Jean-Luc Picard: It's never easy to leave one's home - the safe and the familiar. But there are times when... the greater good demands that certain... sacrifices are made. I'm sure that was something that your grandfather understood.
Anthwara: So does his grandson. There are also times when a people sacrificed too much. When a people must hold on to what we have, even against overwhelming opposition.
-from “Journey’s End”
I’ll be honest. The Maquis are not a well-beloved faction in Second Edition. They represent a particularly powerful style of control deck. Through a variety of cards, they have the ability to return cards to the top of their owner’s deck. This often means that a person who plays against a Maquis player will often not be able to play cards, or play very few of them. Maquis control decks are often paired with All-Consuming Evil/Tragic Turn dilemma piles that kill off large numbers of the personnel that you do get to play. Look elsewhere if you want to learn more about playing this type of deck. This is not The Full Nelson. Today’s deck shows you the softer side of Maquis.
Missions
The headquarters for this deck is Quatal Prime, Quiet Mining Colony. This is the version of the Maquis Headquarters that gave them new flavor in A Time to Stand. It allows any events you place on your Region: Demilitarized Zone missions to cost -1. The first mission to attempt is Hugora Nebula, Border Crossing. You have to be careful with this mission. You want to make sure you have 4 events on it before you finish it. You can put more events on later to make it worth more, but you won’t score those points. After that, I would attempt Evacuate Colony. The strength side of the mission is probably easiest. I would probably round things out with Elude Federation Forces, as everyone and their cat in the Maquis seem to have Astrometrics and/or Navigation. Soltok IV, Transport “Medical Supplies” is probably a little more difficult for the Maquis.
Draw Deck
The idea behind this deck is to get cheap events on your missions. As mentioned before, the Hugora Nebula gets a bonus for all those events. You can also get bonus points for Debate Over Dinner and Habak, so that mission can get bumped up to 60 points. If you’re feeling lucky, you could add Raise the Stakes to this deck. Hurried Departure can also boost the nebula even more. You may have been wondering how you can complete Evacuate Colony with all the personnel in this deck. Well, the solution to that is Ignored Jurisdiction. This event is essentially free and can’t be destroyed (though you can prevent it). Finally, you can protect yourself from nasty dilemmas that hose these Treachery-heavy Maquis, such as An Issue of Trust, with Self-Replicating Roadblock.
There are a few what I would think of as standard interference cards in this deck, because some things are just irresistible. The first and foremost of these cards is Shankar, Maquis Soldier. This powerful 4-cost personnel causes your opponent to place their entire hand on the top of their deck. A first-turn Shankar is, in my opinion, one of the biggest negative play experiences out there. Frankly, the Maquis are not that great at completing missions, so slowing down an opponent can be imperative. In a similar vein, Reide is here as well. He’s a little more balanced as the Maquis player must discard two cards from hand to make their opponent put two random cards on top of their deck. Finally, the U.S.S. Defiant, Stolen Warship is here. I think that I wouldn’t use it too much to put cards back on my opponent’s deck, simply because it’s a lot of resources (7-cost, three and one personnel, stay at an opponent’s mission) to invest for a single card. The Cosette, Reliable Raider is the go-to ship for moving around the DMZ, anyway.
Dilemma Pile
I paired this deck up with the standard attrition dilemma pile I’ve been using for a while. This pile doesn’t really have a lot of combos in it. The big idea is just pull people out and if you get lucky, hit them with a nice wall. Instead of focusing on some of the well-known dilemmas that get used often (Hard Time, An Issue of Trust or The Weak Will Perish), I thought I’d take a look at some of the more situational dilemmas in this pile that have won me games. The first of these is Insurrection. This dilemma rocks against a variety of common missions, such as Investigate Maquis Activity or Cardassia IV, Rescue Prisoners. It adds 10 to any attribute requirement <32 on those missions, so will throw a monkey wrench into any plans for microteaming from your opponent. Similarly, Zero Hour boosts mission requirements as well, adding 3 to each requirement for each event in your opponent’s core. This is a very situational card (not everyone has lots of events in core), but I have played it to good effect against core event heavy decks like this one. Finally, I’d like to give a shout out to Ominous Presence. One weakness of this pile is that the dilemmas tend to be spendy and I find myself often wishing that this one or that one cost one less so I could use it. There are a large number of decks that allow me to make use of the discount on Ominous Presence to get it down to a 1-cost card. It tends to be quite effective against and decks, especially.
Credit Where Credit Is Due
Michael Van Breemen (The Ninja Scot) lent me this deck. Thanks, MVB! I added the dilemma pile, since his version didn’t have one attached.
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