Both Sides of the Mirror

by James Cream, Staff Writer

11th September 2015

The Terran Empire have been one of the better decks in the game for quite a while now, and a big factor of that is the very solid Original Series (TOS) personnel, who not only offer a solid extra play engine with the Halkan Council but have numerous special downloads to help bust dilemmas. It would take some pretty impressive cards to convince me to leave Mirror Kirk and his compatriots at home when playing this faction. At the same time, giving the existing Terran Empire deck too many good tricks could very well push it above and beyond the competition.

When I first got a glimpse at the Crossover expansion, it was quite obvious that the designers had all this in mind while creating new cards for this faction. Not surprisingly, as we have seen this occur in many previous expansions, many of the new toys require you to stick to a single property logo to use them. So I set out to see what sort of deck I could make whilst being limited to personnel from the show Deep Space 9.

The Play Engines

The deck has three play engines, and should therefore play about three free personnel per turn. This is a bit behind most current TNG decks, but I think that the quality of personnel helps out a bit. Of the possible new Warp Core cards in the set, I chose Plenty of Captains because I like the redundancy it produced with the other two play engines of the deck: Terran Rebellion HQ and Bajoran Resistance Cell.

Eighteen different personnel in the deck can play for free with Plenty of Captains and those same eighteen also play for free with the Terran HQ. So, in total, you get two free Terran Empire personnel per turn. Bajoran Resistance Cell is a powerful ally of these free play engines as it allows the Bajoran Resistance personnel in the deck to play for free directly to any planet – preferably the planet mission that you are currently working through. This also means that all but two personnel in the deck can play for free to either MQ planet mission. But of course the real reason to run Bajoran Resistance Cell is the draw engine.

The Draw Engines

There are also three draw engines in the deck. Bajoran Resistance Cell was an easy one as there were a good number of missions to choose from that could potentially gain draws by downloading an espionage onto them. This deck has all six missions capable of being espionaged and that means the player should get two draws a turn for six turns. I put a good number of Bajoran Resistance personnel into the deck to get this draw going as soon as possible (shoot for turn 2).

In the meantime, the other two draw cards should be able to supplement that. Temporal Shifting is one of my favorite cards for drawing in the game. It gets a total of four cards drawn for just the cost of a card play. It does require the player to throw one card away for this, and that card has to be of an alternate universe. Given, this deck is not particularly rich in Alternate Universe icon personnel, which is usually the deck type that this draw engine is found in, but the most likely card to be discarded for this purpose is a Temporal Shifting itself. And don’t forget that Tribunal of Q will permit you to turn one card draw into a Temporal Vortex (to hand) to fuel this draw (once per game).

The final draw engine is Study Divergent History. This new card can be special downloaded by the new Professor Sisko, and originally I had it in the tent, but then I realized how good this card is. It works much like the Café in that you can choose to stop two personnel to draw a card. On the downside, this has a limit of twice per turn, but on the up: they can be just about any personnel as long as one is MQ and the other AQ. It works particularly well for this deck as all of the Bajoran Resistance Cell personnel are AQ and all the Terran Empire personnel are MQ and they all play to the very mission where this seeds. This draw engine should be running on turn 1 and can supplement draws until the other engines get going or even make good use of the personnel who sit out mission attempts.

Card Plays

Although the card plays are often used for Temporal Shifting, to get draws, they can also be used for personnel and/or Multidimensional Transport Device. Two personnel in the deck do not play for free: The Intendant and Bareil. The Intendant is necessary for getting by Executive Authorization, but she is also quite useful for her skills and can fetch a gun with The Art of Diplomacy. Bareil is usually my choice for the Defend Homeworld download. His main purpose is to bring out an Equipment card (of choice). In particular, I have put Borg Nanoprobes (to nuke an 8472 dilemma) and Transport Inhibitor (to deter interactive decks), but he can certainly also fetch a gun or a Multidimensional Transport Device.

Speaking of which, Multidimensional Transport Device is a great use of a card play. The seeded Crossover should mean that this equipment card can be acquired for free just by playing Ezri, Smiley, or The Intendant but you’ll most likely get it for free when you download Bareil with Defend Homeworld. Using it as a card play causes the exact reverse to happen; Crossover allows one of those personnel to download into play. So it is a rather valuable card play that gets you both an Equipment card and a choice personnel card.

But one thing you won’t be using card plays on is ships! Three copies of Hidden Fighter offer the options of four ships in the tent, all free and all pretty awesome.

Hidden Strengths

As with all my decks, I look for the places where a deck can really get that step up on the competition. One of the best aspects of this deck is the proximity of the missions. Three missions are in the Bajor Region and two are in the Badlands. But those are not in the same quadrants. Instead, they are split with three total missions in the Alpha Quadrant and three in the Mirror.

What this means in most games is that one of the spacelines will only be three missions long. The player can then simply move between those three missions and beam to the other side using Multidimensional Transport Device. Early in the game, you won’t even need a ship. You can attempt both Find Hidden Base and Search for Rebels without flying anywhere and all other missions should just be one location away. I’d recommend putting the HQ in the middle of the Mirror Quadrant and putting the other two MQ missions to either side of it. But regardless of how it ends up. A simple beam across and a play of Hidden Fighter should get your personnel to any mission.

Mr. Tuvok and Bareil both offer cheats for dilemmas; the former with use a special download of Vulcan Mindmeld, to allow any skill to be gained during the mission attempt and the latter to pull an equipment card into the attempt.

Another strength of this deck is against Diplomacy dilemma combos. You might notice that the deck has exactly 0 personnel with Diplomacy. That‘s either a major error on my part or a bit of brilliance. The Art of Diplomacy allows two Treachery to be used as Diplomacy – and this is a choice. So when a dilemma is looking for a Diplomacy personnel to be stopped or killed, we haven’t seen any. But if Diplomacy is required to get by a wall, well suddenly everyone is a diplomat.

 

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Decklist

Print Decklist • Copy Deck

This deck is legal in the following Card Pools:

• Complete

This deck is legal in the following Rules Sets:

• Open
• Revised
• Warp Speed

This deck is currently eligible for the following family or families of achievements:

• Empire Player
• Terran Rebellion Hideout Player

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