No Hand Luke

by Paddy Tye, Hand of the Praetor and Warden of the Neutral Zone

31st March 2020

Back in late 2016, The Terran Empire released. At the time, I mainly focused on throwing those Mirror personnel into normal Starfleet decks using Crossover. I saw a lot of other players doing the same. Playing just in the Mirror Quadrant had big drawbacks – mainly the need for an extra 40 points – so I never really tried to use the Imperial Starfleet mechanic of “no hand”. I think it was the same for many players – if you compare the number of decks using mirror Starfleet personnel like Commander T’Pol with decks using key no-hand cards like Tyranny, you can see for yourself. But that closes off a lot of fun cards which key-off that mechanic!

Then in 2018, we got The Gift of Homestead – which enabled 100 point win entirely in the Mirror Quadrant – if we only used smaller point missions (to be fair, Mirror Quadrant missions were never particularly high scoring anyway). At this point, I finally I started to consider using Imperial Starfleet. But ultimately I found emptying that initial 7-card hand just too slow. Instead I focused on “mixed Terran Empire” using a mixture of Enterprise, Original Series and Deep Space Nine personnel.

I hadn’t been alone in that frustration, so myself and another player (Alan French, adf8) brainstormed the issues Imperial Starfleet had:

1) Easy ship access – Alpha Quadrant Starfleet has Maxwell Forrest to grab a ship – for free. The best equivalent in the Mirror Quadrant is downloading a universal ship in place of your card play or using Tyranny to get a ship into hand.

2) Emptying the hand – even with Radiation Monitoring to fuel discards, because of that “(limit +3)” it can still take 2 turns to achieve that empty hand.

3) Unless you can kick off your objectives like Asset Authority early on, Watch Dog generally only gives you one card to start each turn with – your end of turn draw. Tyranny does let you download a personnel to hand, which can then fuel another card draw with Finally Ready to Swim, but only once you’ve emptied your hand.

4) Countdown management – Tyranny and other countdown based events constantly counting down means a lot of factors to monitor each turn. While Tyranny can download an Alternate Universe event (ie a copy of itself) instead of a personnel, allowing you to grab a replacement copy every third turn, that does mean no personnel download to hand, requires you to stock multiple copies in the deck, and is another complexity of the deck you need to constantly monitor.

5) No easy access to “Regenerate” style functionality – as you can’t keep a Regenerate in your hand for when you need it, and you are discarding cards to keep that hand empty, you need a way to cycle those back into the deck.

Alan initially proposed a cycling function to get cards out of the hand and fuel cards going under Watch Dog – which ticked two of the boxes. We also added a “side effect” from that cycling to also delay the countdown on one card each turn, and added a ship download (provided you weren’t stacking mirror functions and using Halkan Council). Note that an uncontrolled ship is not “yours” so not one you have in play Starship Defiant fans! This eventually became Long Live the Empire! The only major change was that we adapted the cycling to being a full discard (previously it had placed cards under deck) as discarding fit the more aggressive theme of the Mirror Quadrant better. It also fuelled the need for our second card...

Ensign Tamara adds additional depth to the skills, attributes and gender of available to Imperial Starfleet – with high INTEGRITY, high CUNNING, ENGINEER, Biology, Navigation, Transporter Skill and Anthropology! But her special download is the real star prize! Now, if you’ve depleted your draw deck and been unlucky with timing for drawing into Regenerate from your deck, you can grab a Regenerate straight from your deck or Q’s Tent instead!

Hopefully these new cards will encourage you all to give Imperial Starfleet and the No-Hand mechanics a go!

Discuss this article in this thread.