Premiere Remastered releases today and is tournament legal Friday, January 31, 2025! With it, there are a lot of personnel who are considered classic to the game who are still popular to this day, decades after their debut. Mains like Duras, Sela and Alyssa Ogawa. Solid personnel such as Richard Galen, Koroth and Baran. Mission Specialists like Christopher Hobson and Darian Wallace.
And Mot the Barber.
One of dozens of mission specialists in the first set, there was no use for his skill, at least none that could be found on a mission, and the attributes were not that great. Nonetheless, his popularity persisted, to the point where Decipher wrote a Card Extra about his usefulness. With some annotations, here is that Card Extra written by Kathy McCracken.
Since 1994, players have wondered what the quintessential barber Mot (and his skill of Barbering) was good for, other than snappy conversation and the occasional redshirting assignment. Alternate Universe's Frame of Mind dilemma revealed one piece of the puzzle: if you don't want to give your opponent's personnel a skill that he might be able to use, what better skill than Barbering--and if it were not for Mot, that skill wouldn't exist in the game.
In the time since this was published, there were more skills to give a personnel with Frame of Mind such as the Intelligence skills, including Memory Omega, created by the Committee. Those skills do have a use, gaining in usage as time passed. By the time they hit Frame of Mind, you know what skills to give, and Barbering is a good one to have in your back pocket, along with Cantankerous, though you will want to make sure Reunion is not on the table first..
The second piece appeared in Q-Continuum: Terraforming Station lets you change a mission's requirements for your next game with the same opponent. Switch a mundane requirement of Computer Skill to Barbering, and suddenly Mot can actually help solve a mission!
This combo has only gotten better with time. There remains one and only one personnel with Barbering. Missions stealing is something you need to be careful of, but with Barbering, there is an extra layer to make sure no one waltzes over and takes the mission, no matter what the point value.
But the Bolian barber's true value didn't come to light until First Contact, when we discovered that he is a mission specialist. Now he can not only be downloaded to your outpost (during the seed phase if you're in urgent need of a barber), but can even score an extra 5 points when he helps solve that Terraformed mission. Perhaps more important, he's a downloadable CIVILIAN, with a skill that you wouldn't mind losing in lieu of something more useful.
If you have a very tightly skilled deck, this is not a bad strategy to use Mot as a redshirt and get a peek at a dilemma before you forge ahead with your carefully curated away team.
Combos:
Mot the Barber + Reflection Therapy + Assign Mission Specialists: No mission specialist available with the skill you want to score 5 points for? A customized Mot is the perfect answer. And you can always "cure" his case of Astrophysics and give him more Therapy to make him think he's a Geology specialist.
With the changes to Assign Mission Specialists, having flexibility with the skill your mission specialist has become more potent. This combination is primarily unused, but you can save yourself a card play and use a personnel who has a skill useful for your missions.
Mot the Barber + Colony: 2 points per turn adds up and can be well worth an early download.
Maybe not the best use of a download, but getting a start on nabbing points is always good. With the shorter games in terms of turns that we have today, you can still get a good beginning before things get fully underway. Note that the points are scored at the start of your turn so you can still play around with Mot a bit before coming home. Also, Colony got a bit of a nerf errata so you will only get one pint a turn.
While not totally erasing the legacy of being a joke, there are some tricks you can pull off with the first Bolian in the game. Thanks to Kathy McCracken for showing us some cooler tricks that remain true even thirty years later.
Premiere Remastered releases today and is tournament legal next Friday, January 31, 2025! Thanks to the First Editon Staff specifically the Rules team which labored over this set, particularly the most recent months and the Art Team who matched images for hundreds of existing cards. We would also thank the Balance, Creative, Proofreading and Programming for getting these cards out to you.
Discuss this article in this thread.
Back to Archive index