Into the Final Frontier, Part 7 - Provisioning Your Draw Deck (2 of 2)

by Chris Heard; Updated by James Hoskin, Staff Writer

10th March 2009

< continued from page 1

We have two deck slots left to fill in our 35-card deck, so let's look for one event and one interrupt. While there are many generic events available, and several of these - especially those that either enhance your ability to draw and play dilemmas against your opponent, such as Unexpected Difficulties and Storage Compartment, or those that diminish your opponent's capacity to draw and play dilemmas against you, such as Running a Tight Ship - are extremely popular, let's focus our attention here on Starfleet-only events so that we can get a feel for the affiliation. We've already rejected Diplomatic Offer, because we don't really have enough Starfleet Diplomacy personnel to make it worth a precious slot in our deck. What we do have in abundance, though, are Engineer personnel, and Starfleet has a special event that plays to that strength. Preeminent Precision - the reference is to Trip Tucker's precise alignment of the dilithium matrix in the warp drive - allows us to stop a Starfleet Engineer personnel to make the ship that personnel is aboard Range +2 until the end of the turn. We could use the Range boost on our slow, early-model ships, so let's add one Preeminent Precision to our deck.

Finally, we turn to interrupts. The To Boldly Go expansion, which introduced the Starfleet affiliation to the game, included just three interrupts, but they could all work quite well for us. Two of these, Disinterested Visitant and Temporal Delineation, manipulate the "budget" that you or your opponent may spend on dilemmas. Since we won't really be discussing dilemma costing until Part 8 of this series, let's skip those interrupts for right now. That leaves us with He Speaks in Shale, which is quite useful in a Starfleet deck. (There are, of course, many other useful interrupts that aren't keyed to the Starfleet affiliation, but for purposes of illustration, we're limiting our focus.) When our Starfleet personnel face dilemmas, they will often have to meet an attribute requirement as well as skill requirements. For example, let's imagine that our crew, pictured below, encounter the popular space dilemma Gomtuu Shock Wave.

Emory Erickson Integrity 4

Callaghan Integrity 5

Travis Mayweather Integrity 5

Garrid Integrity 5

Maxwell Forrest Integrity 6

Soval Integrity 6

Gomtuu has two sets of requirements that can be used to overcome it, one of which is "2 Diplomacy and Integrity>32." Maxwell Forrest alone provides us with plenty of Diplomacy, but our crew's total Integrity is only 31, so we are two short. If we examine the abilities on each of the personnel in the crew, we discover that Emory Erickson increases the attributes of each other Engineer facing the dilemma with him by +1. Unfortunately, there is only one such Engineer (Callaghan), so our crew's total Integrity is exactly 32, and we need 33 or more.

That's where He Speaks in Shale comes in. This interrupt allows one of our Starfleet personnel to add the dilemma's cost to each of his or her attributes until the end of the dilemma. Since Gomtuu Shock Wave costs three, we can play He Speaks in Shale to make one of our Starfleet personnel - let's choose Garrid - attributes +3. That will give him a total of 8 Integrity for the duration of the dilemma, and will raise our crew's total Integrity to 35, which is enough to overcome the Shock  Wave. Since we're going to encounter dilemmas in practically every mission attempt, let's make He Speaks in Shale the final addition to our deck.

Having chosen our ships, equipment, events, and interrupts, we now have a fully-functional draw deck on par with the starter decks you've been using up to this point. Our final deck list, incorporating the personnel and missions chosen in Part 6 of this series, is shown below.

Now we just need one more thing: a dilemma pile to interfere with our opponent's mission attempts. In the next installment of "Into the Final Frontier," Nathan Miracle will guide you through the creation of a straightforward but effective dilemma pile.

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-djl-

Decklist

Hide Deck Stats

Draw Deck Total Draw Deck 35 Equipment 3 (9%) Cost 1 1 Cost 2 2 Event 1 (3%) Cost 1 1 Interrupt 1 (3%) Personnel 27 (77%) Cost 1 2 Cost 2 4 Cost 3 14 Cost 4 6 Cost 6 1 Ship 3 (9%) Cost 3 1 Cost 4 2 Total Draw Deck cost 99

Skills Count Skill # Missions # Personnel 1x 2x 3x Total Acquisition 0 0 Anthropology 2 5 1 6 Archaeology 0 3 3 Astrometrics 2 4 4 Biology 0 3 3 Diplomacy 0 3 2 5 Engineer 2 15 15 Exobiology 0 2 2 Geology 0 2 2 Honor 0 4 4 Intelligence 0 2 2 Law 0 1 1 Leadership 2 9 9 Medical 0 3 3 Navigation 1 4 4 Officer 0 6 6 Physics 0 11 11 Programming 1 10 10 Science 0 6 6 Security 2 4 1 5 Telepathy 0 1 1 Transporters 2 7 3 10 Treachery 0 1 1 2 Icons Count Icon # Personnel % Personnel Staffing Icons Command Star 10 37.04 % Staff Star 12 44.44 % Temporal Icons Alternate Universe 3 11.11 % Future 1 3.70 % Past 22 81.48 % Keyword Count Keyword # Cards Admiral 2 Commander: Columbia 1 Commander: NX-Prototype 1 Dissident 1 Infiltrator 1 MACO 1 Region: Delphic Expanse 1 Region: Sector 001 1