The Alternate(s)

by Benjamin Liebich, The Menagerie Submitter

13th July 2022

The basic idea for the personnel in this article originated way back during the Will of the Collective that produced Shelley. I had gotten quite involved in that project as I was pushing for an AU TNG personnel from the beginning. Up to that point, I had been playing around with AU TNG decks for a while, but the theme was lacking and I felt it needed support. Unfortunately, I felt the Will of the Collective derailed a bit in the closing stages and it yielded a card that I thought could have been improved.

That experience, however, sparked an idea to sit down and think about what sort of support I'd like for the AU TNG theme to make it a stand-alone alternative to other TNG builds. Since all except one of the AU TNG cards available up to that point came from "Yesterday's Enterprise," I started looking at the one card that didn't come from that episode for inspiration.

Worf (First Officer), from the episode "Parallels," came with the ability to swap out personnel, thematically based on his jumping between realities in the show. I thought of this as an intriguing concept that could be explored further. The different realities in the episode also provided the possibility to introduce alternate versions of some of the TNG cast that had previously been underutilized in the game.

After a while, I ended up with a file of nine cards. Personnel as well as ships and missions all from "Parallels." I envisioned a boutique set, but soon after came the call for community members to send in ideas for a community set, so I took that chance.

Of the nine cards I had originally pitched, I'm very happy that the following three eventually made it into the set:

Alyssa Ogawa (Chief Medical Officer)

As one of the main supporting characters in the show, it seemed a shame that the game only includes one version so far. It seemed a no-brainer to introduce another version of Ogawa.

Sticking with the swapping-out theme from Worf, Alyssa also allows you to switch personnel, but from your discard pile instead of your hand. This somewhat mitigates the high cost of both her and Worf's ability. Yes, you have to discard two cards every time you want to use those abilities, but now there's a chance to actively utilize at least some of those discards.

Not to mention, such a deck could make good use of recycling cards such as Tacking Into the Wind or Back to Basics, like so many others that have similarly high costs.

Andro

A Fed Cardassian? Yes please. One of the major issues with TNG Feds has always been that they get stopped fairly easy by a lot of commonly used dilemmas (An Issue of Trust, Moral Choice, etc.). So the idea behind Andro was to mitigate that by unstopping rather than preventing the stop while facing the dilemma.

In the usual Cardassian manner, Andro discards cards from the top of your deck to use his ability, which allows you to continue the swapping theme, replacing him with two of your previously stopped AU TNG personnel. Andro himself ends up replacing the discards with himself, ready to be drawn (or perhaps Quantum Incursion-ed) back the next turn to work again. And while it's possible to unstop an entire six-personnel crew in one turn, you would, in an interesting twist, have to sacrifice two of those copies to the discard pile. Perhaps Alyssa could assure his safe return.

Deanna Troi (Par'Mach'kai)

Similar to Alyssa, there aren't as many versions of Deanna as there are of the other TNG main crew. Only Wesley and Tasha have less and then only by one version. And they didn't even make it through the series!

Deanna's ability of having an AU TNG personnel gain a skill of your choice is reliant on you commanding and subsequently destroying a copy of Quantum Incursions, a card that doesn't see a lot of play but is generally useful in AU decks. Deanna should not only encourage you to use it but to bring multiple copies, like a Confessions in the Pale Moonlight that acts as hand extension as well, just in case you need that one skill you're missing. After all, another weakness in TNG Feds includes some obvious skill holes.

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