[Fritzinger]

Will everyone be trying battle? Will the people who don't like battle ignore the set? Or will they immediately add the counters to their solvers? Will the battle players try to add counters to the counters immediately, or will they wait until their opponents actually start using them?

What about code of the ushaan, will everyone pack away their AWC? Or will it take a bunch of tournament winners stocking it to make you take it seriously?

[Naetor]

I'm not convinced battle will be pervasive once the meta restabilizes. I think, with the influx of defensive battle cards into non-battle decks eg All Available Personnel + Power to the Shields, there's a possibility that battle might even be a less common winning strategy. One way to catch up with battle is to go slaughter the other's while you are building up a crew. Well Defend It and Hope really means that approach will not work for a large proportion of the game - only when you are losing but have solved a mission, and everyone will be running 3x that because the order is broken. In the end, battle players are going to have to rely more heavily on interrupt counters to execute their strategy: Dreamer, Swashbuckler, Grav trap, etc. There is reasonable expectation that the pro-battle cards in the set will improve existing battle decks and create new ones that are competitive with the cheesiest decks out there. But that's speculation. I haven't seen a decklist - at least one that isn't just repackaging the cheese.

Code of Ushaan is a meta-defining card, but it's about 2 years too late. The top meta decks are Cardassian cheese w/ or w/o KCA, Relativity, and weenies. None of those are really affected- maybe the remnants of Jaeger Bomb. Borg should be able to adapt to it. They have ways to generate event destruction and your opponent always has to play and draw it. Cardassians have pretty much supplanted big Romulan as thee attribute boosting-stop preventing affiliation, who would struggle to keep this event off the table. Not sure about Ferengi, never played them.

[Fritzinger]

I'm not sure I see power to the shields being an auto include unless battle is a really big thing, you have to draw AAP and how many awesome non unique officer personnel are there? Greer, or Jasad would be my picks, I'm not seeing much for other affiliations.

[Fritzinger]

To answer this for my own group, I only see one or two other players building their own decks, say if there is something awesome out of Texas this weekend some might netdeck. I am likely to try roll my own for the next time we play. Maybe I'll bring the counters along for other people to add in to their existing builds.