My other options would have been Battle Borg and Bajoran/Cardassian Earring Genesis, two decks I played in side events in Vienna. Both decks were missing cards, though, so borrowing one of Peter's decks spared me the tedious deck(re)building process. Not a bad thing, considering what my head felt like after the Friday Night Fun.

What sorts of decks were you hoping to face while playing your deck? What decks did you hope not to face?
After looking at what Peter gave me, I hoped to play against decks that don't run Temporal Micro-Wormhole to counter my big report-with-crew on turn 2, and Computer Crashes to limit TOS downloading in critical moments.

I wasn't particularly concerned about any specific decks, more about players that can deduce what the deck does and seed efficiently against me. Therefore I assumed the game against the deck's creator would be an uphill battle, no matter what he himself chose to play.

Prior to this tournament, did you have much experience playing this deck (or decks like it)? Did you learn anything new about it when you played it this time?
This particular deck I had only seen in a test game Peter and I played at my place a couple of weeks before Worlds. I got steamrolled by it then, and it was four months earlier, so I couldn't remember the details, but I was fairly familiar with the abilities and skill combinations on the personnel, so I had a reasonable idea of whether it was worth triggering a particular download, for example. Only over the course of the tournament, in particular when I shuffled the cards for the next round, did I discover certain options (e.g., using Transporter Mixup for additional AMS points, etc.)

Did you use any situational cards (cards that you wouldn't expect to be useful in every game)? Are there any whose usefulness exceeded your expectations? Were there any that you wouldn't include if you played the deck again?
Stone Knives and Bearskins is very situational and was never played in my games. I don't know if it would have made a difference in a matchup against Niall's slicing and shooting Jemmies.

Motion Picture McCoy seems an odd card to run in TOS when there's a dilemma-nullifying version around, but downloaded on turn 1 by Reunite Legends > Enterprise-A, his ability is a huge help to set up a massive turn 2 report-with-crew (you use him to take the two personnel you discarded with Temporal Shifting as your card plays on turns 1 and 2 back to increase your hand size).

Looking at the deck now, I would probably only replace the Future Enterprise with the Starship Enterprise for an extra download. The ratio of personnel/ships/draws seemed great the way it is.

What was your toughest matchup of the day?
No easy games. Alex's Romulans would have destroyed my ship with 9 guys on turn 2 if I hadn't eventually spotted the Shields +2 text on Reap All The Glory when I was already placing the cards in my discard pile, and the game would have been very different then. Huge respect and thanks to Alex here for always being a gentleman in such situations, he actually asked me to double-check if his Weapons could really beat my Shields.

Game 2 against Mike had me do 3 missions no thanks to an Edo Probe, but my dilemmas held the line here.

Game 4 against Steve was tough because after a great headstart with a reasonably early 55 points in the MQ, I lost my main crew of 8 or 9 guys to a MLI/Plague Ship in the AQ, and needed several turns to rebuild a crew that could get through the two remaining dilemmas. Chula: The Game was the winner for me here.

The game against Peter was probably the toughest, and the strangest in a while. I don't want to give away too many details of Peter's deck, but seeing how he had almost no seeded draw engines, I took a gamble and played Temporal Shifting on him, reducing his hand to two cards. Of course, that meant I forfeited my much-needed draws, too. We had a very weird first six or seven turns of playing one, drawing one (or none! there were reasons to keep your hand size very, very small at certain points), during which I hoped my Study Divergent History draws would allow me to get into gear again earlier - but I couldn't get out a second Alpha Quadrant personnel for the second draw, so it was a real drag. In the end, we recovered at more or the less the same time. Incentive-Based Economics was very valuable here, and Linguistic Legerdemain was the winning dilemma for me that gave me the Mod Win.

Did you reliably score points from Off-Zel Vase? How about Tantalus Field, how many people did you kill?
Off-Zel Vase was acquired successfully in every game. Tantalus Field was used a grand total of zero times, as the ISS Enterprise had no way of leaving the mirror quadrant (but I suppose the artifact could have helped to defend against decks that came to the MQ looking for a fight).

There's been a lot of talk in various circles about the power of decks, in particular because of their abundance of downloads. Do you think that cards, or [DL] in general, should be looked at?
, yes. [DL] in general, not necessarily, no. The card selection seems very strong and versatile even without any downloads. Their ships are easy to staff. They have personnel that nullify entire groups of dilemmas: MEDICAL with Dr. McCoy; female-related with Uhura; even [1E-AU] with Guinan, who is reasonably easy to get into play for TOS. All three of these abilities can be used multiple times per game without any cost. To add to that, they have a cheat-out-of-a-dilemma card in Nilz Baris.

And of course with their various download resources on ships and personnel (especially multiple options of personnel that download the same superstrong and flexible equipment), it is not unusual to bully through skill-based dilemmas on the first attempt. I find this especially problematic in decks using General Order 7 and The Final Frontier, as those cards allow you targeted access to a very good skill spread (including the dial-a-skill on Vina) and therefore provide the flexibility to have several unused downloads ready for use on your first attempt.

Computer Crash and Containment Field can only control this madness to a limited extent.

What would you nominate as the MVP card from your deck?
The Multidimensional Transport Device provides the movement control the deck hinges around to beam directly to whichever of your AQ missions you seeded your Vase at, so I'd have to name that.

Do you have anything else you'd like to say about your deck?
Big thanks to Peter and Paddy for a great deck, and yet another fantastic event. Also, it was nice to see three guys sporting our mWo shirt in the top 3 spots.