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Welcome to today's First Edition Friday Question, where you get a chance to answer questions that will help shape the future of First Edition. If you'd like to catch up on previous entries, here's a list of all of my previous Friday Questions:



Today, as we get ready for the first Trek Masters Series event of 2020 and start to move into Regional Season, I want to talk about decks. Not top decks, but favorite decks - the decks you love to play, even if they aren't going to win a game.

What are your favorite decks to play?

I really like theme decks, so the decks I tend to really enjoy playing are built around big themes. I've played a Generations deck before, using as many dilemmas as I can from that movie and trying to get Soran into the Nexus. I've also played "Worf and His Harem" before, where it's a deck with all females except one copy of Worf.

What kind of decks really make you excited to play them? Do you have a favorite deck of all time? Or even recently? Post links, if you have them, and share your love!

No matter what kind of deck you play, I hope you get to play this weekend.

-crp

I had a lot of fun playing this deck last year. It was based on a deck by Lucas Thompson (edgeofhearing) that I very slightly modified. More speedy and competitive than I usually like to play, but a lot of fun.

-crp

I repeatedly tried to get Dan to cut These Are The Voyages from Cold Front. It's a bad episode, I said. It's a bad concept, I said. You can't give powerful cards the high pace and flexibility of Continuing Mission, I said. We tried, but it's just not working, I said.

He stuck with it.

And now I play it constantly. There's something really fun about trying to balance the deck's delicate intermix ratio, filling its weird little skill holes, and trying to use a healthy mixture of holograms and organics at different stages of the game. And nobody techs for Holograms these days, especially not in the Alpha Quadrant, so you have some freedom of action that others don't. One of those weird pleasant surprises.

This deck is very firmly Tier 3: it won't beat Borg, it won't beat an OS Solver, it won't beat a Dominion lockdown (Tier 1), and it will only defeat TNG Speed or KCA or MACOs (Tier 2) once in a blue moon. And it's a fussy little guy, too. But I've had a bunch of fun playing it, so I keep coming back anyway.

My most recent public version of the deck is here: https://www.trekcc.org/1e/decklists/ind ... ckID=19820

(Ignore the dilemma strategy. Exobiology drain was extremely effective against certain decks in early 2019, but the release of Misinterpreted History means people actually check to make sure they have Exobiology now.)

I tend to go for either gimmicky or themed decks. I enjoy playing decks that aren't necessarily competitive, but play out some fun idea.

I built a deck that focused on the TNG episode "Birthright", using missions and personnel focused on getting prominent characters to the colony and solving the mission. I had to stretch the premise a bit to include Ja'rod and Mogh, but it seemed thematically appropriate enough.

I also had a deck that was 30 copies of Galathon solving Archaeology missions. There were dead Galathons as far as the eye could see, but it actually managed to win once.

I don't actually think I like playing decks that are efficient and teched appropriately to defend themselves. If it's not a little goofy or using long-forgotten cards, I just don't seem to find pleasure in playing it.

I always try to build the deck that IMO is one of the best in the current meta. In decipher times that meant 4 years hirogen.

Luckly since trekcc is there, a lot more affiliations get almost equaly competitive.

I love the ideas of themed decks. But when "mixed" decks are more competivie i play them.

idealy i find one specific surprise (interaction).

Like:
Playing CM Klingons and suddenly download Penk + Tsunkatsi ship with captains log for +13 weapons for my klingon ship to blow up an important ship and continue the game without CM.

or using Admiral Riker for I.S.S. Enterprise + Tiberius Kirk + Tantalus field

or Wormhole a Ventic Hunter to alpha quadrant when Holoprogram: Fortress of Doom when both where not errataed yet.

etc.

I think the only deck that's still legal that I like is Full Contact Borg - find out how fast those speed decks are when a cube is a-comin'.

Before that? Death Star Nine was fun and janky. All planet Iconian Gateway was amusing in the right meta.

Looking at my affiliation choices from the events I've played in, there's a lot of . I've just often gravitated towards / for awhile, having had a number of ideas of variations of how to play them -- crew reassignment + arne darvin @ k7 to draw cards with my CF guys? I deviated from this once even to go with era augments and the General to allow me 2 draws when playing a ❖ augment to K7, which was a fun and novel draw engine, I thought.

Anyway, they've got some good skills, a bunch of free playing ships that download staffing, so it's easy to build up some decent personnel to attempt missions and have a few spare, easily staffed ships to go threaten my opponents with.


More specifically, one of my favorites was one that I think had a losing record, but was goofy fun, using the 2E ECH in a mostly Romulan deck + I've been waiting for you to swap him out with a different holo so I could replay him again and again to drop more Nelvana Traps on my opponent's missions.


But I think my favorite deck of all time was the one I took to worlds (and stupidly saved for the team event instead of playing it in one of the big events) like 15 years ago that I'm pretty sure is the reason that Launch Portal got its way onto Strategema, since I was playing it in front of all the people from Decipher and it was messy. Basically the idea was to use baker street to put 2 ❖ Jem hadar from TwT (cause I could get my hands on hundreds of copies of them) underneath so they played for free. and using Deyos + launch portal & STP I could generate an infinite number of them on turn. Empty my hand of them to draw cards, playing them straight to my ship with ASP, and if I got stuck with a draw, I could just suspend play to launch portal a sona shuttle, STP it back to hand and play those 10 guys or whatever to get the draws/plays started again. Repeating as necessary til' the deck was depleted and I had my horde assembled.

So I think I brought like a 500 card deck, and managed to deck myself with pretty much a literal army of these two jem'hadar on the second turn, QSD my ship to you and let's party.

I recall one very sour opponent being quite petulant in the game because I guess the deck also managed to generate enough ships (sona shuttles iirc) to direct hit his unicomplex on like T3, and he was rather displeased with the cheese. But it was great fun to be on that side of it, and genuinely not care about redshirting through missions -- if you can call it that when you're redshirting with like 10 guys... ok, 2 guys but 5 copies of each of them

princedetenebres wrote:Basically the idea was to use baker street to put 2 ❖ Jem hadar from TwT (cause I could get my hands on hundreds of copies of them) underneath so they played for free. and using Deyos + launch portal & STP I could generate an infinite number of them on turn. Empty my hand of them to draw cards, playing them straight to my ship with ASP, and if I got stuck with a draw, I could just suspend play to launch portal a sona shuttle, STP it back to hand and play those 10 guys or whatever to get the draws/plays started again. Repeating as necessary til' the deck was depleted and I had my horde assembled.

I must be missing something, cuz I don't see how this worked, based on the cards mentioned.

https://www.trekcc.org/1e/cardimages/ha ... alomew.jpg

With the old version of Regina & Moriarty, the people under Baker Street play for free, not even once per turn.

So I play 1 of them for free, draw with Deyos, play another, draw another. And if I get to a point where I no longer have any to play, I suspend play to launch portal and STP the ship back to hand (without going to execute orders) to kick-start the drawing again. And it can outlast your Scorched Hands just by doing this again and again (since Tribunal was not yet a thing, so you couldn't retrieve it from the discard pile).

I really like TOS Fed because I don't feel like I'm playing so slow I'm going to lose.

I did like playing Vulcans before IDIC High Command was nerfed so hard the entire deck died.

princedetenebres wrote:https://www.trekcc.org/1e/cardimages/ha ... alomew.jpg

With the old version of Regina & Moriarty, the people under Baker Street play for free, not even once per turn.

So I play 1 of them for free, draw with Deyos, play another, draw another. And if I get to a point where I no longer have any to play, I suspend play to launch portal and STP the ship back to hand (without going to execute orders) to kick-start the drawing again. And it can outlast your Scorched Hands just by doing this again and again (since Tribunal was not yet a thing, so you couldn't retrieve it from the discard pile).

Yep, that's the piece of the puzzle I was missing.

Bajorans!!!

so many different options you can do

Hero of the Empire! Always fun!

In think honestly, the most fun deck I think I ever played was the old cytherians shuffle deck. Recently though I have a lot of fun with dominion. There's a lot you can do and I've barely scratched the surface of what I want to eventually do with them.

I love thematic decks! I love themed play engines. TNG, DS9 all have been great. TOS now has some great stuff and looking forward to doing more play with that and now I can look forward to TMP/CF soon!

My favorite affiliations to play...

1) Cardassians (solo, Romulans, maybe some day Dom for Terok Nor play)
2) Feds (#1 TMP, #2 DS9, #3 TNG, #4 Voyager, #5 EE)
3) Theme decks in general (Legit/Illegit TNG Kli, Nexus/Generation, fun stuff!)

~D