Kira Nerys (Lela)

by Johannes Klarhauser, Staff Writer

8th January 2009

The good news: there is a new Kira in Favor the Bold. The bad news: there is a new Kira in Favor the Bold. With one exception, it has been a tradition to have a version of Kira Nerys in every expansion of Second Edition, but with so many Kiras around, it is hard to decide on one (or three) to include in your deck. Let’s see why you would want to play the newest incarnation: Lela.

With the icon, this Kira can report to both Bajor and Mouth of the Wormhole (Deep Space Nine). She has her standard attributes of six Integrity, six Cunning, and six Strength, and a solid skill set, with Law being the most interesting addition (Amnesty Talks is a staple of many Bajoran decks). Still, as always, it’s the gametext that makes her stand out. And this time it’s not even an original idea.

As far back as the very first set, we had Ranjen Koral (Student of B’hala), who has one the most valuable gametexts on any card: when you play this personnel, you may take a card from your discard pile into hand. A very straightforward ability, no requirements, and immensely useful for any Bajoran deck. With Bajor’s tendency to interact with the discard pile a lot, this ability often works like a targeted download. You can get any card back with no effort, be it a personnel, equipment, ship, event, or one of the usually hard-to-recover interrupts. Which brings us to the remaining part of Lela’s gametext.

The little keyword Host brings the Bajoran Host total up to three (Jadzia Dax (Elder) and Odo (Curzon Odo) are the other two). With the option to add Non-Aligned Martia, that should give you enough targets to use The Rite of Emergence whenever you need it. Better still, now that we have Defensive Upgrades, you won’t have to worry about your expensive interrupt being prevented, and therefore you shouldn’t have any trouble coming up with Treachery and any other skills your missions might require.

Random Fact: Did you know that there are currently only two cards that make use of the Host keyword? The other one is Worf (The Strongest Heart), who can prevent your Hosts from being stopped by discarding an event.