A Gaze Blank and Pitiless As the Sun

by Maggie Geppert, Queen

31st May 2017

The Borg have long been feared throughout the galaxy as a relentless horde willing to assimilate whole civilizations to achieve perfection. In Lower Decks this affiliation theme was brought out in the idea of the Borg megateam, giving your Borg bonuses for attempting missions with nine or more personnel. Hidden among the megateaming theme was an intriguing new Drone that didn’t directly get a bonus with that theme. Instead, the Isotope Drone gets a +2 attribute bonus for each of your missions worth 50 or more points. Even though this isn’t a direct bonus, it does go along with the idea of megateaming. If you’re gonna go big, go big and try for those high risk/high reward missions.

Fast forward to Zero Hour. This new set fleshes out the idea of the Borg attempting and solving missions worth 50 or more points. A new Drone, Nine of Seventeen, allows you to assimilate your opponent’s dilemmas after winning an engagement. He also has skills that match up with big missions that the Borg can solve. What’s the catch? The Borg don’t go in all that much for engagement. They have a number of cards that get bonuses for engagements, but really only have two events that begin them, The Will of the Collective and Borg Cutting Beam. This does limit your ability to put dilemmas under missions, but every little bit helps.

So this does beg the question – which missions worth 50 or more points can the Borg access? In the Alpha Quadrant, they can do Pegasus Search. That’s nice, but it’s hard to envision the Borg quietly searching an asteroid belt for the phased cloaking device. Better to look in the Delta Quadrant, and right away Destroy Transwarp Hub pops into view.  The Borg can only score 35 points from the mission, but its point box says 50, so it is usable with Nine of Seventeen. The Borg’s final 50 point mission is Harness Omega Particle. This mission is crucial to the Borg’s quest for perfection. The Omega Particle was believed to exist in a few instants right after the Big Bang, but it has a crucial drawback; when it is destroyed, it takes subspace with it, rendering warp travel impossible.

What happens when the Borg manage to harness the Omega Particle? All that energy gets put into more assimilation and they become more Persistent than ever. Another minor theme design has been toying with is giving the Borg bonuses for using Persistent dilemma piles. This was first seen with the Borg Queen’s Vessel then later on with Strength in Numbers. The ship is a bit of wall-of-text, but the event is a great way to slow down something like a 5 Space Voyager deck. Speaking of which, persistent dilemmas have always been a nice piece of tech against Voyager, since you can bring back space dilemmas for later mission attempts. Particle 010 brings harmony to your Collective by melding the 50 point mission theme with the Persistent dilemma theme. It reduces the cost of your Persistent dilemmas by 1 for each mission you have worth 50 or more points. This means that all of the Persistent dilemmas in this deck will cost 0 or 1.  Those cheap dilemmas make Flare of Rage and Frozen by Fear even easier to get out.

This deck is designed as a solver, so you will need to do three missions. Assimilation happens, but it is not the primary focus of the deck. You can use engagements to trigger Nine of Seventeen and put dilemmas under the mission. The excess mission points you would score can go towards You've Always Been My Favorite to get out any cards you may be missing mid-game.

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Tournament Record:

• Hall of Fame - Regional (2020-08-22): 6th place

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

• Borg Player
• Ghost Stories
• Unbroken I
• No Crutches I
• How About a New Mission, Admiral? I
• No Crutches II
• Good Casting: Armstrong (Two of Nine)

Decklist

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Dilemma Deck Total Dilemmas 36 Space 11 (31%) Cost 1 4 Cost 2 2 Cost 3 3 Cost 5 1 Cost 9 1 Planet 9 (25%) Cost 1 5 Cost 2 1 Cost 3 3 Dual 16 (44%) Cost 0 6 Cost 2 3 Cost 3 2 Cost 4 5 Total Dilemma Deck cost 79

Draw Deck Total Draw Deck 66 Equipment 2 (3%) Cost 5 2 Event 12 (18%) Cost 0 1 Cost 1 8 Cost 2 1 Cost 3 1 Cost 6 1 Interrupt 6 (9%) Personnel 39 (59%) Cost 0 2 Cost 1 11 Cost 2 14 Cost 3 6 Cost 4 6 Ship 7 (11%) Cost 5 3 Cost 6 4 Total Draw Deck cost 149

Skills Count Skill # Missions # Personnel 1x 2x 3x Total Acquisition 0 0 Anthropology 0 5 5 Archaeology 0 3 3 Astrometrics 1 8 8 Biology 0 5 1 6 Diplomacy 0 2 2 Engineer 2 7 7 Exobiology 2 4 4 Geology 1 4 4 Honor 0 1 1 Intelligence 0 0 Law 0 0 Leadership 0 1 2 2 5 Medical 1 6 6 Navigation 2 8 1 9 Officer 0 4 4 Physics 2 6 6 Programming 2 9 9 Science 1 8 8 Security 2 12 12 Telepathy 0 0 Transporters 1 5 5 Treachery 0 2 2 4 Icons Count Icon # Personnel % Personnel Staffing Icons Command Star 4 10.26 % Staff Star 35 89.74 % Temporal Icons Past 1 2.56 % Keyword Count Keyword # Cards Commander: Locutus' Borg Cube 2 Consume: 1 1 Decay: 3 1 Drone 35 Interlink: Biology 1 Interlink: Exobiology 3 Interlink: Physics 2 Nebula 1 Persistent 16 Recall: 1 2