Miracle Working

by Nathan Miracle, Assistant Designer

6th November 2015

Sometimes you feel like a card is calling your name. Then again, sometimes a card literally has your name in its title. When I saw Miracle Working, I knew I had to write an article about it.

"Certainly, sir.  How else can I keep my reputation as a miracle worker?” -Montgomery Scott, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock

One of the goals of Face of the Enemy is to provide a boost for big ships. Big can mean different things, and in the case of Miracle Working it means a ship with four or more staffing icons. Nearly every 24th century faction has at least one such ship. Even the Bajorans have the B'tanay, but while there are as-of-yet unseen reasons to use that ship, Miracle Working will work better when you can either build around a ship with four staffing icons or you can include several such ships. Borg provide particularly good targets, as only their nigh-unused Assimilated Transport fails to meet the four-staffing icon requirement. Voyager and Relativity should always have a qualifying ship in play, so they also work miracles on a regular basis.

Now that we know who can use Miracle Working, why bother using it in the first place? The effect should be familiar to anybody who uses These Are the Voyages. You get to draw four cards and place three cards from hand beneath your draw deck, allowing you to engineer the perfect hand. These Are the Voyages has a clear advantage in that you can use a 6-cost personnel such as Julian Bashir, Rebel Captain or Lwaxana Troi, Extravagant Ambassador to gain an actual card advantage.  But Miracle Working has advantages of its own. You can run Miracle Working even if you stick to low-cost personnel, and it does not tie you to certain high-cost personnel.  After all, you might want to run the new Lwaxana Troi. Perhaps the most useful advantage of Miracle Working comes in the form of its keyword.

The Recall keyword allows you to play Miracle Working from the discard pile. You do have to spend one extra to do so, but since the event itself did not come from your hand you recover that extra cost in card advantage. With a single copy of Miracle Working, you can dig eight cards deep for the relatively low cost of 3 counters. You can also discard the event to pay for other costs and still play the event. Romulans in particular like to discard events as costs, and Relativity can use Miracle Working as fuel for Temporal Transporters. Even if you end up discarding Miracle Worker to a stray The Dreamer and the Dream, you can play it next turn, giving it a strong advantage over non-Recall events.

"Oh, laddie, you've got a lot to learn if you want people to think of you as a miracle worker." -Montgomery Scott, Relics

From Galaxy-Class starships to D’Deridex-Class cruiser, from Borg Spheres to the U.S.S. Defiant, you too can engineer a miracle hand.

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