Fritzinger wrote:chompers wrote:
.... and works at headquarters
It takes a year for the first person to try this at a serious tournament. How much worse could it be after a bunch of people try it?
(although I do trust Greg to go full mad-scientist and produce something well-tuned in the lab. So maybe this is the worst it could be)
There seems to be general trend of fewer players playing and those that are playing doing it less often. Obvious power cards like
The Enemy of my Enemy will quickly expose themselves as powerful or a problem. Cards like
TR-116 Rifle are more likely to take time as its the player and the deck its put in that will expose the power / problem. So I am not particularly surprised it took a while for this one to rise to the top.
I played Greg day 1 and lost to his Romulan deck. It wasn't obvious to me how to beat it because I was so unfamiliar with the cards he was using as I barely play these days. I also don;t consider it a strength of mine to break apart or even beat well designed interference decks.
Either way - on day 1 I did not see the weapon in use (I am not sure if that was intentional on Greg's part ... if it was
). I went home and made some changes that I felt might help a little if I faced the same deck on day 2. Then on day 2 I managed to use
Silaran Prin to prevent an early play of
Tal. It mattered little because I attempted too early (to try and dodge
Deep Hatred) and lost a heap of crew and got destaffed when Greg targeted gold staffing icons (I was on
Groumall so not too hard to staff). He then started picking gold stars off at my HQ with the rifle each turn and I barely managed to get another crew together to try another attempt before I decked myself. Second mission attempt he was setup to draw and play extra dilemmas and complete the lockout. Against these types of decks it is often advantageous to wait and get a larger crew but all that does is give him time to setup TR-116 Rifle and start sniping.
It will take a better player than me to find a solution. Weapons don't have counters outside of mission attempts do they? Kill prevention seems obvious but it will have to be outside the mission attempt which will limit what can be used against it (interrupts won't work well with Deep Hatred) If it is a personnel -- the personnel will have to be able to prevent their own death. His deck does not intend to attempt missions unless it has to so the dilemma pile is not going to help. Speed doesn't seem to be a reliable solution because the Cardassian deck is pretty fast if it doesn't lose its tools. So there might be a solution but it seems it might be narrow and affiliation based.
Emergency Transport Unit works and costs one less than the rifle so that might be it! ... except for
Obedient Centurian
As for design improving? I dunno? They have given us some interesting cards but some seem poorly designed from my perspective. They seem to have ignored what I would have thought are some fundamentals of design. But what would I know though -- I am not a designer and only get to see the product of design.