all very effective. It’s a slim twenty-five card pile. This was not the standard Filter-Filter-Wall pile, but instead just straight attrition. I will say that skill tracking is probably the most important aspect of playing in the Premiere only format as a lot of dilemmas will just stone cold stop you forever if you don’t have a certain skill. Knowing if they have a skill or don’t have a skill is very important.
I had a slight kill theme going on in this deck. I ran a single copy of Kelvan Show of Force, Trabe Grenade, Unscientific Method, Pursuit Just Behind, Explosive Decompression, and Enemy Boarding Party. I knew outside of Escape, Julian Bashir, "Frontier" Physician, and Beverly Crusher, Chief Medical Officer there really wasn’t a whole lot of kill prevention. The latter two cost a ton and don’t really add a whole lot to their particular decks, with the former being an Integrity based solver and the latter being a low-cost speed solver. Both Trabe Grenade and Enemy Boarding Party are amazing against the cheap TNG speed solvers, as they are low strength and haven’t much Security among them.
I’m only running one hard wall in the deck; Center of Attention. This is another card that hoses those TNG speed solvers and any deck not running a bunch of Security as well. I’m running a few soft walls as well; Antedean Assassins, Recurring Injury, Systems Diagnostic, and Planetary Survey. All of these, at the very least, stop one personnel, and if they try to skimp on certain skills these will hard stop them and return to my dilemma pile.
The last group of dilemmas is just a series of efficient stoppers. Chula: Echoes was one amazing dilemma early on in the game, as the number of 7 Cunning personnel were few and far between. Each affiliation only really had a couple at most and as for non-aligned there were only five personnel who didn’t really fit into every deck type. So if you caught them just right it could stop three personnel for a one cost dilemma that could be played at Planet or Space…now that’s efficient. Every set since the release of this card has brought more and more high cunning personnel into the game making this much worse as the years went on.
Another one of the extremely efficient dilemmas was Temptation. This three cost Planet/Space dilemma really hits the TNG speed solvers where it hurts. Honor and Treachery on those personnel is few and far between. With no stop prevention, Pinned Down was amazing. A two cost Planet/Space dilemma that stopped someone (even randomly) was pretty darn good. Chula: Pick One to Save Two will always make someone stop three personnel or bounce someone back to their hand. Many-a-time I chose the one personnel they needed to complete the mission and they had to just stop the three personnel.
I mentioned there isn’t a whole lot of combos here and there really isn’t. One would be throwing a Triage in front of Recurring Injury. If you know they don’t have any Biology or Medical this combo will kill someone and Recurring Injury will bounce back to your dilemma pile. If they have just one it will stop that personnel and Recurring Injury will still bounce back to your dilemma pile. Throwing a Blended in front of an Antedean Assassins will also most likely end with a complete auto stop and Antedean Assassins will bounce back to your pile. An inordinate amount of personnel of the day had both Anthropology and Diplomacy. You could easily catch them by stopping all their Diplomacy/Anthropology personnel and let a single Diplomacy personnel go on and the away team is stopped (Not saying it will happen but this does happen.)
The biggest thing is really just paying attention to what they have out, what they play, and how many personnel they are sending. This resonates still to this day in order to play solid dilemmas. It was a little easier then, as people would play lots of non-uniques in multiples. Knowing they have two Chagriths, two Thexors, Ty Kajada, Relentless Investigator, and two Jorvas’ attempting a mission, it’s easy to figure out what skills they don’t have and then throw dilemmas accordingly. It becomes much more complicated when they attempt a mission with seven different personnel, but not impossible to track.
ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE
This is a very simple deck with lots of low costing high Strength personnel. The mission set is: Investigate Coup, Supervise Dilithium Mine, Investigate Sighting, and Study Cometary Cloud. The planet set both require Strength and the space missions require Cunning, so your avenue for victory is to play out your initial team and see what you get. Usually, I try to complete one of the two space missions first, just depending on what you get for personnel. Then finish strong with the two planet missions, since they require Strength and late game you can swarm with two or three away teams.
Until the Romulans got Bird-of-Prey, they really had no single ship that could fly from a mission, to the Headquarters, and back to a mission in the same turn. So this deck runs a split of Romulan Scout Vessels and D'deridexes, with both only having 7 Range. This deck uses a lot of Remans, so The Reman Mines will easily turn those into 10 Range ships. This deck also uses a single copy of Cretak, Supporter of the Alliance to be able to get a ship when you need it. While also having the all-important skill of Anthropology, she also has Law to help get past Drumhead - should you face it.
In order to help cycle through the deck faster, this deck uses three ways. Tactical Planning will help you by discarding something in your hand you don’t need to draw two cards. One of the most efficient ways to cycle through your deck is the long forgotten The Viceroy, Shinzon's Protector. Most people think of The Viceroy, Advisor to the Praetor when you mention The Viceroy, but the Premiere set version is by no means bad, allowing you to set the top card of your deck. With this ability, dropping any Reman or Shinzon into play with him out gives you a way to get the skills/personnel you need quicker. Shinzon, Romulan Praetor also can help you cycle through your deck. Much like Tactical Planning, you can pitch cards you don’t need to draw with him.
IS THAT BANE OR SHINZON? AT LEAST SHINZON SPEAKS CLEARLY
Most of these personnel were chosen because of their mission skills but a good chunk of them have a dual purpose: they help pass some of the best dilemmas from the Premiere set. The Viceroy, Shinzon's Protector provides an Exobiology for Berserk Changeling, Geology for Captain's Holiday, Medical for Recurring Injury/Triage, and Telepathy for Antedean Assassins, making him the absolute all-star of the deck. Shinzon, Romulan Praetor has Engineer for Systems Diagnostic and Biology for Recurring Injury/Triage. A good portion of the deck goes this way, so I won’t really go into detail with the non-uniques other than to say they all provide excellent dilemma skills.
However, as I mentioned earlier in the article, two levels of one skill on a personnel were very good. This makes Selveth, Tal Shiar Pilot with 2 Navigation to pass Wavefront and Gravimetric Distortion, very effective. Ty Kajada, Relentless Investigator has 2 Security to help against a number of dilemmas requiring multiple Security like Center of Attention. Vash, Treasure Hunter and Kamala, The Perfect Mate will both pass a number of normally effective dilemmas, but with these two out it’s very risky to give certain dilemmas to the player, like Captain's Holiday and Authenticate Artifacts.
With the sheer amount of Treachery in the deck, it makes Temptation and Dangerous Liaisons very risky dilemmas to give. In my eyes, Shady Resources is by far the best skill cheater from the Premiere set. It’s usable with multiple affiliations and when the best walls all required a personnel with two levels of a skill, this card is simply amazing. I am using a miser’s copy of Romulan Disruptor Pistol in order to hedge a bit against Nanite Attack and Center of Attention.
All in all it’s a good deck that was very effective that day. I just narrowly edged out a Cardassian Speed Solver to take the day down.
ALL GOOD THINGS MUST COME TO AN END
I plan on writing this as a series, and as such, I will be going over a lot of different decks I have together from Maquis Disruption with a Tragic Turn Kill Pile, Starfleet At What Blast, more Romulan shenanigans and even one or two Traditional decks. For some of the decks, I use the same dilemma pile, but will always detail something about them, such as combos, theory, or even examples of different types of dilemma piles like a Tragic Turn pile.
For any suggestions, questions, or concerns please PM. Deck List can be found here.
Discuss this article in this thread.
Tournament Record:
- Constructed (2010-11-06): 1st place (Tournament Report)
This deck is currently eligible for the following family or families of achievements:
- Romulan Player
- They Make Virtual Cards Now?!
- Unbroken I
- No Crutches I
- How About a New Mission, Admiral? I
- No Crutches II
- Good Casting: Sloyan (Alidar Jarok)
Decklist
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