[edgeofhearing]

Greetings friends. It's that time when you ask questions about the new set, and then receive answers. Some answers may be insightful! I don't want to over-promise though. Let's just leave it at answers.

Designers for this set include:
Lucas "edgeofhearing" Thompson
Charlie "MidnightLich" Plaine
Richard "The Guardian" New

This was my first (full*) set as the design lead from start to finish. I'm very excited to share it with you!

@Global moderators could you sticky this thread and give the designers (temporary**) edit permissions in this forum?

*Timeless was a lot of fun and I'm very proud of it but I don't think of it as a full set
**I think my edit permissions from the 50th Anniversary set ended up lasting a few years before being taken away. I was sorely tempted to abuse those privileges but was very well behaved.

[boromirofborg]

What is the thing you're most excited for players to get their hands on?

I think shaking up mission selection is very important, and I think many of these new affiliations fit well in decks besides Vidiian. -crp

Road not taken: If you could change anything as far back as the beginning of the game about how affiliations work, what would it be?

Nothing about affiliations specifically. I think it's one of the things 2E improved upon 1E really well. -crp

The past icons on entire factions. I know it can be a way to separate out cards within affiliations, like TOS-era Klingons, but they both get mashed in with Enterprise-era Klingons and they aren't exactly involved in time travel. I wish the icon meant more, but it's kind of devalued by whole decks having the icon and it not being the unifying aspect of those cards. To bring the question back to this expansion, there was a good deal of discussion about a "temporal" icon on one of the personnel. I'm very comfortable with what it represents, but at least one member of the staff had a completely different read on what the icon meant. -richard

[MvComedy]

How many, if any, personnel are not Vidiian species?

Are there any cards who have not been previously featured in 1E?

Speaking of 1E, I take it that The Phage and Lifesigns were in parallel development, at least for a time. Did either set influence the other in any way?

They weren't intended to be. Lifesigns was designed in 2020 during the pandemic. The Department of First Edition was trying to do a "2 team" model where Team A designed it and then passed it over to Team B to develop. That ended up not happening, and those cards sat around a long time. We eventually shifted our schedule around to get them tested because we thought they'd make a good impact on the game. We ended up starting testing just a short while before The Phage did. -crp

This is going way back, but an argument against introducing the affiliations to 2E that used to be raised was that the game wasn't designed with them ever being playable in mind. As a result, we have, for example, 2E versions of missions that were attemptable in 1E that are only attemptable in 2E. Did you find it a challenge to give the Vidiians what they needed to be playable without a foundation for them already being in place?

Interesting. I'd never heard that argument, but certainly noticed it. Another thing I noticed was a large number of missions with "Any affiliation..." on them, so there was actually a fair starting point. But much like designing an affiliation-specific verb, making missions that are restricted to certain affiliations can free up some worries about unintended interaction, so making new ones isn't that much of a problem. Also, with the more modern understanding that missions can exist at the same location and represent different perspectives, we've had the options opened back up to us a bit.

Related question: in 1E, Decipher tried to support the Khazon and Vidiians by giving them the Khazon Collective and Vidiian Sodality cards, which were intended to diminish the weaknesses that inherently came from having a shallower card pool than the affiliations had by allowing them to basically be a dual-affiliation deck. Setting aside discussion about whether that particular approach worked, did you consider giving Vidiians some kind of built-in non- support at any point? Or did you never find that necessary when developing them for 2E?

As Lucas mentioned, for the Vidiians especially, the theme of working backwards (getting weaker over time) wasn't really conductive to having them play well with others. They do get support. And even if they didn't the, Think Tank could find a way in. I don't expect the solitary headquarters text to be the standard with other new affiliations, unless their theme also makes it unlikely that they'll play well with others.

On the other hand, we did indeed talk about the problem with the lack of material. We still have some characters that exist in 1E from which we could draw, but I imagine that would be more of filling in the gaps. Any new direction we go with for the Vidiians (one that would have to adhere to their theme, of course), would probably involve personas. -richard

[Faithful Reader]

Questions form Bob:

Hi, "Bob."

You're going to have a party. A wild 'what happens in Vegas' style party. Which card do you bring with you?

Clashing Values?

You have reached the natural end of your life. Which card do you want by your bedside?

Based on my driver's license, Organ Harvestin.

You have a secret. A deep dark secret that must be kept confidential. Which card do you tell it to?

Neelix wouldn't say a word.

You are planning a crime. Which card do you take with you?

Grid 216. -richard

[abargar7510]

A couple of questions and comments for @edgeofhearing !

First of all, congratulations on the set release. I can't imagine sticking through a project, especially one this big, and seeing it through from beginning to end for seven years. How does it feel to see the set in all its finalized glory? Do you have any favorites, either sentimental or gameplay wise that you see when you look at the set? Or is it like trying to pick a favorite child?

Can you tell us more about the Organ Counter mechanic? How did it work, and why didn't work well enough to make it through the design process?

[Mugato]

Vidiians are strong in the early game, and weak in the late game.

How difficult was it to balance the late game when, I would expect, you could throw more bodies and ships at attempts to compensate for weaker personnel and ships.

[GooeyChewie]

Are there any specific existing cards you believe will help support the Vidiians? In particular, are there any existing missions you feel will be popular with Vidiian decks?

Vidiia is the first Delta Quadrant headquarters to allow unrestricted access to non-aligned personnel. Do you have any deck ideas in mind that focus primarily on in the Delta Quadrant?

[edgeofhearing]

What is the thing you're most excited for players to get their hands on?

I think that, generally, I'm really excited to see how players tackle deckbuilding with Vidiians. It was really important to me to give players plenty of paths to take when building a deck, and I'll be watching decklists closely to see what people try (and how their decks evolve).

Road not taken: If you could change anything as far back as the beginning of the game about how affiliaitions work, what would it be?

I'm quite happy with how affiliations work overall, but one thing from Project Trek that I found interesting were affiliated verbs. I don't think that it would be a huge difference over some verbs just requiring you to command 3x icon personnel, so it's not a huge "what if", but it might be handy to be able to link a verb directly to a headquarters.

How many, if any, personnel are not Vidiian species?

Just two, Intimidation will be a pretty good tech card against Vidiians.

Are there any cards who have not been previously featured in 1E?

By my count there's two ships and two personnel.

Speaking of 1E, I take it that The Phage and Lifesigns were in parallel development, at least for a time. Did either set influence the other in any way?

@MidnightLich was the only designer who was able to see both projects, so I think that he might be able to give a better answer to this question. I know that Lifesigns hit proofreading before Phage went to the creative team, so for a couple non-unique personnel we followed First Edition's naming lead.

This is going way back, but an argument against introducing the affiliations to 2E that used to be raised was that the game wasn't designed with them ever being playable in mind. As a result, we have, for example, 2E versions of missions that were attemptable in 1E that are only attemptable in 2E. Did you find it a challenge to give the Vidiians what they needed to be playable without a foundation for them already being in place?

Fortunately, easier access to errata allowed a couple icons to get added to older missions, but it wasn't a hard thing to just have more missions in this set - it was just harder on the creative team because most of them would have to not be missions, since there were already plenty of those. Several of the missions are just from a slightly different perspective than the Voyager crew viewed them from in the show.

In some ways though, having no baggage was easier. When Decipher introduced , , and there was more baggage that came along with having a icon, which we didn't need to worry about. When the CC introduced Relativity (in some ways the first CC-era affiliation, followed right up by Khan) the baggage was even heavier because of Temporal Transporters, allowing them to use any subfaction card Kirk.

Related question: in 1E, Decipher tried to support the Khazon and Vidiians by giving them the Khazon Collective and Vidiian Sodality cards, which were intended to diminish the weaknesses that inherently came from having a shallower card pool than the affiliations had by allowing them to basically be a dual-affiliation deck. Setting aside discussion about whether that particular approach worked, did you consider giving Vidiians some kind of built-in non- support at any point? Or did you never find that necessary when developing them for 2E?

I think the biggest parallel here was the decision whether or not to allow additional Headquarters missions or personnel. In the end, we opted to block the use of other HQs so that it would be harder to game around the Vidiians' weaknesses, but felt that cards were essential because the pool of potential Vidiian-affiliation personnel is so shallow.

A couple of questions and comments for edgeofhearing!

First of all, congratulations on the set release. I can't imagine sticking through a project, especially one this big, and seeing it through from beginning to end for seven years. How does it feel to see the set in all its finalized glory? Do you have any favorites, either sentimental or gameplay wise that you see when you look at the set? Or is it like trying to pick a favorite child?

It was very cathartic to see the cards take shape for real during the art process, but I have to admit I'm all nerves now. Definitely the most ambitious Trek project I've taken on. I love a lot of these cards, but I think that 63 V 10 is probably the one that is the best mix of Visual, Creative, and Gameplay Mechanic elements.

Questions form Bob:

You're going to have a party. A wild 'what happens in Vegas' style party. Which card do you bring with you?

You have reached the natural end of your life. Which card do you want by your bedside?

You have a secret. A deep dark secret that must be kept confidential. Which card do you tell it to?

You are planning a crime. Which card do you take with you?

63 V 9, 63 V 8, 63 V 15, and 63 V 16 respectively.

Can you tell us more about the Organ Counter mechanic? How did it work, and why didn't work well enough to make it through the design process?

Broadly speaking, they were a resource that you started with a lot of, but over time you'd lose them (either automatically or due to game events like mission completions or both, depending on where in development we were). You could also replenish them through battle, which utlimately became their downfall. Vidiians would basically need to battle once and they'd be back at full solving strength which made them pretty boring, or you'd need to spend counters on abilities, and then counters were kind of a see-saw that went up and down and you no longer got the feeling of decay. (This is a very condensed version of events.) I do think that counters could work well for another affiliation, but they ultimately weren't a good fit for Vidiians.

Vidiians are strong in the early game, and weak in the late game.

How difficult was it to balance the late game when, I would expect, you could throw more bodies and ships at attempts to compensate for weaker personnel and ships.

This element was challenging, though not perhaps as much as you'd expect. Probably the biggest challenge was making battling in the mid-late game worth it, even when you have more bodies. But we found that, since Vidiians aren't generally that cheap (they have a handful of 1-cost personnel, but they're generally the ones without fancy abilities) and you aren't getting discounts after the first few turns, they (very generally) don't have more personnel than a non-Vidiian opponent in the late game.

Are there any specific existing cards you believe will help support the Vidiians? In particular, are there any existing missions you feel will be popular with Vidiian decks?

Well, Battle Reconnaissance is likely to be reasonably popular with its two-span, but Vidiian ships were designed with that card's existence in mind and their strength numbers aren't great on average - if and when Hirogen show up, I think that they'll be even more interested in BR. I think Vidiians will likely appreciate cards like Sylvia and The Killing Game as ways to supplement their acquisition of captives.

Vidiia is the first Delta Quadrant headquarters to allow unrestricted access to non-aligned personnel. Do you have any deck ideas in mind that focus primarily on in the Delta Quadrant?

Well, I can say that that never came up in testing, but DQ Gatherers could be fun. I know we had a few people combine Vidiians with Think Tank and Android support, either of which could be tried in the DQ on their own now. It'll take a lot to pull pure decks away from Mouth of the Wormhole, Deep Space 9's 1-span though, I'm not sure there's anything in the DQ that could do that, but I guess we'll see!

Great questions so far, keep them coming!

[abargar7510]

I do think that counters could work well for another affiliation

Yes, collecting Relics for going on a Hunt doesn't seem very .....

[Danny]

• Given their cultural strength of completing the first mission and then becoming slightly weaker on the second (if Motura's a good example of his people), what are your collective thoughts on Vidiians becoming a 2MW affiliation, either through two 50 pointers (e.g., Varria missions) or two 40+ pointers and some non-mission 'over the top' shenanigans?
  • Or is it not a concern, as it's a valid way that any affiliation could adopt as a strategy (albeit probably not as simply)?

• Any new keywords?

• Was it tricky/liberating/something else working on a new affiliation that has little to no "star" power?

[eberlems]

What card do you think will see most play and what least?

[CorellianSecurity]

What is the new Hirogen affiliation icon based on? At first glance I thought it was hinting at a Think Tank affiliation, which threw me for a loop!

Would it be possible to get some Work-in-Progress pictures of the Vidiian template as it was being developed? I come from a graphic design background and I love creating card templates.

[boromirofborg]

What is the new Hirogen affiliation icon based on? At first glance I thought it was hinting at a Think Tank affiliation, which threw me for a loop!

I don't know where it came from, but when I googled "Hirogen symbol" and "Hirogen Symbol Star Trek", all I found were variants of this current symbol and not the 1E symbol.

[abargar7510]

I come from a graphic design background and I love creating card templates.

Welcome!!

[edgeofhearing]

• Given their cultural strength of completing the first mission and then becoming slightly weaker on the second (if Motura's a good example of his people), what are your collective thoughts on Vidiians becoming a 2MW affiliation, either through two 50 pointers (e.g., Varria missions) or two 40+ pointers and some non-mission 'over the top' shenanigans?
  • Or is it not a concern, as it's a valid way that any affiliation could adopt as a strategy (albeit probably not as simply)?

At first I was very concerned that, unless we outlawed it on the HQ, they'd be exclusively a two-mission-win affiliation. But we left that option open for playtesting, and it really didn't shake out that way. Enough of their solving power weakens after the first mission that the second 50-pointer becomes a real slog, and their bonus point options are (intentionally) limited. You can do it, but it doesn't look like two-mission-winning will be an overwhelming strategy for them.

• Any new keywords?

No, though early on, when we had organ counters, we considered adding a keyword for their verbs that cared about them.

• Was it tricky/liberating/something else working on a new affiliation that has little to no "star" power?

I'd say fairly liberating, since we had a lot of flexibility to shuffle skills around as needed when the skills are kinda made up on rando background characters anyways. But then it got tricky when it came time to do the art (more on that in a later article).

What card do you think will see most play and what least?

Most: Well, likely one of the non-unique ships; with only four ships, they're not going to change a whole lot from deck to deck. That said, a dilemma like 63 V 4 could show up in a lot of non-Vidiian decks, which (even if Vidiians get a lot of play) could be a good path to being the most played.
Least: Verbs tend to see less play in general, and 63 V 16 is one of the more situational ones, so maybe that one?

What is the new Hirogen affiliation icon based on? At first glance I thought it was hinting at a Think Tank affiliation, which threw me for a loop!

As @boromirofborg noted, when I did some research on the Hirogen icon, I found lots of the soccer-ball-looking one, and none of the First Edition icon. Decipher made up that icon entirely, and, while I like it, I opted to go with the icon that kinda sorta appeared on-screen (it's on a crate in one of the Hirogen Hologram episodes) and has been adopted my several other corners of the fandom. If backwards-compatibility were still a thing, I probably would have stuck with the First Edition icon for simplicity.

Would it be possible to get some Work-in-Progress pictures of the Vidiian template as it was being developed? I come from a graphic design background and I love creating card templates.

I'll see if I can get in touch with Marc for you!