The Cost of Freedom

by James "RedDwarf" Hoskin, Staff Writer

29th April 2008

The Cost of Freedom has two costs. The initial cost is the two counters required to play the event. You are then required to discard three cards from the top of your deck at the start of the Execute Orders segment of each of your turns. Should one or more of those discarded cards be events, then your Cardassian-icon personnel will have the freedom to do whatever he or she wants, by virtue of the resulting increased attributes. The Cost of Freedom increases those attributes by one for each event discarded. However, should you not discard an event in this way, your Cardassian-icon personnel will lose their freedom and be stopped for the turn. This means there is actually a third cost to playing The Cost of Freedom: the cost of failure.

In order to avoid this last cost, and have an event as one of the top three cards of your deck, you could rely on luck. If one third of your deck consists of events, then every third card in your deck should be one, correct? If you don't want to rely on luck, then there are other options available. Using cards like For All Our Sons, The Pillage of Bajor and Cardassian Protectorate, you can both speed through your deck and also fill your discard pile with events. That means you can use Ocett (Dogged Rival) or Feast on the Dying to rig the top one or two cards (respectively) of your deck.

If you're willing to add a second headquarters mission to your deck, commanding three Deep Space Nine-icon personnel will allow you to play Transporter Buffer. This also lets you place an event from your discard pile on top of your deck. You can even replicate the event (discarding two cards from hand – Cardassian style) and return it to your hand instead of discarding it.

All of the cards mentioned so far can only place one or two events on top of your deck. While that is going to pump-up the attributes on your Cardassian-icon personnel, it isn't going to turn them into game-winning beasts. With One Man Can Summon the Future in your core, you can however examine and re-order the top five cards of your deck when you play a personnel costing 4 or more. Providing that you have a decent proportion of events and personnel costing 4 or more in your deck, this should allow you to take advantage of multiple copies of The Cost of Freedom. With a fairly modest attribute increase of four, you can attempt and complete most missions with three or four personnel. If you could manage to get the full attributes +9 increase, you would still need three personnel to complete most missions, but you would have the respect of any players who saw you pull off this impressive feat!

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