Space ...

by Matthew Zinno, Errata Team Leader

2nd July 2018

Happy Fourth (almost) of July!  I am pleased to announce the arrival of several errata, with three cards coming off of the OTF Ban List.

Space was banned in 2013 as the perceived cornerstone of a particular abusive deck.  In the most extreme version, The "Borg 12-space deck" would seed 12 copies of the universal mission Space, leaving the opponent nowhere to seed their dilemmas.  It would then build a Borg Outpost at one of these, and use Harness Particle 010 there, which targets the event on the facility, rather than the mission.  (Borg objectives which target missions tend to say something about their point box.). The Borg player then got to scout the mission, which had no dilemmas since it was not attemptible, and get to victory with no real obstacles.  

Before the Errata Team could find a solution for the card, the Rules Team solved that particular problematic interaction with a rule change, stating that you cannot scout a mission that has no point box.  At that point, the Errata Team might have simply unbanned Space, since the original problem no longer existed.  But one of our players found a less extreme scenario which was also a problem.  He described a Borg deck using Space x8 to interfere with the opponent's RANGE on a grand scale.  The Borg would use Transwarp Network Gateways and Transwarp Conduits to get around faster, and assimilate the opponent while they were stuck in the high-range Space regions.  That left room for one planet mission and one space mission which the Borg deck could actually target (and the right two objectives are sufficient to get this to 100 points), and while those would collect all the dilemmas, the Borg (with their vaunted dilemma-busting capability) had more time to do so with the opponent hampered by RANGE and/or assimilation.  There was much discussion about how best to adjust the card to address situations like this as well, and several different attempts were sent for playtesting over the years.  In the end, we decided to keep the fun flavor of "Counts as 1/2 card" as well as inserting it into the spaceline, and simply imposed a limit on copies of the card itself.

Beware of Q has been overpowered and banned thanks to a longstanding quirk of the dilemma timing rules.  Its second function lets you replace a dilemma just after it is "encountered."  This sounds reasonable, until you discover that the time when this happens is after determinations have been made about who the dilemma targets, and whether you have the skills to meet its requirements.  So essentially, you get to see whether your opponent is going to pass the dilemma, and can wait until you know (literally) that they'll pass it, then switch it out for something else.  This technique of "moving the goalposts" amounts to giving your opponent an extra dilemma, not just a replacement.  Now, with the new rules concept of tracking when a dilemma is "revealed", Beware of Q can key off of that, for a similar effect that's not overpowered.  In addition, we've made a small change to the third function, incorporating another new game concept (download and seed) to make that function more usable and interesting. 

In 2006, Decipher released its final First Edition set, The Enterprise Collection.  This set occurred long after All Good Things had closed the book on First Edition templates, but Decipher had introduced in Second Edition, and wanted to open that door to First Edition as well.  But they largely had moved on from First Edition, and from what I've heard, this set was low on playtesting and other quality control.  Revisionist History had two powerful effects which both contribued to its placement on the original OTF Ban List.  The second ability concerned Temporal Rift, and was probably intended as a defense, letting you move an opponent's Temporal Rift off of your critical ship.  But the wording also allowed it to be used offensively, moving it onto your opponent's critical ship.  Now that Temporal Rift itself has received errata, the defensive need for this ability is gone, and today we are removing that text.  The first ability concerns events in general, and has often been paired with Temporal Shifting.  If you have an event in your discard pile (probably from being played earlier), then any card in your hand can become that card, ready to be played again next turn.  Whether you're using Temporal Shifting on your self for draws, or to attack your opponent and make them discard, that's a pretty powerful effect to be guaranteed a repeat each turn.  The Errata Team explored some options, and testing indicated that simply limiting the exchange to thrice per game was a reasonable balance.

When Five of Fourteen was released, he had a special skill letting him Retask in place of a card play.  This wording, slightly different than what had been used before,  turned out to be too ambiguous for some players.  Playing an Interrupt is still playing a card, they argued; can I use his download in place of playing an Interrupt?  Today's errata brings his wording into line with previous cards, stating that it's in place of your normal card play.  Looking around  we also found that the same correction belonged on the early-CC card For the Sisko, so that gets errata as well.

Gegis has long been in the "almost usable" category of cards.  He has an intriguing special skill allowing and holograms to mix ... But when you try to build a deck with this, you notice that his mixing ability does not extend to Ferengi ships, thus limiting your Ferengi/holo partnership to Non-Aligned vehicles.  Today's change of one word rectifies that.

When the Vulcan ship Sh'raan was released, one small error got past the proofreaders.  It has a download of a "Combat-Ready" card, but the Sh'raan left off the hyphen.  The discrepancy was patched by a blue ruling, which can now be taken off the books.

Thanks as always to the people behind the scenes who contributed to this release -- including the Errata, Rules, Playtesting, and Art teams.

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