Design Log: Inside the Matrix

by Chris Lobban, Assistant Designer

16th December 2011

When we started pitching cards for Unity, one of the goals was to create teams for affiliations that didn't already have them. And one of those affiliations was the Borg. In addition to not having a team yet, the Borg have generally been overlooked recently... in fact they haven't gotten a single personnel or ship card since the last time I wrote a design log, almost two and a half years ago. So I was determined to do my best to get a Borg team into this expansion.

The real question was... how to balance it? The reason the borg have been so starved recently is because they already have so much. They've been considered one of the top decks around for years. And though it's been a while since they've actually won any big championships, they've always made their presence known in them. So if we gave them too many new tricks that could be worked into their current decks, there was the risk that they would utterly dominate the tournament scene for the foreseeable future. No, we didn't need to give them any new tricks... we needed to instead give people a reason to completely rethink their current Borg decks. To build something completely new, without leaning on any of their old crutches.

So we wanted a Borg team, and we wanted one that would exclude a lot of common Borg deck-elements... immediately Unimatrix Zero came to mind. They were like the anti-Borg, they wanted nothing to do with the Queen, or Locutus, or anything like that. So with the storyline quickly decided upon, we needed to find a way to make them stand alone. For inspiration, I took a look at the Unimatrix Zero card that already exists. It gives great bonuses if you're using a lot of Unique people, and gives them all the icon. Well, obviously anybody that was in UZ would be unique, that was the entire point... they were celebrating their individuality. As to the icon, well it was a good representation of life "inside the matrix", so it would make sense to natively give that to anybody who existed there. Those would be our main four, and then we could add in the three Voyager crew-borg as support for them. And we knew right away that they would all be Dissidents, because that was an easy fit, and gave them access to a lot of Dissident verbs that the Borg hadn't been able to use before. So they already had some new flavour. But we still needed a way to make them stand apart.

The first thought came in the form of a powerful carrot. It was basically an event that played on table and said something along the lines of "If all your personnel are Dissident Borg, really awesome things happen.". The idea was that by combining the sphere's "make drones Dissidents" ability, and Unimatrix Zero's "make uniques " ability, you would want to build a deck using only the dissidents and some unique drones, in order to get the carrot. With one swell foop we'd cut out not only the Queen, Locutus, and Data; but also all of the Interlink drones, attribute-boosting drones, and most of the other Borg tricks. The problem with this was that in order to properly convince people to leave out all those good tricks, the carrot needed to be really powerful. And for it to be that powerful, it meant that it was still boosting the Borg decks above where we wanted them. We didn't want to make better borg decks, just different borg decks.

This is the point that we started sending things to the testers. We tried to balance our big carrot for a few weeks, but it was a very delicate balancing act. We were trying to stop it from becoming way too powerful, but then the testers just ignored it. Sure, they were happy to use the new drones in their borg decks, but they were still mixing them in with all the same old tricks as well, and just leaving out the carrot. It seemed that no matter which way we went, we were losing that battle. It was time to take a new approach.

The other problem was that building a deck with the carrot was just too limiting. There were a very limited number of unique drones available, and a lot of skill-holes. Cutting out all of the non-uniques was just too crippling to the deck. We tried a few things to plug the skill holes (like Janeways "gain any skill" ability... that I found particularly amusing considering her tendency on the show to quickly become an expert on any threat they were facing, allowing her to ignore the underlings that had trained in that field for years), but it just wasn't cutting it.

The other problem was that testers reported that certain dissidents were getting thrown into their decks simply for the skills. Because looking around, this group certainly has a unique set of skills that are generally considered rare for the borg. Axum gains the rare Leadership skill over his non-dissident version. Janeway has both Leadership and Diplomacy available. And Korok has a whole plethora of unique skills that most Borg decks would kill for... so even though the Borg were massively overpaying for the personnel (who were costed to account for the abilities that you couldn't use if you didn't have enough, or often only, dissidents present), it was worth the extra cost just to get the rare skills. And so, we had to add in the card-blanking gametext, to ensure that dissidents would only work with dissidents, and would become blank husks if the Queen tried to use them for her bidding.

Finally, we felt that we'd achieved our goal. We'd created a team of Borg that was completely unique from the rest of the Borg. In their own deck, they can do a lot of new tricks that the Borg couldn't previously do... including bringing in a whole new skill selection, opening up use of some new Dissident verbs, and lots of individual tricks. The carrot event ended up being cut from the set for lack of room, and we never were quite able to get it working properly anyway. But I anticipate that it could make a come-back in Allegiance 3: The Search for Teams (if not before)... hopefully by then there'll be enough unique Drones and Dissidents around to make a real "inside the Matrix" deck possible, without the non-unique crutches. We'll just have to wait and see...