Welcome back for another season of The Road to Worlds. Around this time every year, we have a three-month stretch where each region of play for the various Star Trek card games gets to have its "big dance." Whether the players of your locale are rated 1800 or don't know their rating, whether your nearest regional attracts 4 players or 40 players, once a year everyone brings their best decks and competes for their regional title. I'm here to celebrate with the winners, ask them what they think, and analyze their decks.
The Second Edition Chicago Trek Masters event kicked off the weekend. Nate W won, going undefeated against a field of 18 players using this deck:
Title: 06/03/15
Headquarters: Romulus, Seat of Power
Deck Size: Large (60+)
Deck Archetype: Midrange Solver
Dilemma Pile Size: Unknown
Dilemma Pile Type: Unknown
Average Draw Deck Card Cost: 2.29
Agonizing Count: 4
Odds of Passing a 3-Skill-Dilemma Legacy: Unknown
Nate had this to say about the event:
I was very impressed by Michael’s leadership and the rest of the players that attended the 2e event. The event was 5 rounds and we were able to successfully finish in 6 hours! Because of this, we all were able to attend a post-tournament dinner that included jokes, drinks, and watching the first Triple Crown winner since 1978. Overall it was an enjoyable, welcoming experience.
My Commentary:
At first glance, this deck looks pretty similar to the powerful Romulan decks of the last few years (including the one that Nate won the 2011 North American Continentals with). You've got your downloaders (Viceroy and Tal), These Are The Voyages and Ptol to draw what you can't download, and At What Cost?/Energize for extreme card advantage. Donatra, Karina, and Ruwon will eat through opposing dilemmas while flying around on massive Birds of Prey. The non-aligned kit has been tuned down; no Navaar or Weyoun, just some low cost cunning to keep things running.
Donatra and company have some new help this time in the form of The Die is Cast and a pair of gamma quadrant missions. Karina's stop prevention is nice, but has always been limited by the number of the events in your hand (that you are free to pitch) and by the total number of cards in your opponent's hand. The Die is Cast, however, doesn't care about the opponent's hand and offers the Cardassian-flavored option of discarding cards from the top of your deck. Self milling in a 70 card deck isn't likely to affect you too much (you weren't likely to draw through the entire deck anyways), and doesn't touch your card advantage.
Interestingly, this deck doesn't take advantage of the new Stakoron missions, unlike most of the gamma quadrant focused decks we've seen this season. I suspect this decision says more about the already formidable strength of Romulan mission solving than it does about the power of adding one cost to all dual dilemmas. When you already have the capability to prevent stops en mass, prevent kills, prevent and overcome non-skill dilemmas, boost attributes, and play personnel with high printed costs for cheap, it may simply be preferable to have missions with tighter requirements.
I wasn't entirely sure what to make of the damage downloading cards (Demonstrate Aggressive Intent and USS Prometheus) in a deck without damage cards to be downloaded. My suspicion is that they are there to put the opponent off-balance. I know that if I saw Aggressive Intent at the start of the game, I'd start turtling (hiding at my headquarters) until I felt confident I could deal with its implications. Against this deck, however, going slow would be a sure-fire way to lose; its average cost is a fair bit lower than most Romulan decks, and once it is up and running it will be tough to stop. I like to see that sort of gamesmanship in deckbuilding.
Peter Ludwig won on Sunday in the Borg Regional in Wien, Austria. He used a creatively titled deck called:
Title: Paxan Gloryhole II
Deck Archetype: Speed Solver
Play Engines: Finest Crew in the Fleet, Attention All Hands, Cybernetics Expertise, Holodeck Door, Going to the Top
Draw Engines: Continuing Mission, Handshake
Bonus Point Mechanics: Assign Mission Specialists
Peter offered these thoughts about his deck:
Why did you choose the deck that you used? What other decks did you consider using?
I chose Finest Crew in the Fleet in combination with Cybernetics Expertise because it is one of the most versatile deck types: fast, doesn't require many non-dilemma seeds, cool features like the Barash people and Admiral Riker with his two downloadable Enterprises (using Wall of Ships). I also considered playing a Dominion speed solver, but didn't because of their difficulty with Quantum Incursions, which is popular at the moment.What sorts of decks were you hoping to face while playing your deck? What decks did you hope not to face?
I wasn't particularly afraid of any deck type, but my deck can have difficulties against really fast speed solvers (4 or more people per turn), which can just ignore my Kobayashi Maru Scenarios and keep spitting out personnel. I haven't faced any ship or personnel battle decks yet, but it's pretty well teched against that with Evade Borg Vessel, Paxan "Wormhole", and a homeworld.Prior to this tournament, did you have much experience playing this deck (or decks like it)? Did you learn anything new about it when you played it this time?
I played a similar deck at a tournament last year and had one test game with this current version. It's fairly easy to play and by now. I know all the mechanics and tricks of the deck pretty well and it didn't give me many surprises.Did you use any situational cards (cards that you wouldn't expect to be useful in every game)? Are there any whose usefulness exceeded your expectations? Were there any that you wouldn't include if you played the deck again?
Cards I included for eventualities were Paxan "Wormhole" (which is the perfect place to hide from anything dangerous, like Borg or Kazon) and Balancing Act (which never hit, though). I would not include the Alternate Universe Door in the draw deck again, since I learned in round one that it can only be seeded, not played for its first function.What would you nominate as the MVP card from your deck?
Save Stranded Crew: With my two mission specialists it is a 40 point mission, easy to solve, too. It also gives me the All-consuming Evil to boost Armus: Energy Field. Additionally, it is often under-seeded, since Espionage Mission is a more tempting target for strong combos.Do you have anything else you'd like to say about your deck?
A final comment on the ban of In the Zone. This completely changed the way of mission solving, since it is now possible to work on two or three missions at the same time, eventually solving them on the same turn. This favors my deck greatly, since it usually goes for three adjacent missions and has 3 ships out early for simultaneous attempts of more than one mission. In the past, this often lead to problems in the end-game with ITZ.
My Commentary:
I listed five play engines, but really what we're looking at is four full engines with a bonus Going to the Top download chain. Finest/Attention/Holodoor/Cybernetics is still plenty to be considered a speed deck with the ability to churn out high-quality personnel; I'd consider the ability to download Admiral Riker and download two high-quality ships (the Enterprise and the Future Enterprise) to be the cherry on top. There isn't a high density of AU-icon personnel, but Riker is one himself and each of the Barash-icon personnel can either be downloaded with the Holodeck Door or drawn and played for free with Finest Crew, and each one has an AU-icon for Future Enterprise staffing. As an additional benefit to getting those Barash-icon personnel early, their number includes Commander Troi and the increasingly in-demand (thanks to Quantum Incursions) Empathy skill.
It took me a minute to figure out what is going on with Cybernetics Expertise: if you scroll down to the end of the decklist, you might note that there are zero personnel with Cybernetics. That count isn't entirely accurate, since Juliana Tainer can gain it in Android mode, but one's still not enough to run the engine. I suspect that the plan here is to download Suna with Defend Homeworld and use his Reflection Therapy download to create a Cybernetics personnel. And hey, if Juliana's already in play, you could make her a roving-play-engine-enabling, double Cybernetics personnel. I think that, in the case she's in the opening hand, it might be better to save the Reflection Therapy to dial a needed skill for a dilemma that is giving you trouble.
Peter called out Armus: Energy Field in his commentary, and I'm also a big fan of that card, but I also see some other underused gems in the seed deck. Shades of Gray: Cruelty not only helps make Zaldan a very potent Diplomacy filter, but it also boosts Shaka, When the Walls Fell, which is a diplomacy wall dilemma that you'd want to use with... Zaldan! I also see Cytoplasmic Life-form, continuing the Exobiology theme, with a unique and surprisingly effective effect. I imagine that with a full three seeded Kobayashi Maru Scenarios, as the game goes on it gets increasingly likely that (a) the already rare Exobiology gets whittled down and (b) it gets increasingly difficult to have the personnel flexibility you need in order to complete a mission with that bug on top of it.
Sunday's First Edition Omarion Nebula Regional was won by Cristoffer Wiker, our First Edition Brand Manager. He used the first Circle-based Bajoran deck to win this season:
Title: The Circle is complete
Deck Archetype: Midrange Solver
Play Engines: Alliance for Global Unity, Chamber of Ministers, Hidden Fighter
Draw Engines: Bajor for Bajorans, The Celestial Temple, Promenade Shops
Bonus Point Mechanics: ,
Cristoffer had some insights on his deck to share with us:
Why did you choose the deck that you used? What other decks did you consider using?
Actually I built three decks for this Regional. I used the whole Saturday and a most of the night to finalize them all. I hadn't settled into which one I wanted to play really until I was at the tournament. The first one I built was a mostly Block Circle deck which I discarded after I couldn't get it to work. Then I built a Hirogen hologram thing just to see if they where any good still. And finally a DS9 Maquis deck which was mostly a rebuild from last years release tournament. But after all this I decided to rebuild the Circle deck and found something I liked there that I still thought would be able to go up against the Borg.What sorts of decks were you hoping to face while playing your deck? What decks did you hope not to face?
Well, we usually see a lot of Borg decks this being Sweden and all. =) But this time none showed up, which was a bit of an anti-climax, as everyone had teched against them. All players had both Dilemmas and other cards just to be able to battle the Borg decks somehow. Otherwise, I wanted to see something new, something I hadn't seen before. Especially decks I hadn't tried to build myself yet. I'm somewhat of a purist at heart so all the techy decks with lots of stacked mechanics and affiliations is always nice to see, as I seldom build them myself. But I was really hoping not to see any pure battle decks as my only response to it was landing ships really. I know that my DS9 was vulnerable to both commandeering and battle, but it being so long ago since I really saw such action I did not really mind it happening just to freshen up on the mechanic of things.Prior to this tournament, did you have much experience playing this deck (or decks like it)? Did you learn anything new about it when you played it this time?
No, Never played a Circle deck before. I've played pure Bajoran decks before and a couple of Federation/Bajoran with a treaty but that's about it. I usually tend to gravitate towards the darker spectrum of Trek. Such as Cardassians or Romulan. =) It was a good experience playing the deck. and I really liked it. It felt really true to the show and there was not that much juggling needed to play the deck which was nice.Did you use any situational cards (cards that you wouldn't expect to be useful in every game)? Are there any whose usefulness exceeded your expectations? Were there any that you wouldn't include if you played the deck again?
Alliance for Global Unity and Promenade Shops. Almost all probes were draws across all games. I don't know if there is a card in there that I would not include again. I had a bad experience with Hidden Fighter in two of the games. In one, I got 3 on my starting hand. In another one, I got none for my entire game. And as I played entirely without the crutch of Q the Referee, I had no real good way, other than conducting services and Renewal Scroll, to get a better hand fast. Maybe one less Hidden Fighter? I think I need to play the deck some more to really find what I need. But mostly it's the personnel. They are not that coherent. I lack many skills and have way too much of others. But I think most things play for free in some way or another.What would you nominate as the MVP card from your deck?
A hard question. I would say that Promenade Shops was the card that did most good in the game. That or any personnel with Physics. =)(Barring that, my dilemmas that ate up my opponents entire away teams and ship with crew. =)
Do you have anything else you'd like to say about your deck?
It's a fun thing to play, but I think it might have a problem in another meta. It worked for me and it worked here. Don't know if it will work for anyone else. But I would encourage people to test it out and see if they can make it any better. If you do, please tell me, I want to know what you think and what you did to it. =)Other than that, it lacked a bit on the interactivity with the opponent so that could probably see some improvement.
My Commentary:
I think one of the major benefits that Circle Bajorans enjoy over their more open and affirming cousins, is the ability to use more Bajor Region missions. Sure, Resistance Bajorans can attempt those missions too, but all but Bajor and Characterize Neutrino Emissions lack Cardassian/Dominion icons, which are necessary to make those espionage cards (and the built-in draw engine) work. But the Circle Bajorans don't care about espionage, so they're perfectly happy to fly around their isolated system. Your missions are nice and close together this way, and there's that Bajoran Interceptor to grant even more mobility for just the cost of a Hidden Fighter.
Of course, as long as you're using the xenophobic Bajorans, you get access to Bajor for Bajorans. You get all the benefit of Surprise Party or The Traveler: Transcendence without giving the opponent the extra draws. Only a few affiliations get a treat like this one, and you don't see many Borg decks going without We Are the Borg, do you? No, you don't.
The question is: what do you do with all those draws when you can't play any non-Bajoran affiliation personnel without discarding your main draw engine? Cristoffer opted to use those draws to fuel a second play engine (Chamber), and build an armada of Hidden Fighters. In addition to being able to swarm anyone who has to fly through the Bajor Region, those staffing-iconless ships can hide planetside in case someone with more aggressive intentions comes to play.
But what mission solving tools are there that don't have affiliation icons? Equipment! Cristoffer rounded out his deck with a nice suite of equipment, perfect for busting through some popular dilemmas. Nanoprobes' utility against Your Galaxy Is Impure is obvious, but we also have a couple hand weapons (take that, flapjacks!), and some Environmental Suits for more general kill prevention. Wrap up the set with a Plasmadyne Relay and you've got more range to synergize with other mobility enhancing elements of the deck.
The weekend ended as it started, with a Masters event in Chicago. The First Edition tournament was won by Jeremy Huth with this deck:
Title: ITZ, Why have you forsaken me?
Deck Archetype: Midrange Solver
Play Engines: We Are the Borg, They Will Be Coming
Draw Engines: They Will Be Coming, Strategic Base
"Bonus Point Mechanics": Population 9 Billion - All Borg, Resistance Is Futile
Jeremy had this to say about his deck:
Why did you choose the deck that you used? What other decks did you consider using?
I had been kicking around the idea of a Borg assimilation deck until I saw In the Zone get banned. After that news, I was thinking Fed Mission Specialist solvers might do quite well. So I decided to go with an old favorite, Stop First Contact. Not only would it be a great match-up against said Fed decks, but it would give a chance to see how the Borg do without ITZ.What sorts of decks were you hoping to face while playing your deck? What decks did you hope not to face?
Heavy interaction could have been a problem. I didn't have a chance to see what everyone was playing, but I think there was only Justin playing such a deck and I didn't end up playing him. As I mentioned above, Fed is usually a good match-up for the deck and I feel I would be in a good position against a fellow They Will Be Coming player.Prior to this tournament, did you have much experience playing this deck (or decks like it)? Did you learn anything new about it when you played it this time?
Yeah, I played a similar deck at the Chicago Regionals in 2014, and my day 1 Gencon deck last year was an Outpost based Stop First Contact Deck. I guess the biggest thing I learned was that I should be more aware of small opportunities that present themselves in the game. For example, in my game against Kris, on turn 2 or 3 when moving toward Earth, my cube ended at the location of his ship with 5 or 6 people and it didn't even occur to me till the following turn I could have probably destroyed it. It wouldn't have delayed me to attack and it could have slowed Kris down a turn or so.Did you use any situational cards (cards that you wouldn't expect to be useful in every game)? Are there any whose usefulness exceeded your expectations? Were there any that you wouldn't include if you played the deck again?
As a last minute adjustment, I added a copy of Two of Nineteen, Transwarp Network Gateway, and Transwarp Conduit to the draw deck in an effort to work around Loss of Orbital Stability. LoOS didn't show up in any of my games, but it was still nice to have for the times Secret Salvage didn't land near the spaceline end. HQ: Defensive Measures is my anti-Borg tech and each time I revisit the deck I contemplate cutting it because I so rarely face Borg. But despite that I am too paranoid to cut it, so it remains.What would you nominate as the MVP card from your deck?
Last time I said Borg Queen, which is still true here as well. But as an honorable mention I would say the mission set. This mission set has helped me to make it to the finals of both this tournament and last year's worlds event by throwing my opponents off base, as it works for both Stop First Contact and Harness Particle 010 themed decks.Do you have anything else you'd like to say about your deck?
I went in wanting to see how Borg could fare in an In the Zone-less environment, and apparently they can still eek out some wins. At the end of at least a couple games my opponents were very close to clearing multiple missions, after being delayed by Edo Probes, Friendly Fire or Dead End, for a win. Thankfully Mission Debriefing was still able to slow them down somewhat.
My Commentary:
As Jeremy noted, we took a look at a prior version of this deck last year. The deck has evolved somewhat, along with the game, so let's take a look at what Jeremy has changed in the deck.
The first thing I noted was an increase in the draw deck size, it's just over 20% bigger this year. There are more Queens, but again there are 20% more of her, we're just trying to keep the odds of drawing her early the same. Last year's version had just the one additional ship, but that scout vessel has been complemented now by the new Enterprise-E from the 20th Anniversary Collection. Both ships can report without a facility (essential for a They Will Be Coming deck), but the Enterprise also represents an additional way to "draw" the Borg Queen. Oh, and it is the first Borg vessel that can cure Emergent Life-form thanks to its Holodeck.
Still, one ship won't account for a 20% increase, what else is there? It doesn't seem to be any one thing that has led to the size change, but an accumulation of minor changes. Assimilate Planet has been moved to the draw deck to make room in the tent for more back-up plans, the mobility tricks that Jeremy mentioned are in there, there's a Nanoprobes for overcoming the recently reborn (and very popular) Your Galaxy is Impure. It's the ability to fit in tech cards like that that gives me the prejudice that decks move from speed to midrange to control as they get bigger and bigger. It's not always true, as I noted in a prior week, but it is often true, and I feel that this deck's evolution is an example of the general rule.
Speaking of Your Galaxy is Impure, I am seeing it more and more often, particularly in combination with Quantum Incursion. Jeremy uses it here in combination with Spatial Rift for another way to make personnel randomly disappear, though that middle card in the combo tends to be the most flexible - sometimes it isn't even a dilemma (Kobayashi Maru Scenario), making for a combo that only includes one actual dilemma. In any event, the variable nature of the skills required on Incursions makes it a natural combo with Impure. Since you can never be sure what is coming next, that makes it really hard to chose who dies on subsequent attempts. Even better, Incursions is an Adapt-immune Doorway, so it is one of the few things that can possibly slow down a juggernaut deck like this one.
That's all for this week. We're in the home stretch, and it looks like week 12 will be a light one with just one Regional. In the meantime, Daniel has promised a double length Regional Rundown this week, so tune in!
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