[Faithful Reader]

It's Wednesday! We're more than halfway through the week. Since we are over the hump, let's look at a question!

Last Week: A Saga for the Ages
9-20-23 When Will You Ferengi?
9-13-23 Pick a Promo Feedback
9-6-23 What Card Rules
8-29-23 My Kingdom for a Ship
8-22-23 Legends of Lorcana
8-16-23 Give Tholia a Hand
8-9-23 Bid For Your First Turn
8-2-23 Made to be Broken
7-26-23 Conjunction Junction
7-19-23 On Second Thought
7-12-23 A Mission You Reckon
7-5-23 If at First You Don't Succed ...
6-28-23 Second Page of Second Chances: First Blood
6-21-23 No Time To Die
6-14-23 Millennium Falcon
6-7-23 Unification III
5-31-23 Your Own Second Chances Story
5-24/23 New Affiliation? None of the Above!
5-17-23 Even Newer Than New
5-10-23 First Play Out of the Gate
5-3-23 Picard at His Best
4-26-23 A Pointed Discussion
4-19-23 Egomaniacal Artifacts
4-12-23 Give me a hand: Georgia Masters 2023
4-5-23 Stronger than Strongest of the Strong
3-29-23 GoFORever
3-22-23 Play Twenty Cards
3-15-23 aGarak
3-8-23 Rummage Sale!
3-1-23 Judge, Jury, Hall of Famer 2023
2-22-23 Gone Izing
2-15-23 Trading Cards: Timeless/Nemesis
2-8-23 Algebra!
2-1-23 What we Fifties Behind
1-25-23 Back to the Fifties
1-18-23 Pick a Promo: Story Voting
1-11-23 Vintage Archive
1-4-23 Pick a Promo: Tell me a Story (or Nine)

The card Chula: Pick One to Save Two gives you an option of returning a personnel to your hand in order to let the other two go on. Although, if you can't choose, all three are stopped; this week, you'll do the reverse. I'll give you three things and you remove one taking the other two.

What will you choose between? Denial!

Attribute denial: Can you deal with the constant drain of attributes? Your personnel have one (or two (or three)) less than their printed attributes? Are you ready to have another personnel attempt missions making up the difference for you but giving your opponent more counters for dilemmas.

Counter denial: TOS has a way to spend more on counters, almost giving you an extra turn every seven turns, but what about the reverse? Can you get your costly ship out early enough? Can you make do with a little less each turn?

Point denial: You generally need a hundred points (or thereabouts) to win the game. Can you do with a drain of them each game? Are you able to paly around this certain drain? Can you go with the harder missions for the win?

These three are a nightmare to face but something you can deal with, but not without a cost. Any one would be trouble but two gets to be a bit much, as players form Worlds will attest. Which one will you pick? Let us know in the poll and tell us why below. Revoting is allowed. Have fun picking your poisons.

[Latok]

It depends on the details of the denial somewhat.

Counters for instances is the scenario I am evaluating similar to how it would play out if my opponent was actually doing it? As in I have full counters for a few turns while they set it up and then I have 1-4 less counters from turn 4-5 onwards OR do I have 6 counters turn 2, 5 counters turn 3, etc. down to say 3 counters minimum? Is the attribute denial -1, -3, -7?

If I was playing against an opponent who was using only cards in 2E to do the different denial options BUT could choose cards to draw out of their deck rather than shuffling (but proper rules otherwise). I have to keep attributes and take the counter and point denial.
- Points is basically trivial to play around because you just stack dilemmas under multiple missions and then complete them all on the same turn.
- Counters can only be reduced to 3 prior to dilemmas being faced and will take a couple turns to set up even drawing optimally, so if you get a ship out before that you theoretically can still win the game, but you won't.
- Attributes will also take a few turns to set up fully but once it is you are going to have -4 to -7 on every personnel for every attempt so you aren't going to complete any missions after that.

I voted to keep counters though. In an actual game where the denial deck has to be 'functional' and draw everything 'properly', the attribute denial is way, way less likely to work than counter denial, it would be easier to play around too.