[leonardmccoy]

G'day everyone. Just checking if the following cards are considered outside the game in the seed phase as I'm trying to thin down a Q's Tent:
Mission Specialists
Support Personel
Defend Homeworld download
Quark's Isolinear Rods download
Dr Telek R'mor download from TMW

Thanks in advance,
Peter

[Latok]

G'day everyone. Just checking if the following cards are considered outside the game in the seed phase as I'm trying to thin down a Q's Tent:
Mission Specialists
Support Personel
Defend Homeworld download
Quark's Isolinear Rods download
Dr Telek R'mor download from TMW

Thanks in advance,
Peter

Unfortunately not. When you download a card it must come from your draw deck or Q's Tent unless it specifically says otherwise which none of these do.

Assign Mission Specialist's download can be used during the seed phase so while the personnel are technically in your draw deck they come in to play before you draw your starting hand, effectively making your deck smaller. All of the other cards must use an action to download and thus need to be done on your turn after your play phase.

[Spectre9]

Comes down to deck design choices.

Anything you have to download after drawing your hand might be in your hand wasting a card draw.

A lot of the time you build in redundancy so you can download something else.

[JeBuS]

Often, when looking at other people's decks, you'll notice that they have several cards listed as "outside the game", such as Mission Specialist personnel. Technically, these cards are actually in the draw deck. It is a matter of convenience to keep them separate, though, as they are downloaded before any cards are drawn.

[Mogor]

Often, when looking at other people's decks, you'll notice that they have several cards listed as "outside the game", such as Mission Specialist personnel. Technically, these cards are actually in the draw deck. It is a matter of convenience to keep them separate, though, as they are downloaded before any cards are drawn.

Exactly, it saves game time by figuratively putting them outside the game

[Not_always_but_often]

Often, when looking at other people's decks, you'll notice that they have several cards listed as "outside the game", such as Mission Specialist personnel. Technically, these cards are actually in the draw deck. It is a matter of convenience to keep them separate, though, as they are downloaded before any cards are drawn.

Exactly, it saves game time by figuratively putting them outside the game

The only differences it really makes that basically they are technically in the draw deck, they 1) have to be legal to be in the deck, which matters for Borg decks, and 2) count towards your 30 card deck minimum, which means you could probably build a deck that starts turn one with an empty draw deck if you really wanted to.

[Mogor]

Often, when looking at other people's decks, you'll notice that they have several cards listed as "outside the game", such as Mission Specialist personnel. Technically, these cards are actually in the draw deck. It is a matter of convenience to keep them separate, though, as they are downloaded before any cards are drawn.

Exactly, it saves game time by figuratively putting them outside the game

The only differences it really makes that basically they are technically in the draw deck, they 1) have to be legal to be in the deck, which matters for Borg decks, and 2) count towards your 30 card deck minimum, which means you could probably build a deck that starts turn one with an empty draw deck if you really wanted to.

I think someone attempted to do that as theory exercise awhile ago. I think part of the issue was not enough personnel to actually do viable mission solving

[commdecker]

Often, when looking at other people's decks, you'll notice that they have several cards listed as "outside the game", such as Mission Specialist personnel. Technically, these cards are actually in the draw deck. It is a matter of convenience to keep them separate, though, as they are downloaded before any cards are drawn.

Even so, you have to be careful. Most of the cards listed in the original post perform their downloads after play starts, and therefore the cards they download actually do need to be stocked in the deck or tent. You can only use this bookkeeping trick for seed-phase downloads -- some examples of which are:
Seed AMS, download 2 people
Seed certain mssions that download an Emblem
Seed an Emblem, download Art of Diplomacy

[Jono]

G'day everyone. Just checking if the following cards are considered outside the game in the seed phase as I'm trying to thin down a Q's Tent:
Mission Specialists
Support Personel
Defend Homeworld download
Quark's Isolinear Rods download
Dr Telek R'mor download from TMW

Thanks in advance,
Peter

Unfortunately not. When you download a card it must come from your draw deck or Q's Tent unless it specifically says otherwise which none of these do.

Assign Mission Specialist's download can be used during the seed phase so while the personnel are technically in your draw deck they come in to play before you draw your starting hand, effectively making your deck smaller. All of the other cards must use an action to download and thus need to be done on your turn after your play phase.

It can also come from the Zalkonian Storage Capsule

[BCSWowbagger]

1000 years after I should have done it, I modified the header in the deck builder to reflect customary usage. For example: https://www.trekcc.org/1e/decklists/ind ... ckID=20618

That hopefully means this question (which has been asked many times, quite reasonably) will no longer confuse and trouble newer players.

Creating a new and separate "seed-phase download" category was unfortunately impractical, since we have at this point hundreds and hundreds of decks that use the "outside the game" category for seed-phase downloads, and there's no way to amend that retroactively. So this seemed like the best solution.

Questions, complaints? Post 'em here.

[JeBuS]

1000 years after I should have done it, I modified the header in the deck builder to reflect customary usage. For example: https://www.trekcc.org/1e/decklists/ind ... ckID=20618

That hopefully means this question (which has been asked many times, quite reasonably) will no longer confuse and trouble newer players.

Creating a new and separate "seed-phase download" category was unfortunately impractical, since we have at this point hundreds and hundreds of decks that use the "outside the game" category for seed-phase downloads, and there's no way to amend that retroactively. So this seemed like the best solution.

Questions, complaints? Post 'em here.

Use title case. And possibly a line break, as it's pretty long?

[9of24]

1000 years after I should have done it, I modified the header in the deck builder to reflect customary usage. For example: https://www.trekcc.org/1e/decklists/ind ... ckID=20618

That hopefully means this question (which has been asked many times, quite reasonably) will no longer confuse and trouble newer players.

Creating a new and separate "seed-phase download" category was unfortunately impractical, since we have at this point hundreds and hundreds of decks that use the "outside the game" category for seed-phase downloads, and there's no way to amend that retroactively. So this seemed like the best solution.

Questions, complaints? Post 'em here.

Can that field just be deleted? Cards outside the game shouldn't be a part of your decklist, and if they are in the draw deck, they should be listed as part of the draw deck.

[winterflames]

1000 years after I should have done it, I modified the header in the deck builder to reflect customary usage. For example: https://www.trekcc.org/1e/decklists/ind ... ckID=20618

That hopefully means this question (which has been asked many times, quite reasonably) will no longer confuse and trouble newer players.

Creating a new and separate "seed-phase download" category was unfortunately impractical, since we have at this point hundreds and hundreds of decks that use the "outside the game" category for seed-phase downloads, and there's no way to amend that retroactively. So this seemed like the best solution.

Questions, complaints? Post 'em here.

Can that field just be deleted? Cards outside the game shouldn't be a part of your decklist, and if they are in the draw deck, they should be listed as part of the draw deck.

So you don't want to know which ships your opponent had under their camouflage in that game you played 4 months ago? You don't want to have the bajoran wormholes print with your deck when you download them with first stable or the phoenix print up when you want to stop first contact?

[BCSWowbagger]

Can that field just be deleted? Cards outside the game shouldn't be a part of your decklist, and if they are in the draw deck, they should be listed as part of the draw deck.

I couldn't delete the pile for the same reason that I can't separate it into two piles (which would be my preference): there are hundreds and hundreds of existing decks using this pile, no reasonable way to untangle them.

Theoretically, we could write code to make new decks do a new thing while leaving old decks to do the old thing, but the cost-benefit on that is so low that it would be near the bottom of a priority list with literal years of work already awaiting attention.

So (unfortunately) the pile must stay as-is. Only question is what it's named. Players who want to continue putting seed phase downloads are of course free to keep doing so. I'm tempted to mark this whole pile "optional," but the title is already pretty long and I trust most people already realize it's optional.

Use title case. And possibly a line break, as it's pretty long?

Fair.

I thought about a line break but am nervous it would have side effects on print decklist forms.

[9of24]

So you don't want to know which ships your opponent had under their camouflage in that game you played 4 months ago? You don't want to have the bajoran wormholes print with your deck when you download them with first stable or the phoenix print up when you want to stop first contact?

I suppose they could list all of the ships they intend to use with Holographic Camouflage for the tournament, but since they are chosen when the card is seeded they may differ from game to game. As for printing such cards, you can add the cards to the deck to print and remove them from the list after having printed the cards or having a separate deck list just for cards you want to print.

I couldn't delete the pile for the same reason that I can't separate it into two piles (which would be my preference): there are hundreds and hundreds of existing decks using this pile, no reasonable way to untangle them.

Ah, I misunderstood what you were saying then. I didn't realize that removing that option now would affect posted decks.


It is good that there is so rarely a need for deck checks at high level events, I would feel bad for the TD that has to issue a penalty for an improper deck list because a player decided to put their Assign Mission Specialists downloads in the outside the game field and not in their draw deck.