has so much draw already across the board, I don't think adding more would help them. (
New Frontiers,
Cross-Quadrant Expansion,
Morn,
Celestial Temple,
Process Ore,
Study Divergent History at Bajor or Cardassia,
Guest Quarters,
Promenade Shops,
A Better Alternative -- although this last suffers from being hard to get on the table without ruining your deck ratio --
Mutual Distrust,
Renewal Scroll,
New Arrivals -- which is
huge for Cardassians running
Dominion War Efforts --
Reward from the Founders,
Bajoran Resistance Cell... and that's just the decent ones! There are also usually-bad options like
Bajor for Bajorans,
Determined to Stay,
Cargo Bay,
Forced-Labor Camp, and
Articles of Jurisprudence. And this doesn't touch on the more generic engines like
Duck Blind and
Kivas and
War Council and
Fajo's Gallery.)
Obviously
does have something wrong with them, or they'd be played more, but I don't think draw is it. They've got more draw than anybody.
A chunk of it I think has to be chalked up to Nors being fundamentally unattractive to a lot of players. I like them, because I like complex fiddly things, but even I want to overhaul the compatibility, beaming, and walking rules, because they are a headache. I might go so far as to make "Nor rules overhaul" the #1 thing
needs, and that applies to most of the factions to one degree or another.
The inability to pass QI, which Armus mentions, is another huge factor. Depending on which faction you're looking at,
has only extremely limited and extremely
expensive access to Empathy and/or
. I have definitely given up on DS9 decks in frustration because my
only option to pass QI's Empathy requirement is to stock 2 copies of
Soto and an
Altovar. (Lwaxana Troi helps HBI decks, but HBI has no free-play options for
, so they've got their own problems.)
Each individual faction has its own friction points. I'll try and go through what I perceive as the biggest needs, starting with the most viable DS9 faction (Here By Invitation Federation) and going down toward the least.
- It's been a while since I ran this, and I've been meaning to get back to it for literally years now. But my memory of it is that the biggest weakness of this deck is its dependence on the
Defiant, and specifically sending the
Defiant out into the field. If it gets blown up and you have to replace it with the
Sao Paolo or whatever, it's really very bad -- much worse than losing the
Enterprise in a Finest Crew deck. It's more like losing Gowron in a Legitimate Leader deck, but it's a lot easier to keep Gowron safe, IMHO. That treaty is also terrifyingly vulnerable to
Kevin [EDIT: sorry, obvs meant The Devil], which made all my HBI decks skew
heavily toward
in case I lose the treaty. Honestly, though, I think HBI Fed is in a pretty good place and doesn't really
need a lot more juice. I tend to chalk up its lack of play to the first two factors.
My last deck with this faction (yes, it's super dee duper old): https://www.trekcc.org/1e/decklists/ind ... ckID=10171
-
Greater Glory of Cardassia was a fantastic card and really patched the gaping holes in Cardassian decks. Cardassia's trouble is that you really want to stack
I Miss This Office with
Central Command, just like Bajorans stack Here By Invitation with
Chamber of Ministers and TNG Feds stack
Finest Crew with
Holodeck Door or
Cybernetics Expertise or
Office of the President (and so on for every other TNG affiliation). But, unlike all those other groups, the Cardassians are locked into using two fixed locations (Bajor and Cardassia) and have no way of guaranteeing that they are anywhere close to each other on the spaceline. This leads Cardassian players into a cul-de-sac, with the dominant DS9 Cardassian builds being either HQ-only decks or Nor-only decks (often with a Bajoran treaty to engage Free Report Salad) rather than a blend like everybody else. While there's a certain story-based sense to the idea that Cardassians work best by exploiting Bajor rather than working with their own homeworld, finding a way to make transit between Terok Nor and Cardassia Prime simple would go a long way. Also: I think
Awaiting Trial is a sleeper broken card, and I've been meaning to get back to them, in part so I can show this. So could Cardassians use some help? Yes. Are they in a really bad way? No. It's
possible to win a tournament with them, if not particularly easy.
My last public deck with this faction [unusual Nor-only build]:
https://www.trekcc.org/1e/decklists/ind ... ckID=12157
Jason Tang's last public deck with this faction [archetypical HQ-only build]:
https://www.trekcc.org/1e/decklists/ind ... ckID=16758
- Honestly, I think they could just use some more personnel. And maybe some treaty protection. They're okay. The facts that the free report doesn't have to be to Orias, and that Orias isn't necessarily stealable, are tremendous... though I find in practice it can sometimes lead players to just do DS9-Romulan builds that totally ignore Orias or perhaps don't even seed it. But that's not really a bad thing, IMO.
My last public deck with this faction: https://www.trekcc.org/1e/decklists/ind ... ckID=15554
- There are a lot of ways to approach this. They don't have enough personnel, and the balance that they have isn't quite great. Thanks to They Call Themselves The Maquis, it is very very easy to stack Maquis with a different main play engine (often MQ decks), but, thanks to the restrictions on Not So Demilitarized, it is basically impossible to stack Maquis as a main play engine with anything else. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I think they need to stack better, given their very limited personnel selection. The straightforwardest thing to do would be to give them a
facility that either (a) is
, so they can stack with War Council, (b) allows Resistance personnel to report for free once per turn, so they can kinda stack with BRC in a story-relevant way, (c) allows Alliance for Global Unity to report to it, or (d) all of the above?? Learning Curve is super cool, and I'm not sure the Maquis would need an extra way to get it out early if their other problems were patched.
I've never built a public deck with this faction, but I have tried
several times.
- De-errata
Sucking Up To The Boss. Make it 33rd Rule of Acquisition, give it a
icon, let it work while facing a dilemma as it did originally. (Or just make a new card called 33rd Rule that is strictly better than Sucking Up, whatever works.) The Ferengi have a lot of strengths (and some gigantic weaknesses), but none of them can make up for their enormous skill holes except this card, which was not a problem at the time it was gutted because (unlike, say, Wisdom of Surak or pre-errata Security Drills) Ferengi aren't using skill cheaters to wheedle past tough walls; they're using skill cheaters to fill
basic holes in their skill matrix like OFFICER. I really miss this card, because I saw it used before its nerf in a couple of really fun DS9 decks and I was excited to see how good those decks would become once Ferengi got their own
card. Instead, Ferengi came out of The Gamma Quadrant even less playable than they had been the day before -- and I really do chalk it up to that single decision. Reducing the cost of transiting the wormhole would also be a huge help -- Ferengi have to go back and forth a lot more than anybody else, which is too bad, because both
Wormhole Navigation Schematic and
Operate Wormhole Relays are
extremely difficult for them to use.
My last deck with this faction:
https://www.trekcc.org/1e/decklists/ind ... ckID=12435
- A broader non-HQ play engine.
Finest Crew gives you access to 53 personnel. Legitimate Leader, 56 personnel. Here By Invitation, 36 personnel. I Miss This Office, 40 personnel (hedged somewhat but not tremendously by the peculiar Site requirements) (and that's without Comfort Women). Joint Operation, 19 personnel, which seems to be at the lower boundary of viability.
All of these engines can be readily supplemented with an HQ free report.
Bajorans have two options for play engines: Alliance for Global Unity and Bajoran Resistance Cell. BRC gives you access to 13 personnel, which is savage for a primary play engine. But the actual
card, Alliance for Global Unity, gives you access to a grand total of
8 personnel (!!!), which makes it more like
Scientific Diplomacy than a real play engine... and then it has the nerve to make its main draw boost (
Bajor for Bajorans) restrict you to
, which makes it even more difficult to supplement with others. Worse, there's a good deal of overlap between Alliance for Global Unity and Chamber of Ministers, so your Bajoran decks end up with VIP x1000 and MEDICAL x2.
Colonel Kira (Warp Pack) may help with draws, but the skill matrix for Bajorans is so fundamentally broken by its underpowered free report engines that nobody's tried her out yet.
In short, I think Bajorans need a totally new
card -- one that provides ready access to 30-40 Bajoran free reports representing a broad cross-section of the affiliation.
My last public deck with this faction::
https://www.trekcc.org/1e/decklists/ind ... ckID=15553
- I have never played with
Reward From The Founders nor built a deck around it nor played against anyone who was running it, so I honestly have no idea how these guys are. They're on my backlog, have been since they came out, but for all I know they're Tier-1 already and just waiting to be discovered. Or they're garbage. Or anywhere in between. Point is, I have no clue.