Introducing Caretaker’s Array of Cards

by Benjamin Rostoker, Caretaker Set Designer

24th September 2021

"Mister Tuvok, while Chakotay and I are looking for Torres and Kim, your job is to find out as much about this array as you can."

-- Janeway (“Caretaker”)

The Continuing Committee and the Department of Second Edition are proud to introduce to our community the next 2E expansion, Caretaker. You'll see this sixty-three (63) card virtual expansion unveiled slowly over the next two week before its release on October 8, 2021 with articles on new cards and decks to inspire you to come up with new gambits and strategies. I'll go in depth into specific cards here, but don't forget to check out our social media channels for additional spoilers.

Meet the Team

At this point, I'd like to introduce the members of the design team for Caretaker:

Daniel “Danny” Giddings, Designer

Designer Profile: Daniel Giddings

Danny has been playing 2E since shortly after Decipher lost the licence, around the time the Continuing Committee took up the mantle. Starting out as a fan, posting to the Dream Cards board, he was given the chance to work with Tyler Fultz and Keith Morris on A Time to Stand. Since then, he’s worked on four more sets, with Caretaker being his fifth.

Benjamin “Gorgo Primus” Rostoker, Designer

Designer Profile: Benjamin Rostoker

Benjamin has been playing 2E since back when Decipher had its very own dedicated browser-based system for online play and is a regular at Online events via Lackey to this day. Caretaker is his very first design credit, having spent about a year tirelessly working alongside Danny to ensure that, even if Voyager isn’t your favourite show, players of all kinds will come away with a set that excites and encourages them to unashamedly call themselves 2E players.

The Focus of Caretaker

This is the last of the Interaction 2020 2021 sets and, as expected, this one is locked in to the last series set in the 24th Century: Star Trek: Voyager. To be more specific, we were mandated to ensure that all of our cards focused on those affiliations (and sub-affiliations) that appeared in the show, including the Borg, the Federation, and the Maquis.

Due to the breadth of content and the manner in which card reveals have been allocated this time around, I’m not going to be able to give you a snapshot of every theme or card subset this expansion touches upon now. But you can trust that a lot of care has been taken (no pun intended) to ensure that pretty much every single Voyager-based affiliation, sub-affiliation, and card group gets significant and meaningful support from this expansion. So, even though we’re bound by the limits of the show, even people with zero interest in Janeway and her polarizing journey should find something in Caretaker worth plugging into their existing decks or inspiring some new ones.

So in that spirit, let’s look at one aspect of Caretaker’s focus on interaction that any affiliation can use: the dilemma pile.

Playing with Dilemma Suites

"You people... you wonderful people... my friends, you do know how to make a man feel better, don't you? Okay, then, what shall we play?"

-- The Clown (“The Thaw”)

In Second Edition, there are a number of dilemmas that belong to what you could call a dilemma suite: dilemmas that for various reasons, either thematic or mechanical, can be seen as belonging to a group meant to be used together, the most well-known of which is probably Chula. Caretaker adds to a few of these. Two of the most striking of these are probably the Species 8472 dilemma suite and the (previously) relatively sparse Clown dilemmas.

The Species 8472 dilemma suite offers one of 2E’s few alternate win conditions if you’re willing to devote a significant chunk of your deck and a large swath of your dilemma pile towards supporting it. At their core, affiliations that opt to pursue an alliance with the mysterious Species 8472 will attempt to sneak eight 8472 dilemmas into their opponent’s core whilst solving (at least) Terrasphere 8. Many (though not all) of the more iconic 8472 dilemmas tend to be defined by offering up players the choice between ‘working’ and giving you a stop or kill on the one hand and actually achieving their real goal of going into the core on the other. In effect, they put the one playing them into the strange and unique position of hoping a dilemma gets ‘passed’ with its counters ‘wasted’ in order for it to slip into a core and forces the one facing it to into the strange and unique position of choosing whether to boost someone in order to ‘fail’ it so that it doesn’t. For example, Charismatic Mimic instructs you to "choose a personnel with 2 Aquistion or a personnel with 2 Diplomacy to be stopped" in order to not go into the core. Those aren’t the most common skills for most personnel to have, and most of the time when it’s played you’re hoping they won’t and it’ll do ‘nothing’ other than go into the core. Conversely, if you are facing it and already have a good number of 8472 dilemmas in your core, you might be tempted to Security Drills someone to 2 Diplomacy and stop them just to hold back the xenomorph onslaught a little while longer.

One of the few new additions to this roster in Caretaker, Race Relations, largely fits into this particular 8472 pattern by asking its player to choose between getting it out early in the stack and being more likely to get passed but end up in a core, or play nearer to the bottom and get a stop but risk not meeting the requirements to join its friends there.

in this thread.