[razzy]

I've been thinking about this for a while now and I'm curious as to what everyone else thinks. What single 1e card best captures the 1e aesthetic and why?

For me, it's Hero of the Empire. I don't know of any other game where you can travel back in time and change the history of the universe to have an in-game, mechanical effect. It really captures 1e's "Treksense first" sensibility and demonstrates that 1e isn't just a card game, but almost a roleplaying game in a universe with history and story.

While Stop First Contact did the whole change history bit first, Hero does it best. SFC is only available to the Borg, but any affiliation with a handful of tribbles can blow up Kirk. SFC requires a copy of the glossary to know what actually happens after history changes (admittedly, a very 1e move), but HotE has everything neatly packaged on one card. Is there anything more 1e than shoehorning a new bit of tech into the game only to revisit and/or fix it two or three expansions later?

Also, HotE encourages you to use tribbles, which brings up another 1e staple, side decks of immense flavor and debatable utility. I love the tribbles side deck, I just wish it worked better.

I guess what I'm getting at is, for me, 1e is a card game that feels like a roleplaying game, which takes its source material very seriously, and also, historically, has a habit of adding on superfluous bells and whistles that have to be fixed later, all of which enables the game to do things that no other card game dares to try. Hero of the Empire, in my opinion, hits all those beats.

[prylardurden]

Really wish Hero was rewritten so it pulled K7 and Kirk from outside the game. Would love to try a borg deck that changed the past *twice*.

[Not_always_but_often]

I'd nominate Persistence of Memory as the most 1e card in 1e, for the following reasons:
- It calls out a handful of cards
- only has an effect of those cards are played
- is a reactive silver bullet to cards that should have been errataed or banned instead
-has a complex glossary entry for "reverses" that basically gives the card a full column of hamster to explain what it actually does
- can have completely bonkers effects under the right, fairly unlikely, circumstances (like playing Anti-Time Anomaly and bringing an entire discard pile back to life).

[Not_always_but_often]

Follow up question: does the Persistence of Memory glossary entry need to be updated for the Devidian Door errata? It assists to reference the old version, since now you could actually play the Persistence on the copy of Devidian Door that is in play.

[BCSWowbagger]

Follow up question: does the Persistence of Memory glossary entry need to be updated for the Devidian Door errata? It assists to reference the old version, since now you could actually play the Persistence on the copy of Devidian Door that is in play.

This entry got updated last year when the DD errata came out. (I believe they added the final sentence, which says that Persistence must be played on the DD that's played on the table, not the one in the future.)

There's two ways a card can be "most 1E": a good way and a bad way.

For the bad way, I'm going to go with Nor, a card that looks like it should do something fairly straightforward, but is actually concealing nine kinds of crazy in its back pocket. (I love Nors, but boy do I wish I could go back in time and rethink some of their implementation.)

For the good way, I think it's The Whale Probe. It's dead-simple for a 1E player, nothing tricky or wordy about it, and yet nothing about this card -- its effect, its movement (!), its function in a larger dilemma strategy, its appropriate counters -- would make the slightest bit of sense in 2E. And the strategies a well-placed Whale Probe can advance go well beyond what the card itself indicates. That's 1E at its best: low comprehension complexity, but high strategic complexity, using mechanics that don't translate into any other context.

Really anything that leverages the spaceline (Q-Net, [Self] cards, Blade of Tkon, Gaps In Normal Space, etc.) is quintessentially 1E to me, and our dilemmas are the thing that really set us apart (in the good way).

[SudenKapala]

Really wish Hero was rewritten so it pulled K7 and Kirk from outside the game. Would love to try a borg deck that changed the past *twice*.

Now THAT might, ultimately, be more 1e than even 1e can handle. But I feel errata coming up to change it...

This topic poses an entertaining question. (And some ideas behind others' choices are really humbling in their awesomeness and understanding of this CCG, and card games in general. I won't try to compete with that.)
It took me some thinking, and to my own taste, I certainly can't top the OP. But since it's boring if I just back that up, I'll go for...

Launching the Phoenix. Admittedly, I've never done it in-game. But all related cards are very Trek-like. And I love the card itself (which I don't have yet, either... ).

While HotE is great for its CGI statue, I'm (also in this case) a more Traditional person, and I like that Phoenix comes from a 'real' production. (Of course I do deem all CGI and Virtual cards to be canon, too; but, you know.) I love that movie. And I love the way Trek always played with (altering and/or rectifying) 'future history' (the main titles of In A Mirror Darkly, with its alternate take on First Contact... brilliant), which is reflected in the old, retasked nuclear missile with its new warp engines. I really dig the card image, too.
Not as many as HotE, but some weird cards are needed for the Phoenix mechanic -- like Zefram, who is great -- and as such it feels like the sort of 1e I could just about handle myself.

(Hey -- could you also just play it simply, via AU Door!? You couldn't easily dock and protect it w/o , but there's ways around that, too. Maybe it's a bad choice after all! )

Well... Better cases were already made for other cards, but for fun, I will stick with Earth's first warp vessel.

A runner-up option for me could be the joke I put in -- I realised when doing that, that unleashing a Cube and then re-establishing the neural connection with the Rogue Borg that seemingly went joyriding in it, in order to dump a major boat with 7 drones, is also quite a 1e thing to do.

Looking forward to more answers!

[Hoss-Drone]

Because it just came back into the fold for OTF play, i'm gonna go with Black Hole. Its so insanely 1e to 1. be forced to play with requisite cards that are themselves "half a card" :/ , 2. nuke missions in the middle of the game and 3. operate so slow as to only be good for either A. being worthless or B. get abused super hard by other cards working with it.

[SudenKapala]

Because it just came back into the fold for OTF play, i'm gonna go with

Black Hole.

Its so insanely 1e to 1. be forced to play with requisite cards that are themselves

"half a card" :/

, 2. nuke missions in the middle of the game and 3. operate so slow as to only be good for either A. being worthless or B. get abused super hard by other cards working with it.

Ooh, yes. Space itself might even have been a contender, but the hole... Indeed. A choice to my taste.

[Professor Scott]

Wesley Gets the point because "Shut Up, Wesley!"

[HoodieDM]

Protect Historic Encounter > Launch the Phoenix > Montana Missile Complex > Phoenix b/c it's very thematic and it really is 4 cards and that's how 1E is....never easy and very complex!!!!

LoL

~D

[SudenKapala]

Protect Historic Encounter > Launch the Phoenix > Montana Missile Complex > Phoenix

b/c it's very thematic and it really is 4 cards and that's how 1E is....never easy and very complex!!!!

This.

That's exactly what I meant (except perhaps for my sentiments on the artwork and the imagined symbolism I superimposed on it). But you convey it in all of 2 lines. Well said!

[9of24]

Temporal Causality Loop.

[Latok]

Barber Pole

[Data's Socks]

Perhaps not quintessentially 1E, but covering one aspect of it: Shaka, When the Walls Fell. And that is the game can easily leave players up a creek without a paddle, so it's up to them to make sure they're aware of the card pool and can actually win the game.

I think this becomes apparent as soon as going through the first starter deck. For me I remember it as having only one Exobiology for Investigate Anomaly or some similar dicey situation. It was like, the cards in here are randomized, right? So I could have possibly not gotten the Exobiology, or I can lose it to something, and that would mean I couldn't solve this mission.

At least players can select their own missions. With wall dilemmas like Shaka, they go a step further with win conditions unknown to the rules and to what players have chosen for themselves. The rules could've given wall dilemmas an out (as with some other things, perhaps also apparent from the first starter...), but no. Just have to be prepared.

[SudenKapala]

Temporal Causality Loop.

Yep -- thematically / topically sound! But also, it's old, and has become nigh-unusable in the mean time...? (Hasn't it?) Or is that part of your reason? Because it is very typical of the usual power-creepiness in CCGs.

Barber Pole

Uh-huh. Needs no explanation either. And it got a real twist in the end, with In For A Trim -- which herewith puts it high on my personal list.

Perhaps not quintessentially 1E, but covering one aspect of it: Shaka, When the Walls Fell.

Now this card itself would never have been my choice for this topic. But then, your explanation behind it really makes sense, dealing with an integral part of the spirit of 1e (since its inception, even).

That's what I find interesting about such topics! With every explanation, I -- and perhaps others -- learn about the

hidden

depths of the game. So, thanks again for sharing! (And thanks, Razzy, for creating the topic itself.)