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 - Beta Quadrant
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#489907
Orbin wrote:
Discovery rox wrote:i think qs planet is a neat mechanism to get an artifact, which is an especially in an environment where artifacts arent used anymore.

i guess i dont really see the issue with it.
I believe in OTF if I play Q's Planet you can't attempt it. So I could play a point loss strategy on you and Q's Planet (with no intention to solve it) to make you need an additional 40 points on top of all the point loss. Yes I would need an additional 40 points, but I can easily plan for that.

- James M
i see. i guess it can be errated to say "may attempt as if you had seeded it."
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First Edition Rules Master
 - First Edition Rules Master
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Continuing Committee Member - Retired
Community Contributor
#489908
Orbin wrote:
Discovery rox wrote:i think qs planet is a neat mechanism to get an artifact, which is an especially in an environment where artifacts arent used anymore.

i guess i dont really see the issue with it.
I believe in OTF if I play Q's Planet you can't attempt it. So I could play a point loss strategy on you and Q's Planet (with no intention to solve it) to make you need an additional 40 points on top of all the point loss. Yes I would need an additional 40 points, but I can easily plan for that.

- James M
And worse - since I'm the only person who can attempt it, I get to control when the effect goes away. So even if you're in the lead, I can prevent you from winning, wait until I solve my mission and get ahead on points and then send down a Bob to remove the effect. Maybe not "broken", but it feels sooper cheap. (I'd group it with Containment Field and In The Zone, where it's mechanically sound but bad game design.)


Also wanted to add a perspective on Anti-Time Anomaly - remember that Premiere was the days when no-one really understood what TCG/CCGs were going to be or what was going to work - either for a game in particular or the genre in general. (Go look up the scoring for the SimCity CCG, or how X-Files painted themselves into a corner on the first set, to pick two examples.) And Magic isn't immune - there are a lot of old ABUR cards that everyone has forgotten because they're just incomprehensible or were proven to be completely wrong (like the idea that "one mana for three of something is equal"*)

I'd argue that ATA's issue, at heart, is the same as Rogue Borg and Brain Drain - they're all cards that hit personnel out of the blue. (You have to proactively walk into dilemmas, so they "feel" fairer.) Walking over with personnel and battling feels fine, blowing up ships the same (until we hit lockout territory). But the ability to just point and whack people "from range" doesn't feel right these days. And Shrouding fits the logic as well, since just dropping in a random dude doesn't feel much different from just popping a Rogue Borg, even if it's technically a personnel.

Balance-wise, it's pretty much a maxim that symmetrical effects aren't really symmetrical, because one of you knows what's coming and the other doesn't. Holograms are the classic trick (your guys die, mine don't), and there was definitely a version that played ATAs every turn or two to prevent the opponent from ever getting their feet under them again. (Or as a simpler trick - get ahead, then just spam events to lock the game down.)
Sure, you could Kevin it - but that's a bit expensive, because the game has moved to wanting you to get your events down. And if I'm dropping a fresh one every turn, that cost gets prohibitive *fast*.

In the end, ATA is on the ban list in no small part because it encourages play that the game doesn't really support (and players don't *want* it to support).


* for folks who don't know the punchline, the five cards range from utter binder fodder (white got 3 life), through staples (green with +3/+3 to creatures), to kinda-overpowered (red with 3 damage, black with 3 mana), to "this is a $6500 card that is banned or restricted in every format" (blue with 3 cards).
 
 - Beta Quadrant
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#489911
Catching up on a few of these...

Distortion has been powerful for a long time, for largely obvious reasons (for extra fun, play a Transwarp Conduit first! Who needs Wormholes or a Naiskos?)

It also dovetailed very well with other broken cards. Two additional abuses that took it from "really really powerful" to "stupidly broken":

1. As part of Ooby Dooby decks. Play with all Youth personnel (or self-seed Rascals), hit a Dooby to draw a bunch of cards and stop the mission attempt. Drop more Youth personnel into play with Devidian Doors or Barzan Wormhole, play a Distortion to unstop everybody, and repeat at another mission. Properly constructed and played, you could fairly reliably draw out your whole deck in a turn or two, and have everybody in play no less. Its most infamous incarnation was Olav Rokne's Dance Dance Revolution deck, which added DQSS and Revolving Doors (on the opponent's AU Door or Space-Time Portal to stop Temporal Vortex from coming out) for extra fun. (Ooby Dooby = "Dance Dance", Revolving Door = "Revolution")

2. With Vic Fontaine, whenever a dilemma stops you, download a Distortion and keep going. Right after Holodeck Adventures released, I built a hologram deck called "Visit Fontaine Memorial." Killer dilemmas were ineffective against holograms. Against a wall, Vic could download whatever I needed to pass it, and against a stopper I'd download Distortion. Walked through combos like a knife through butter, and even though I threw the deck together at the last minute (forgetting to include any MEDICAL personnel at all) came within a hair's breath of winning the tournament, with only a loss to Todd Soper who was also playing a Vic deck.


On In the Zone, I don't have any historical perspective, but just an opinion. I'm glad to see it gone (and wrote more than one forum post complaining about it), and agree with those who say that the cards enabling a one-turn win should be the ones targeted, and not the player for simply scoring points. I may spend a number of turns to clear out dilemmas under a few missions, I should be able to score the points all in the same turn once they're gone. On top of this, the bookkeeping is a mess (remembering which points count and which don't). It's even crazier when multiple In the Zones are involved -- not that it's ever happened, but you can construct scenarios where it's advantageous to have multiple ItZ's in play (from different turns), and Ref-cycling one of them at the right time. This isn't what the game should be about.


Orbin and Disco rox hit on the main problems with Q's Planet: self-seeding an artifact, and using Fair Play to raise the winning score to 140 without giving the opponent a chance to get it back down. (You could permanently take personnel out of play using Q-Type Android with the same trick.) For a long time it was obligatory to include dilemmas in your Q's Tent (to guard against an artifact-grab by your opponent; Alien Parasites was always fun and gave you a chance to nab it for yourself.) The worst was in the Voyager era, when DQSS and Revolving Door were around. Turn one, Tent for Q's Planet, Scission a Revolving Door onto your opponent's Tent (closing it off) and Q's Planet into play, and you can get whatever artifact you want. Horga'hns were common, as were Tox Uthats. (More than one player didn't read the cards carefully and tried to Scission a Tox and Supernova into play on the same turn.)

Another nifty Q's Planet trick was letting it get eaten by a Black Hole, then Toff-ed and replayed (back before rules prohibited you from solving a mission more than once a game) for extra artifacts. Jason Drake used this as a backup win condition in his Hawking's Paradox stasis deck (Tox Uthat / Persistence of Memory / Interphase Generator to solve Pegasus Search with a small crew).
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European OP Coordinator
 - European OP Coordinator
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#489912
ATA is one of those cards which should stay on the ban list forever.

If a card is completely out of the line, completely broken or stupid (like ATA or Raise the Stakes) the best solution would be to keep it as they are without any Errata.

Creating a completely new card with an old card title by calling it Errata is definately not a good idea (happened once before with Operate Wormhole Relays). Yes, it fixes the card for OTF, but also destroying the cheesy stuff for Open.

And, for example, ATA is one of those cards I would really like to use if I ever play Open again...
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European OP Coordinator
 - European OP Coordinator
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#489914
Rachmaninoff wrote: On In the Zone, I don't have any historical perspective, but just an opinion. I'm glad to see it gone (and wrote more than one forum post complaining about it), and agree with those who say that the cards enabling a one-turn win should be the ones targeted, and not the player for simply scoring points. I may spend a number of turns to clear out dilemmas under a few missions, I should be able to score the points all in the same turn once they're gone. On top of this, the bookkeeping is a mess (remembering which points count and which don't). It's even crazier when multiple In the Zones are involved -- not that it's ever happened, but you can construct scenarios where it's advantageous to have multiple ItZ's in play (from different turns), and Ref-cycling one of them at the right time. This isn't what the game should be about.
My major issue with this card was that it makes it impossible to overtake an opponent who is in lead with more than 50 Points. In fact you have used it primarily as a coverage if you are in the lead to hinder your opponent to overtake you.

Of course in times when a lot of decks are based on all planet missions with 140 (or more) points after 2 solved planets it is valid to discuss about this one again, but as my Point with ATA above - keep this card as it is for Open (this format needs it more than OTF) and Maybe create a new one with it's effect for OTF...
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First Edition Rules Master
By BCSWowbagger (James Heaney)
 - First Edition Rules Master
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Community Contributor
#490001
Today:
Red Alert!
Terraforming Station (out of order)
[Evt] Red Alert! - Everyone, absolutely everyone agreed that this card was beyond broken in 1995. But, by 2010, the question was more complicated. It wasn't clear to everyone anymore that Red Alert! was harmful in the environment, what with It's Only A Game, Spacedoor, and the other counters to Red Alert! that were prevalent by then. One very key decisionmaker went as far as saying that 2010 Red Alert! was too weak, given all the counters: after somebody proposed errata'ing Red Alert! to follow the restrictions on It's Only A Game, this decisionmaker mused "This is effectively what the card does now, and it does not see any play. It should do more than that."

Regardless, everyone still agreed that, without the counters, Red Alert! was too powerful. Even with It's Only A Game, unprepared players still sometimes got steamrolled. Since Team OTF was trying to make the game less of a guess-the-meta, hope-you-packed-the-right-counters kind of game, that was enough, and Red Alert got banned. (As we've seen, "being named by a [Ref] card" is kind of how a lot of cards got banned.)

All this suggests that giving Red Alert! balanced errata could be challenging. Nobody's really seen it in an environment free of its counters in, like, two decades. That makes it hard to redesign and harder to test. Everyone's going to be skittish about reintroducing such an iconically overpowered card, but it would be all too easy to turn it into binder fodder in the process. And, when it comes off the ban list, do its counters get errata'd, too? That has a huge effect on how powerful the updated card can be. Should be fun to see what Errata ultimately does with it!

[Neu] Terraforming Station - Here's a surprise! The story has always been that T.S. was banned for being "unsuitable for tournament play," as Rulesmaster AllenGould put it once in 2010, soon after the ban list came out. And I'm sure that's a big part of it; T.S. is a really weird card.

But the official internal reason T.S. got banned was for being confusing -- I think the only card on the ban list there for that reason. Here's the conversation that got T.S. banned, on 16 January 2010, back when the ban list was being put together originally:
rules person A, Rules thread on ban list wrote:And I think that Terraforming Station should also be banned due to all the questions you get from that card. I know it's not played that often but Man do you have to argue with players about it!
rules person B, five minutes later, Design thread on ban list wrote:Lets also ban Terraforming Station, just because it is so very difficult to track in a tournament setting.
design person C, five hours later wrote:Agreed. The card could do something far more useful ;-)
There was no further discussion of it, from Design or Rules or Testing, before the ban list was released several months later.

(For his part, I don't believe Allen was part of the ban list creation; he came on soon after and his post was based on his best understanding at the time.)
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By Boffo97 (Dave Hines)
 - Gamma Quadrant
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Retired Moderator
#490003
I really do miss the days where I was plonking down individual personnel all game and then suddenly, boom, Red Alert!, and all my personnel, ships and equipment could be played. Plus, it feels less like a Star Trek game when Red Alert! doesn't exist as a concept.

Maybe it could be errata'ed by having its text apply to all players, since in real Trek, if one Captain is at Red Alert, the other Captain is too. Or something that applies to an individual ship since we rarely see fleetwide alerts (I think the only one we saw a fleetwide Yellow Alert in All Good Things).
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First Edition Rules Master
 - First Edition Rules Master
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Continuing Committee Member - Retired
Community Contributor
#490012
BCSWowbagger wrote: (As we've seen, "being named by a [Ref] card" is kind of how a lot of cards got banned.)
Which makes sense if you think about it - Decipher's [Ref] cards were their equivalent to banning or hard errata, so when folks are compiling the list stuff that Decipher felt the need to call out by name is a really good place to start. :D

As for errata, I'd say the problem is going to be less on the counters (because we seem to have a working system of just wiping out the bullet text), but that Red Alert is a really flavorless play engine by modern standards. But the Errata folks are clever and tricksy, so I expect they'll find a use.
[Neu] Terraforming Station - Here's a surprise! The story has always been that T.S. was banned for being "unsuitable for tournament play," as Rulesmaster AllenGould put it once in 2010, soon after the ban list came out. And I'm sure that's a big part of it; T.S. is a really weird card.

(For his part, I don't believe Allen was part of the ban list creation; he came on soon after and his post was based on his best understanding at the time.)[/hidden]
[/quote]

I honestly don't remember if I had Opinions or Official Opinions at that time, but I'll stand by the point that it's unsuitable for tournament play. The confusion piece is partly why - if memory serves, Decipher's official stance on the Station was that the text only worked within a single tournament. You couldn't, say, play Charlie in a casual game or a local this week, and then avoid him till Worlds and spring the replacement text on him then. And the reasons for that are obvious - how on earth is a judge supposed to verify that? (In either the "opponent disputes" OR the "collusion" angle).

But within a tournament, if you're doing your pairings right you *can't* play the same guy twice, unless you both finish in the top two AND are playing a final confrontation. So, I bucket it with Raise the Stakes in "this does a thing that we figured out TCG/CCGs shouldn't do".
 
 - New Member
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#490082
First time poster, long time lurker -- just want to say as someone who has a lot formative memories from playing competitive 1E at a young age that it's really been a lot of fun reading this thread; thank you to BCSWowbagger for such thorough and interesting write-ups!
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By Spectre9
 - Beta Quadrant
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#490158
If Dix wasn't banned I don't even know how or where you would want to play him.

This is the one card that is banned by shear fearmongering and nothing else.

Everything else seems to have real reasons.
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By Ensign Q
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#490159
Boffo97 wrote:I really do miss the days where I was plonking down individual personnel all game and then suddenly, boom, Red Alert!, and all my personnel, ships and equipment could be played. Plus, it feels less like a Star Trek game when Red Alert! doesn't exist as a concept.

Maybe it could be errata'ed by having its text apply to all players, since in real Trek, if one Captain is at Red Alert, the other Captain is too. Or something that applies to an individual ship since we rarely see fleetwide alerts (I think the only one we saw a fleetwide Yellow Alert in All Good Things).
red alert definitely should exist, especially when there are still a million ways to report people for free.
just errata it to affect both players. but ya i like the idea its placed on a ship.
 
 - Beta Quadrant
 -  
#490162
red alert should be easy to fix. just put a countown icon on it so it lasts until the end of your next turn. if spacedoor isnt enough, then also errata red alert so that it applies to both players.

that way it takes your card play to play it this turn. then your opponent can take advantage of it first on his turn, with the disadvantage that he didnt necessarily know it was coming or isnt necessarily set up for it. then on your next turn you can take advantage of it. then it goes away. if you set it up right, for the cost of two card plays you can get a lot of free plays, but it doesnt stay around forever and your opponent gets to use it too.

then all you have to do is errata its only a game, because otherwise it would be unbalanced against the player using red alert and then would never see play, because the opponent would use your red alert fully before limiting yours.
AllenGould wrote:But within a tournament, if you're doing your pairings right you *can't* play the same guy twice, unless you both finish in the top two AND are playing a final confrontation. So, I bucket it with Raise the Stakes in "this does a thing that we figured out TCG/CCGs shouldn't do".
i really dont like the attitude of tcgs/ccgs shouldnt do this thing. that limit a ccg to being like every other ccg in ways that arent necessarily valid or important and limits both innovations and the ways in which flavor can really make a game unique.

in the case of terraforming station, i really dont see the issue with it, or your issue with it. youve said it only makes sense in tournaments in one specific situation, your playing it and later it comes back for the finals round. so that seems like a great high risk high reward gambit to me and a really interesting strategy choice. you waste a seed slot on a facility in all your games, knowing that makes your deck weaker, in the hopes that it will pay off by making your mission easier in the final confrontation, when all the marbles are on the line. of course to get to that final confrontation you have to keep winning, which is even harder because you have a dead seed slot for all your games up to that point.

as for confusing, well i really dont buy that argument as a reason to ban something becuase then half the cards mentioned in the glossary should be banned because apparently there are a lot of cards in the game that are confusing enough to need entries in a mega hundred page glossary rulebook.
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First Edition Rules Master
By BCSWowbagger (James Heaney)
 - First Edition Rules Master
 -  
Community Contributor
#490388
Today:
Rogue Borg Mercenaries
[Int] Rogue Borg Mercenaries

Horga'hn may be the most powerful card ever, but RBM is the most obnoxious. My very first tournament (late 2002), my very first game, was versus a guy who Defended Homeworld for Lore, and the rest of his draw deck was Rogue Borg, Lore Returns, and Crosis. He waited until I attempted a mission, hit me with the Higher Fewer / Scow combo that was underneath every single mission, then buried me in RBM for a lockout. (At the time, I was impressed; 13-year-old me was astonished that anyone could own more than 2 or at most 3 copies of a rare card like Crosis.)

That's all RBM did. It seems they were supposed to be kind of a cool pop-up battle, maybe once or twice a game, where the intensity of the battle scaled with the owner's investment in the strategy. (I've misplaced my Brady Strategy Guide, so maybe somebody can remind me what it says about RBM, but I think it was something like that.) Neat gamesmanship, right? But, instead, in a classic "here's why good Interrupts are hard to design in 1E" moment, RBM only ever showed up in one of two very degenerate uses:

(1) The deck I faced, a hard lockout deck that prevented me from playing the game.

(2) RBM "ping" decks, where a single RBM would be sacrificed in a battle with opponent's crew on opponent's turn... thereby stopping said crew and preventing them from doing anything that turn. Another kind of lockout, essentially.

Decipher refused to ban cards, so instead they started making counters. RBM is probably the most-countered card of all time: I count 11 explicit counters to it, increasing over time from the very modest (Targ and Intruder Force Field) to the dramatic (Sense The Borg + Borg Neuroprocessor) to the absurd ( [Ref] Reactor Overload) until finally Decipher gave up and pseudo-banned it with Strategema.

Strategema is what got it added to the original OTF ban list, because every card named by pre-errata Strategema was banned. But, interestingly, RBM was considered a serious enough problem that, about three weeks earlier, there was a discussion about banning RBM (and Q, and for some reason Strategema itself) from Open format as well (where the only banned card has always been Raise the Stakes). However, decisionmakers were starting to work on OTF at that time, and decided that it was better to tackle everything at once in OTF's comprehensive ban list rather than single out a few cards for special treatment.

On a side note, while I was trying to figure out exactly what was going on here, I discovered that the ban list went from "here's an idea whose time has probably come" to "we're done, ship it to Playtesting" in six weeks flat -- and this happened over the Christmas holidays, when things around here usually get very quiet. The speed with which the 1E Department moved in those early days is both thrilling and terrifying.

(There was also a brief public comment period in May, which was surprisingly sparse given the explosive content.)
I think JeBuS has a point that I shoulda done this as an article series. I think I'm committed now, though.
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Director of Operations
By JeBuS (Brian S)
 - Director of Operations
 -  
1E Deep Space 9 Regional Champion 2023
#490389
BCSWowbagger wrote:I think JeBuS has a point that I shoulda done this as an article series. I think I'm committed now, though.
It's not too late to repackage it and schedule it for the holiday doldrums.
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