Beginner Deck: Borg

by Lucas Thompson, Ambassador

21st February 2020

Resistance Is Futile. The Borg Collective is faceless, impersonal, and will use your own resources against you. This is the most aggressive beginner deck, with cards allow you to take your opponent's personnel, and use them to complete your missions.

It is also the most complicated of the beginner decks by far. Figuring out the balance between interfering with your opponent and completing your own missions is a tricky skill to pick up; if you have an experienced player to play against, I'd recommend giving this deck to them. This deck would be good for someone doing demos to new players, so that you, as the demonstrator, can show how some of the more complicated parts of the game work without the brand new player needing to internalize them yet.

But, if you're still excited about playing this deck, and don't have an experienced player around to show you the ropes, here's how it goes. Use The Will of the Collective to start battles (an engagement is a ship battle, combat is a personnel battle) and take command of your opponent's personnel (if Changed History is in play, you may get more). You can also use Abduction if you've flown a couple Borg Security personnel over to a planet mission where an opponent has personnel that got stopped last turn; then, if you still outnumber them, you can use your unstopped personnel to fight afterwards.

Once you have their personnel, use them to complete your missions. Knowledge and Experience is perhaps the strongest anti-dilemma interrupt in the game, but you need points and assimilated personnel to use it. The Borg Queen prevents all of your assimilated personnel from being stopped; if she and an assimilated copy of Jean-Luc Picard are selected by Intimidation, only the Queen will get stopped.

The dilemma pile also diverges significantly from the other decks. This deck aims to misbehave, and so does the dilemma pile. In order to supplement the deck's goal of assimilating personnel, the dilemma pile is more focused on killing than stopping. As a result, the pile, like the draw deck, is also more complicated. While with the standard beginner pile, you would aim to stop as many as possible with a few dilemmas going under as possible, with this pile you're more incentivized to kill as many as possible with less regard to the number of dilemmas that are being overcome.

Traditional Borg assimilation deck designs are among the most complicated decks in the game, so this beginner deck does not strongly resemble any of them. Kevin Jaeger won the 2017 North American Continental Championships with a great Borg Assimilation deck - if this deck type is for you, I strongly recommend checking that one out. If you're more interested in adapting this deck, here are some suggestions:

One With the Borg
- Like assimilating? Do more of it! One With the Borg provides bonus points for harvesting your opponents personnel, which you can use on more copies of Knowledge and Experience or Reborn. And, now that you have all these extra personnel, try a few more copies of Unrelenting.

Wolf 359
- There are some great Borg alpha quadrant missions, like Wolf 359. The Observation Drone gives you an incentive to complete those missions, and has three of the four skills for Salvage Borg Ship. And, if you switch all your missions to alpha quadrant ones, Annexation Drone will give you easy points.

General Use Cards
- Some cards can just go in any deck - and often do because they're so useful. You have plenty of ways to get extra resources in your deck, but an extra counter per turn from Surprise Party wouldn't go amiss. And once you've played a few games, you'll see how the reboot from Unexpected Difficulties can be game-changing. Alvera Tree Ritual is subtler - you basically play it for free, and not only does it protect you from any dilemma pile manipulation, but it can also be used offensively. If you keep track of which dilemmas you don't use, you can proactively use the Ritual to shuffle your dilemma pile at opportune times.

Discuss this article in this thread.

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

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

Decklist

Hide Deck Stats

Dilemma Deck Total Dilemmas 30 Space 5 (17%) Cost 2 4 Cost 3 1 Planet 5 (17%) Cost 2 3 Cost 3 1 Cost 4 1 Dual 20 (67%) Cost 0 1 Cost 2 7 Cost 3 6 Cost 4 4 Cost 6 2 Total Dilemma Deck cost 84

Draw Deck Total Draw Deck 35 Event 5 (14%) Cost 1 1 Cost 2 1 Cost 3 3 Interrupt 2 (6%) Personnel 23 (66%) Cost 1 1 Cost 2 11 Cost 3 10 Cost 4 1 Ship 5 (14%) Cost 6 3 Cost 7 2 Total Draw Deck cost 101

Skills Count Skill # Missions # Personnel 1x 2x 3x Total Acquisition 0 0 Anthropology 0 4 4 Archaeology 0 3 3 Astrometrics 0 3 3 Biology 0 5 5 Diplomacy 1 1 1 Engineer 0 3 3 Exobiology 2 8 8 Geology 0 1 1 Honor 1 1 1 Intelligence 0 0 Law 0 0 Leadership 1 1 1 2 Medical 0 0 Navigation 2 6 1 7 Officer 0 2 2 Physics 0 1 1 Programming 1 7 7 Science 1 7 7 Security 3 12 12 Telepathy 0 0 Transporters 1 8 8 Treachery 0 1 1 2 Icons Count Icon # Personnel % Personnel Staffing Icons Command Star 2 8.70 % Staff Star 21 91.30 % Keyword Count Keyword # Cards Assault 3 Commander: Locutus' Borg Cube 1 Commander: Queen's Borg Cube 1 Consume: 1 2 Drone 21 Interlink: a skill on your non-[Bor] personnel present 1 Maneuver 3 Temporal 1