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Strategy Articles
Beginner Deck: Enterprise
by Lucas Thompson, Ambassador
21st February 2020
"We are all explorers, driven to know what's over the horizon, what's beyond our own shores." There's a big galaxy out there, and Earth's fledgling Starfleet is eager to explore it. As Starfleet characters earn new experiences (represented by dilemmas beneath their missions) they learn and adapt.
Accumulated Knowledge is a powerful eight cost event that gets cheaper as you overcome dilemmas. It'll be tough to play early on, but in the mid to late game, you'll be able to use it more reliably to punch through dilemmas. Likewise, Jonathan Archer and T'Pol both have powerful abilities that are only active when you have dilemmas beneath your missions.
The dilemma pile, while largely identical to other beginner dilemma piles, contains one dilemma that is specific to this deck. Timescape is often tough for a new player to parse; at first glance, it looks like it stops the mission attempt without going beneath the mission at zero cost. What it actually does is prevent subsequent mission attempts at the same mission that turn. That's very powerful in the mid to late game, when your opponent might be able to build two or more decent size crews that could try to topple missions one after another.
Once you're comfortable with this deck, you might want to personalize it. It is based on the deck that I used to take first place in day one of the 2017 World Championships. You may take inspiration from that deck list, or consider these cards:
A Sight for Sore Eyes
- A Sight for Sore Eyes, if drawn early enough, can be used to earn some temporary points before you solve a mission. Those points are generally used on At What Cost?, giving a huge speed boost. Even if you don't get A Sight early enough, as long as you complete the first space mission of the game, the Starfleet Headquarters will give you 10 points that can also be used on At What Cost?.
Into the Delphic Expanse
- There are some powerful versions of the Enterprise crew that get special bonuses at Delphic Expanse missions. Popular Delphic expansion missions to include are Sphere 41 and Investigate Anachronism. Unfortunately, there isn't a space Delphic mission with a Starfleet icon, so Accumulated Knowledge gets much harder to use.
Event and Interrupt Prevention
- Even just using two Delphic missions makes Trellium-D cost zero, at which point it becomes an efficient deck-cycling card. It is popular to use as fuel for the versatile event and interrupt destroyer Grav-Plating Trap - between that card and Lustful Distraction, you can keep your opponent's "verb" cards (events and interrupts) on lock-down for a long time.
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:
- Starfleet Player
- Unbroken I
- How About a New Mission, Admiral? I
- Crew Quarters: Enterprise
- Good Casting: Armstrong (Maxwell Forrest)
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