Then came the errata.

The CC saw that Merc Raiders was being seeded in all kinds of decks simply to build a bigger "free report salad" -- a phrase the community coined right around this time. So the CC fixed the problem by taking away its seedability. Merc Raiders became a plays-on-table Warp Core card, which meant it had to be your PRIMARY Continuing Mission engine if you wanted to get it into play by the start of the game. With only seven personnel (a mere two of them universal!), these guys were clearly a support faction. On their own, they were nearly as unplayable as TNG Cardassians.

And so Merc Raiders was killed to death, vanishing from worldwide decklists overnight, perhaps the saddest casualty of the great wave of TNG Block errata. So it remained for several years.

Then, lo, another erratum came to the rescue. I never played with War Council before it was banned, but I gather it was banned for pretty much the same reason as Mercenary Raiders: it provided a cheap, stacking, universally accessible free play -- one which particularly favored the Delta Quadrant, already ridiculously strong at the time. The errata, which finally came out this year, kept War Council's functionality, but with a new restriction: you couldn't get Non-Aligned freebies in just any deck. It had to be a primarily Non-Aligned deck itself. This was a fair and richly flavorful change... but not a simple one for a deck-builder to integrate into his designs!

Problem: since War Council provides free CIVILIANs and VIPs, it is lacking in some pretty major departments like OFFICER and MEDICAL. Who can help plug those holes?

Who else but the Mercenary Raiders of old, returning on their Long-Range Scan Shielded white horse to finally star in a deck they can truly call their own?

Well, we both threw a spanner into the other player's works, so we ended up playing for -- I believe -- 12 full turns before a decision was reached.

Justin seeded all his missions in a cluster of six, and, being pretty new to this deck and not enthusiastic to stretch out my own ships' limited range, I acquiesced and did the same with mine. Unfortunately, this wasn't a great fit with my "spaceline control" dilemma strategy. Early on, as both teams were cautiously sending down redshirt teams to identify the first dilemmas on various missions, Justin tripped a Borg Ship, which started... way over on MY end of the spaceline! Not very useful to me!

I had been in the middle of packing up my personnel for a trip to Observe Stellar Rebirth, but, well, the Borg were there, and would blow me to bits. So I opted instead to settle in at Conduct Stellar Research, a mission the Borg Ship would pass by. The Amargosa Observatory was there, so I beamed all 15 or 16 of my personnel there for safekeeping. Then I figured, what the hey, may as well find out what the first dilemma is here! Sent Evek over to the Husnock Ship, and he attempted alone.

Reader, the first dilemma was the (IMO) most problematic card in Broken Bow: Symbalene Blood Burn. Excellent seed by Justin, of course, great move, and I should have seen it coming... but the fact that it hit meant I simply couldn't play the game at all for four turns. Alas.

Lucky for me, my own stuff was messing with Justin just as badly. Enterprise picked up some Subspace Seaweed, then a Cytherians. It flew directly into the path of the Borg Ship, and it was destroyed. The personnel used Emergency Evacuation to bail to the planet (Luna), but tactics damage killed a couple of them and of course it's just a big inconvenience to lose a ship.

Meanwhile, I mostly watched the game get played. Fortunately, at least, Blood Burn hadn't shut down my main reporting location, so I was able to play more people, and they pinged past some things once I got them a ship to do it with. Also, I managed to use them to activate The Nexus.

The Nexus made it difficult for Justin to get to the missions he wanted to solve on the far end of the spaceline, even though he had Columbia out to replace Enterprise. This bought me another precious couple of turns while Blood Burn finally ticked out. At that point, I was able to move in a flurry, and won the game with a three-mission win, no Soran points or Stone of Gol points necessary.

Barry was back! We missed him. Hopefully this marks a somewhat permanent return from his far-too-long hiatus.

Still rocking his MQ Terran Empire deck from last year, the main things that mattered to ME about it were these: (1) his turns took longer than mine, because holy cow there's a lot of Objective manipulation involved in playing Original Series Terran Empire, and (2) my Let's See What's Out There copies were almost dead draws. Oh, also, (3) I gave up on Soran points by putting the Nexus in Barry's Mirror Quadrant, hoping he would trigger it.

A fairly nasty Quantum Incursions + The Higher… The Fewer dilemma combo ensured that I did need Stone of Gol points this game, even with a three-mission win. And Barry’s Mission Debriefing plus general strategy of “stall me with the dilemmas” worked out well for him. The Terran Empire required some setup before it could dominate its universe, and these tactics supplied him with that time.

In the end, though, it was tough to keep up with all the spaceline hazards my dilemmas were throwing onto Barry’s compressed spaceline, and Mission Debriefing is a double-edged sword. On the decisive turn, Barry was trying to maneuver around The Whale Probe while solving three missions (he knew I would win next turn). This led, however, to the play of the game. Probably the play of the month.

Coaxing the I.S.S. Enterprise to the limits of its substantially enhanced RANGE, Barry was able to solve the first of the three and headed for the second. (The third had only one dilemma left and he knew what it was; passing would be trivial. The second mission was decisive.) He struck a Cytherians, with all his personnel aboard, and, as I said, this was the last turn. I sat back in my chair, thinking I had just won.

Barry clearly thinks the same, and he looks frustrated. But he soldiers on anyway, just in case he gets another turn. He discards one of his two Space-Time Portals to return I.S.S. Enterprise to hand, with virtually his entire deck aboard. I continue sitting back in my chair, thinking I’d won.

Then Barry says out loud, “Hey, wait. I have two Space-Time Portals, don’t I?” (Yes.) And I am startled to realize that there’s no “once each turn” limit on Space-Time Portal. And I had no Q’s Tent, no Ref Cards, no nothing.

So he discards the SECOND Space-Time Portal and reports the ship and crew back where they started. Of course, he lost some mission specialists and whatnot who weren’t [AU] and couldn’t come with, but this didn’t just get Barry past Cytherians… it also restored all his RANGE!

Unfortunately for Barry, the next card was a Garbage Scow, and he did not find enough RANGE to move it and get to the third mission in time. The turn passed to me, and I notched the victory with a quick solve.

...but, next time, Barry won’t be playing me with a deck that’s a year old.

How about if I just say that the MVPs of this deck were Lakanta and Mortal Q and leave it at that? Mortal Q provided some clutch skills, and Lakanta allowed the fastest recovery from a Cytherians on record.

Otherwise, the game was much like the one against Barry, except that Jason’s deck both moved much faster and had much worse luck against my spaceline dilemmas. The Nexus and Borg Ship destroyed all his ships at least once. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get Dr. Tolian Soran out in time to reverse the Nexus’s direction and do it all again!

This was good for me, because my deck moved punishingly slow this time. This was (once again) because of Symbalene Blood Burn. On Turn 1, I had an intuition that Jason had seeded Blood Burn at Raid Ancient Burial Site. Option one was to just not attempt the mission... but I needed the mission, eventually, because it was the location of the Stone of Gol and held a precious 40 points (and it was dead center of my spaceline).

So instead of waiting to be knee-capped late in the game, I knee-capped myself immediately. Vekor redshirted down to the planet after we’d cleared the base of personnel, and... yep, that’s a Blood Burn. She died, and it went onto my outpost. So I once again spent four turns watching Jason play... and this time I really couldn’t do ANYTHING for myself except draw, because the outpost where he’d placed the Blood Burn was my sole reporting location for three-quarters of my deck (the other quarter could report to the docked Mercenary Ship, which happily doesn’t fall under the quarantine). Smart move by him, but ugh. Fortunately, it really was easier to recover from those lost early turns than it would have been later, and, as I said, I was able to really do a number on his end of the spaceline.

Cytherians

I won’t pretend I’m not pleased as punch to win an event – even if it’s an informal local, it’s still my first victory in Complete in three years. And I’m even more pleased to have done it with such a motley crew of OTSD rejects. When’s the last time you saw Kareen Briannon, Ira Graves, Mortal Q, Madam Guinan, Lakanta, and Maques in an OTF Complete tournament? That’s right: never. Big ups to the Errata team for its restoration of War Council; it has saved more than one card from the binder this year.

Thanks to Jason for knocking out Kris! That was the game that really decided the event, I think. We have been asked to post only lies about Kris’s deck, and I’m not inclined to lie, so I’m just going to remain silent about it, but can I just say that I didn’t even realize a Borg infiltration deck was possible until I saw the end of Joe’s game against Kris today? When Kris wins worlds with Ensure Their Silence triggered by his infiltrating Talon Drone, it’s going to shock the world. But now I’ve said too much.

Thanks also to Justin for running another solid tournament, and, most importantly, to everyone who came out yesterday for some cards!