Future Pike Instructs People at K7

by James Monsebroten, Staff Writer

3rd July 2019

When we started development on The Cage, one of the things we knew we wanted to do was bring characters from the very first Episode of Star Trek. We knew we were going to make a few new characters from that episode and were looking at how we could bring them all together. The first idea we discussed was a reporting engine that revolved around Pike and personnel that named him in Lore, but after some back and forth we decided to go with a more general play engine and deided to tweak our Pike related card to work like Officer Exchange Program works with a download to hand of a relevant personnel.

Matthew Zinno recently wrote a deck article that use General Order 7 and The Final Frontier.  In this article I will show a General Order 7 deck using Sherman's Peak.

When you use Sherman's Peak you get a free treaty (Organian Peace Treaty), so I decided to take advantage of that treaty and add  some cards into my deck.  First off I added  Arne Darvin who, when on Deep Space Station K-7 , give you a card draw when you report cards to Sherman's Peak (once every turn).  You can see that there are a number of copies of Arne Darvin in the deck just to make sure you get one out early, and any others you get can be cycled with Recration Room or discarded with Process Ore: Mining.  As for how to ensure you can report a card to Arne Darvin, the deck takes advantage of the fact that there are already some personnel that can be downloaded by Preserver Obelisk (Captain Koloth from Sherman's Planet, and Kered and Daval from Organia, all of which are in the Q's Tent), and on top of that I added the ships to my deck for good measure.

 

Another card that I chose to use becaue of the Time Location is Temporal Benefactor, and as a Benefactor I chose Christoper Pike.  I chose Pike because of easy access to personnel who name him in lore through General Order 7.  With this I could get a Temporal Agent any time I wanted, at the cost of a card draw, which allowed me easy setup for using Temporal Almanac as a card draw engine.

As you look through the seed cards more, one may stand out.  I chose to seed Intuition as a possible draw engine for the deck.  I did this because of how easy it is to set up and how little effort it takes to get going for a Pike deck.  If you read the lore on Dr. Boyce you'll see that he has the Councilor traight.  He also names Christoper Pike in his lore, so in place of a card draw (which you will get the first time you play an card thanks to Five Year Mission) you can grab Dr. Boyce and add him to your hand, and then you can play him to Sherman's Peak which gets you both a Temporal Agent at a Time Location but also a Councilor to start using Intuition on your opponent.

Let's take a look at the other seed cards in the deck.  We've already discussed General Order 7, Temporal Benefactor, Sherman's Peak, Recration Room, and  Five Year Mission.  Other non-dilemma seed cards include:

Preserver Obelisk: Getting two multi-skilled personnel in play before the game starts is very good.  The deck has a number of missions to take advantage of and for the download from the seeded Preserver Obelisk I recommend using Vanderberg from Janus VI and Yeoman Colt from Talus IV as they get you two Geology on turn one to set up your Process Ore: Mining on turn two.

Process Ore: Mining: Used to get rid of cards you don't need (like extra copies of Arne Darvin) and net you additional draws.  If Review Mining Operation isn't close by to Agricultural Assessment simply seed Process Ore: Mining on Agricultural Assessment.

Call for Reinforcements: Used to get a universal ship and repair a ship that gets damaged.  If you don't get a ship on turn 1, you should use your card play to get the Starship Constitution so you can time travel.

Protect the Timeline: This gets you an extra card play at Sherman's Peak and provides you with a way to time travel.  Remember how the time travel works, in that one ship can only time travel once per turn so travel to and from the time location is a bit tricky.  There are multiple ships in the deck to help with this.

Alternate Universe Door: I figure it's worth calling this out since there are other AU enabling card like Temporal Conduit and I figured it was worth talking about why I chose the classic Alternate Universe Door.  Even though, with a Time Location, the native cards you report there do not require you to have a way to play an card, I wanted to be able to play more than one card outside of the Time Location per turn.  Each one of my turns I want to be able to play Temporal Almanac and still have the opportunity to use a Special Download to grab a card from a special download.

Crew Reassignment: While this is not in the seed cards it is in the Q's Tent and accesible through a Ready Room Door.  This card was added to the deck to give me an additional way to get Lt. Bashir into play beyond the Starship Enterprise Special Download and also allows me to get reinforcements to a ship far away from my Time Location.

Play Notes:

When playing this deck you'll need to manage your downloads.  I prefer to keep Special Downloads to mid-mission attempt to be able to go grab what I need when I need it.  This does mean that if you want to take advantage of your ship downloads on a turn you'll need to not use a Preserver Obelisk before you attempt (you can always play one after you attempt if you didn't use a Special Download for a personnel during the attempt).  Also, remember that the Classic equipment that gives you choices allow you to make those choices when the card enters play, so they make good candidates for downloads when you hit a dilemma that you can't pass without a skill that would be gainable through those equipment.

Discuss this article in this thread.

Decklist

Print Decklist • Copy Deck

This deck is legal in the following Card Pools:

• Complete

This deck is legal in the following Rules Sets:

• Modern
• Open
• Warp Speed

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

• Three Stops Me
• Highlander
• Cold Front Release
• The Cage Release

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