Classification: Civilian Seven Weeks Out

by Ross Fertel, Septem

5th April 2022

Classification: Civilian came out on February 11th. An online release event was held February 28^th running through March, giving us a bunch of decks to look at featuring these cards.

Being fair, some of the decks should already be familiar to you. Maggie Geppert's Casualties of the Occupation was part of the initial slate of articles for the set while Benjamin Liebich's PAXI LEXI FIXI already made an appearance in this series.

Another not entirely new deck comes courtesy of Christopher Jansa who updated a deck called Thieves into one called Thieves v1.1. It was originally created before Classification: Civilian came out but adds in three copies of Pillar of the Community and takes out some other cards to fine tune the deck. Leaning into thieves, this deck has a lot of tried and true tricks that they have had at their disposal, particularly some Crimes.

We've seen Sim, Sacrificial Lamb in this series before but it makes another appearance in a deck here. Markus Eberlein brought him in calling shotgun, a Starfleet deck that leans into a fight with a few Artifacts to help secure victory or simply make the aftereffects even sweeter. There are not a lot of Starfleet affiliated personnel but there are enough to justify his presence. He won't be alone as he has Christopher Pike, Prospective Orion Trader along to help gain a needed skill in a pinch.

An even newer decktype for Starfleet comes with Critical Space Theory 101 courtesy of Brian Sykes. This Starfleet Dissident deck has a lot of redundancies to it. As such, Elias Geiger, Cellular Entertainer is around to help you get through it a bit easier. There is also a Thief subtheme to this deck and as such, Christopher Pike, Prospective Orion Trader makes another appearance.

Pillar of the Community, the most popular card in the set, makes a couple of appearances with this tournament. The first is in Adam Bargar's Wheel of Fortune. We've seen decks lean into one or two keywords on this card but with this deck, there are no more than seven of any one of those keywords and the next highest is four! Based around Tongo: Confront, this deck will show there are more ways to play with a very flexible card.

Michael Van Breemen certainly leaned into some fancy tricks with his Pillar for Achievements. There are a lot of cards you would not expect to see such as Artifacts along with some interesting recycling tricks including Torman V, Conduct "Legitimate" Commerce and Hyralan Sector, Raid Flagship missions with Artifacts along with Orb of Prophecy and Change, Bustling with Activity, and the Fortune with the Personnel.

One thing that was very obvious when looking at Third of Five, Wayward Drone and the Scout Drone was how much easier Expand the Collective is to pull off. If you want to try it out, Alexander Schmitz has a deck for you aptly titled Expanding the Collective. As you would expect with that strategy, Distant Exploration is in the picture, though those two cards are not entirely necessary. If you are itching to try these cards out, this might be a good starting point.

A less obvious path for those two Borg-Affiliated cards is in Julius Melhardt's Population 9 Billion for Civilian Release. As the title implies, this deck leans more into the Borg Forty or More side of things and has a lot of trapping of that deck focusing more on the mission completion strategy. One of the complaints levied against Population 9 Billion – All Borg is the high cost of that event. You have some insurance with Third of Five, Wayward Drone.

To Serve the Empire is still being debated as to the effectiveness, but that didn't stop Sebastian Kirstein with The Saxonian Oeverkill. With a draw deck of over one hundred fifty cards, overkill seems like the right word. Less than half the deck is Personnel and of those, only eleven do not have a staffing icon. Still, it is good to have an insurance policy if you get the Rakal Shuffle with your deck, especially in a battle deck where speed is not always essential, but you have to keep pace with your opponent at some point.

Looking at the dilemmas, Occasional Emergency remains a card that depends on the rest of your dilemma pile, but Morphogenic Virus is in over half of the decks, putting it right up there with Pillar of the Community in terms of popularity.

This was the first online event and the one with the greatest participation since the release of Classification: Civilian. The decks joined the trends of what we are seeing with the release along with some new ones added to the mix.

Discuss this article in this thread.