They'll Assimilate the Enterprise, and then Earth

by Niall Matthew, Assimilated Counterpart

17th November 2014

First Contact is the expansion which changed the Star Trek: Customizable Card Game for the better.

Objectives, Time Locations, new Personnel battle rules, and a new affiliation were just a sample of the new goodies which this expansion introduced.

While relaxing on a beach at Risa surrounded by Orion Slave Girls, Andorians, and naked Ferengi, I got the phone call to do multiple Articles for the 20th Anniversary Collection. One of the cards I snapped up straight away is based my favourite affiliation, the Borg.

The Borg are different to all other affiliations. They do not attempt missions. Instead, they complete Objectives which target Missions, Personnel, and Ships. They have the ability to assimilate the opponent's Personnel and Ships for their own use. They also rely on probing (looking at the top card of the deck) to score points.

Let’s look at my personal favourite card of the set; the U.S.S. Enterprise-E.

Under the control of the collective, this Sovereign class ship has the same attributes as its Federation persona; 10-9-10. This makes the U.S.S. Enterprise-E equal to Locutus Borg Cube on speed and comes packed with a tractor beam and holodeck, handy if you keep facing Emergent Life-form in your playgroup. The staffing requirements are far easier to get than say, a Borg Cube. You just need one navigation subcommand and two defence subcommands and you’re good to go.

There are a couple of very interesting tricks that this assimilated ship can pull off. First, it can report directly to Earth. Very thematic considering it was the ship that almost caused the destruction of humanity. The most curious aspect about this special skill is that it allows the ship to report directly to Montana Missile Complex, or any other Earth based Time Location.

The second part of the special text is a special download of the Borg Queen herself. I believe that in the days of Decipher, there was a policy of not downloading the Queen, probably due to how powerful she is. There is currently only one other card which downloads the Queen, and that card only works if she just died. But now things have changed, and you can now have any of the three personas of the Borg Queen accessible from the first turn.

Another interesting thing to take note of is that the Borg Queen is the matching commander. So you can seed Make it So and have access to any captains order card, like Lower Decks to instantly increase all of your universal drone's attributes by two, or even Captain's Log and Defiant Dedication Plaque to increase the attributes of the ship to 12-12-13, potentially on turn one! Not bad at all.

And best of all, the U.S.S. Enterprise-E is now officially the safest Borg ship to use, as it has a point box of zero. So if the opponent is heading your way with a Kazon fleet, you can feel a bit safer knowing you’re not giving your opponent any points. Be careful though, this ship is not 100% dispensable. Once it is destroyed in battle by the opponent, it still goes into the point area, making it unrecoverable.

How do you use this to your advantage? Downloading such a powerful personnel will, of course, have its disadvantages. When starting the game with the Incident They Will Be Coming, the standard ship to use is a Cube, as it allows your personnel to report directly aboard. However, if you use the Enterprise-E as your starting ship, you only get the reporting function of They Will Be Coming, which is one (and only one) universal drone per turn.

So if you want to make the most of the special download of the U.S.S. Enterprise-E, it’s perhaps best to take a rather unorthodox approach to building a Borg Deck. I have built a Borg Deck based on one of my favourite strategies to use, Stop First Contact, but this deck plays very differently to the other Borg decks that have been played recently. First, start off with They Will be Coming, which allows you to seed the Enterprise-E. Download the Shades of Grey Borg Queen and immediately move to the action phase to use her special skill to download 1 x We Are The Borg into play. This will now give you three end of turn card draws, when combined with New Arrivals. Next, you now return the Enterprise-E to hand via Space-Time Portal. On turn two, you should have at least one Borg Scout Vessel and First Contact Borg Queen in hand, report with crew to the spaceline end which is closest to Earth. The scout drop is immune to the Referee card It’s Only A Game, so you could potentially empty most of your hand by turn two. Now, use whatever drones you get to gain additional card draws. Three of Nine is one of the best for this. This way, you can get A Change Of Plans to download Assimilate Homeworld and Twelve of Thirteen to land your scout ship. I’ve also added Alas, Poor Drone to discard a drone either from hand or in play to draw up to two cards. Once you land your scout ship on Earth, make sure you disembark your personnel and return it to hand via another Space-Time Portal. By now, you will have more personnel in your hand so report them to the same spaceline end and land the ship at Earth again. Once scouting is complete, download Stop First Contact and hopefully complete it on the next turn, erasing any humans, Federation, and Starfleet cards the opponent has in play (keep in mind that it will erase your Borg who are designated as human species, like Seven of Nine, so make sure they’re safe at the Time Location). If for some reason you require another ship at Earth to ferry your Borg reinforcements from the Spaceline end to complete Stop First Contact, you can play the Enterprise-E directly to Earth. Now you just need to complete Establish Gateway on a space mission and use Data of Borg's special download of Resistance is Futile to secure a two Objective win.

I’m sure that this is just a taste of the terror that the U.S.S. Enterprise-E can bring to your Borg strategy (believe me, I’m working on other ways to use the ship.) As most of you know, the Borg are one of my favourite affiliations to play, mainly due to the complexity of how they play. So expect a deck like this to appear in an online tournament near you ;)

So whip out a Sovereign Class ship, hide your humans, hide your mums. The Borg have a new tool to help in their quest to erase the Federation from existence.

NEXT: Enhance your sealed deck experience by adding this card, inspired by the Official Tournament Sealed Deck.

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Decklist

Print Decklist • Copy Deck

This deck is legal in the following Card Pools:

• Complete

This deck is legal in the following Rules Sets:

• Open
• Revised
• Warp Speed

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

• Borg Player
• Good Casting: Armstrong (Two of Nine)
• Good Casting: Spiner (Data of Borg)

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