2019 World Championship winner Peter Ludwig (martok88)
Deck Title: Anthony Molest (Peter's deck is also attached to this article below.)
Deck Archetype: Interference
Play Engines: Seat of Starfleet, IDIC: Wisdom of Surak, Protect the Timeline
Draw Engines: Finally Ready to Swim, Temporal Shiting, Study Divergent History
Bonus Point Mechanics: Assign Mission Specialists, Phoenix, Cetacean Institute/George and Gracie
Dilemma Strategy: Killers and Walls

Peter's Commentary:
Why did you choose the deck that you used? What other decks did you consider using?
From what I have seen at Kaiserfest and also in day 1, TOS is the strongest solver deck at the moment and I was estimating to face about 2 TOS decks on day 2 (which turned out to be right). TOS does not have many weak spots, but at least I knew many versions of TOS don't use Q the Ref and have no landed ships, which meant choosing a Barclay's Transporter Phobia (BTP) deck might give me an edge. I also considered trying a space-time-portal drop deck, able to produce a huge amount of people on turn 2, but the version I brought had already lost to Stefan Slaby (Winner of Borg) in Biermeister the day before, so I decided against it.

What factors went into the decision to play Bajoran on Day 1 versus on Day 2?
The Bajoran deck I played on day 1 is a real one hit wonder. It tricks the opponent into triggering Defend Homeworld at Bajor to download about 80 people and 35 ships. This only works against unprepared opponents though, and only once. On day 1, this worked well, because there were a lot of players and the odds of facing players who already knew the deck were reasonably low (only ended up facing Johannes Klarhauser {Kaiser} who played around it perfectly). On day 2, I knew at least 4 people were just going to play around it, so I had to change the deck for sure.

What sorts of decks were you hoping to face while playing your deck? What decks did you hope not to face?
Since the most important part of my deck were all the BTPs, I was only really afraid of landed ships to avoid beaming and maybe a 6 space mission deck. Some versions of Borg might also have been problematic. Anything else was actually fine, even most battle decks, since I only ever emerged on the spaceline when I needed to, to attempt missions, the rest of the game I was hiding at the various time locations.

Prior to this tournament, did you have much experience playing this deck (or decks like it)? Did you learn anything new about it when you played it this time?
I tried a very similar deck at Kaiserfest. Didn't work at all! I think the problem was that I used too many BTPs, so I didn't get enough people out, thus could only solve one mission per game on average, which is not enough for a timed win (I tied two times). Also, Jorn Engstrom (admiral-mogh), with a fast Borg deck, didn't have any trouble against the BTPs, because he only needed to get a single guy beamed to a planet to scout.

Did you use any situational cards (cards that you wouldn't expect to be useful in every game)? Are there any whose usefulness exceeded your expectations? Were there any that you wouldn't include if you played the deck again?
I included Cetacean Institute in the draw deck for an extra "surprise" 15 points if needed. This actually saved me against Slaby. I can also recommend Disruptor Overload in the current meta. Works great against those annoying Classic Communicators and, if needed, Genesis Devices. The card that underperformed most was Launch Bay. I never even used a single shuttle in 3 games, just because their range is too low to hop between time locations. Maybe it can be replaced by 2-3 copies of Renewed Spirit in the draw deck (in case of Garbage Scows).

What was your toughest matchup of the Day 2 bracket?
All 3 games were really close and came down to single decisions and random selections. Any one of my opponents would have deserved a win. But if I had to choose, the final against Kaiser was the toughest. After recent performances of his (e.g. day 1 and Kaiserfest), he clearly had the momentum of a runaway freight train and I knew what I was up against. I got really lucky, for example, if I hadn't chosen the mission with 3 of his misseeds first, he surely would have won. If one BTP had hit another guy, he would have won. After the exhausting semifinals, I was just glad the title was coming home to Munich, no matter which of us the random selections in the final would decide on in the end.

How much work went into balancing the copies of Barclay's Transporter Phobia?
Thanks to Lackey, generating lots of test draws is super fast, so the balance was found quickly. The more important decision was to either go full molestation with only about 2 personnel a turn and even more BTP (as I tried at Kaiserfest and failed), or to go like I did with 3 personnel a turn and some fewer BTPs. I decided that I needed the 3 personnel a turn to be able to spit out enough skills to solve 2 missions to secure timed wins.

What would you nominate as the MVP card from your deck?
Three things go into producing a reliable timed win: (1) slowing down the opponent to prevent full wins, (2) making sure you have more points than the opponent, and (3) staying sober enough to not screw up too much. (1) was done by BTP, (2) was secured by The Genesis Device in all 3 matches. And the non-card MVP for my deck (3) is my boy Gunther van Herschey, who refused to bring me beer during the quarter- and semifinals to keep me sober(ish) - that probably pushed me through to the final.

Do you have anything else you'd like to say about your deck?
Firstly, I would like to thank Michael Van Breemen (The Ninja Scot) for waiting on me before we could start the quarterfinals - I actually forgot part of my deck at our AirBnB. I never ran so fast in my life... As was pointed out by MVB in the first match of Day 2, I made a huge mistake. I forgot to seed a doorway that allows me to play more than one card per turn. It seems last minute alterations to the deck in the morning are not always a great idea. This means that I had to use that for Temporal Shifting every single turn in all 3 matches and could not play a single Temporal Almanac. I ended up using the Almanacs to put them under the deck when time travelling, so they weren't completely useless, but still, that cost me a card draw every single turn, which reduced the number of available BTP per turn. Another thing that actually worked really well was the 6 planet strategy. Basically I had Access Archives and Genesis Planet in there only as decoys to suck up dilemmas, to allow me to solve Qu'Vat in peace. This worked nicely in all 3 games.

Last but not least, a huge thanks to the organizers, especially Julius Melhardt (Clerasil ToB), who pulled off the best STCCG event I've seen so far.