For posting 1E deck designs for feedback from other players and members of the community.
 
By Thabg3
 - New Member
 -  
#538479
Hi everyone,

I okayed this game as a kid in 1994. Still have all the old cards. Curious I got on eBay and was happy to see some of these original cards are worth more than $0.00. I was also excited to see that the WB booster boxes of the first set were ~ $20.00 so I bought a dozen boxes or so and gave 2 to a handful of friends who played also when we were young and other friends from Magic who I know could pick up the game quickly.

I’m wondering if there is a best deck or every better a best deck for each affiliation. We only have the original set so there’s no doorways or anything fancy yet but I imagine we’ll expand.

If anyone is able to help out with some pointers on building constructed decks with the base set that would be awesome.

Also - I see some cards are banned like horga’hn but we are prolly ok playing with those as printed for the time being.

Any help and guidance is Much appreciated.

Thanks,
Bobby
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By Professor Scott (Mathew McCalpin)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
Trailblazer
1E Cardassia Regional Champion 2023
#538489
Hey there and welcome. Glad you found us.

Banned cards are only banned for tournament play. If you guys are having a local battle royale, go for it. Only Raise the Stakes is probably the only card you should locally ban, or not if you feel like playing for keeps. After all you gave them the boxes anyway. In the base set, [Fed] is going to have the easiest go of it. They had the best skill matrix of the 3 main affiliations, not that splashing in [NA] to your [Kli] or [1E-Rom] decks won't balance you out some. It's just that the base set had way more skill laden folks in blue, but many of them are rare but with 2 boxes each, that may not be a problem, especially if you swap between you.
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By Boffo97 (Dave Hines)
 - Gamma Quadrant
 -  
Retired Moderator
#538498
And even if you don't ban Raise the Stakes, playing by the letter of the rules, you can argue that unless a player has exactly 60 cards total in their deck, it does nothing anyway.

After all, one can't forfeit a card from their 60 card deck if one does not have a 60 card deck. ;)
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By SudenKapala (Suden Käpälä)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#538501
Welcome back!

AFAIK, there are very few Traditional decks (made from Decipher cards) floating around on the forums. And Premiere only, I think there are none.

But the Player Resources topic (and especially the Starter Decks topic included there!) are the ones to browse, to be sure.

The game is most often played with Virtual (free-to-be-printed) cards, as you may have seen; and with new OTF rules (as opposed to, say, the old Open). These are great, and I hear and trust without exception that they make the current game state a better one. But for nostalgic, purely Traditional players (like myself and my group, and some newcomers / returners -- like yourself for the time being) there is painfully little support in the way of existing deck lists and ready pointers. :(

But aside from that, everyone on these boards is very helpful (as you see above) and the knowledge is there; so if you post any specific rules or deck building questions, you'll usually get elaborate and multiple answers soon. :)

Eventually, if you weighed all the pros'n'cons, you could look at these Traditional Open Training decks, but they are more for teaching (and fun) than they are competitive; they are Premiere-like (e.g., relatively basic) in gameplay, but they contain cards from many sets besides premiere.
And if you keep at it, my play group and I might have quite a few very quirky decks among us, to share...?
Also, if you want old Decipher rules documents, they do exist (but are obsolete now). My dark ages group still uses them. 8)
Boffo97 wrote: Wed Dec 30, 2020 4:03 am... one can't forfeit a card from their 60 card deck if one does not have a 60 card deck. ;)
Huh! That sounds like a very 1e (First Edition) way of looking at what is essentially a Magic TG card. 8) :thumbsup:
 
By Thabg3
 - New Member
 -  
#538696
What's a good mix of ships/personel/events/interrupts for deck construction?


Should I choose and build my seed deck first? then pick personel?
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By SudenKapala (Suden Käpälä)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#538715
To begin with, you can look at your seed deck in at least 3 different "zones"; dilemmas (often 18), missions, and other seed cards (often 12). You may want to start by choosing "other seed cards", plus draw cards (and side deck / Q's Tent cards) that go with your theme / main mechanic. As this may include some personnel already (with, say, [DL] ), this may already have an influence on your choice of missions -- hence why those might come later.

Those are my first pointers. I'll let others chime in on what follows, and your other questions.
 
By Thabg3
 - New Member
 -  
#538728
I guess my questions at this point are even more basic than that. I have a very strong magic background so any correlation to explain things will make it super easy?

(keep in mind that were only using the first edition(premier?)) so we wont have Q's tent or anything like that. Just the seed deck and the draw deck, and a bunch of borg ship dilemma i assume :)

is there a maximum number of the same card allowed in a deck? For example can i play 5 red alerts?

I see that seed deck is 30 cards and draw deck any be any amount but at least 30 cards. is it best to stay close to 30? would it be better to play more?

We will likely have a 4 player game so should we play towards 200 points instead of 100 etc?

Are equipment as bad as i think they are? would you play one in your deck?

That's the basic kind of advice that i'm looking for right now, If the first few games go well I imagine this group will take to the game (as i hope) and then we'll be off to the races and the other sets etc.

thanks again
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By PantsOfTheTalShiar (Jason Tang)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#538735
Welcome, Bobby! I'll try to answer some of your questions about deck construction, with the caveat that I don't remember Premiere-only very well, and I wasn't a very good CCG player at the time. :) So this is my attempt to retrofit my current understanding of the game to that card pool.

Typically personnel are the majority of your draw deck, so for a starting point I'd suggest 15-20 in a 30-card deck. Deck building is an iterative process, but I would suggest starting by looking at what your best personnel are (typically most skills/best skills) and seeing if you have any missions those personnel would be good at solving. Then you can fill any skill gaps as needed with your remaining personnel.

Try something like 3-5 ships, because until you draw one, you can only attempt one mission (assuming you seed your outpost at a planet mission, which you should if possible). A few copies of card draw Events like Kivas Fajo - Collector, The Traveler: Transcendence, and/or Masaka Transformations can help you find your ships.

There are no limits on copies of a card in the First Edition of STCCG.

I remember playing Equipment back in the 90s when I was playing with my friend, and they were not obviously terrible, but we were obviously not playing the game optimally (we also might have been playing them incorrectly :P ). You can maybe try 1-2 in your deck, but you aren't missing much if you don't have any.

Regarding banned cards: STCCG 1E is similar to Magic in that the original game is pretty balanced under the assumption that players will only buy a limited quantity of it. There's a chance that 2 booster boxes/person exceeds that limit, but to start you're probably fine playing no bans, no errata. (But yes, Raise the Stakes is basically ante, so maybe you want to ban that anyway.)

-Jason
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By SudenKapala (Suden Käpälä)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#538741
Thabg3 wrote: Sat Jan 02, 2021 12:18 amsuper easy?
Barely an inconvenience.
is it best to stay close to 30? would it be better to play more?
Same as in MTG. The smaller the deck, tge better your chances of drawing those
obscure cards -- but it must be big enough to contain all the needed skills.

What the Pants said. But if you don't use (too many) cards for deck manipulation, I'd consider 4 ships to be the bare minimum.

We played per the local tourney rules back then -- 70 card total deck limit, The stakes banned, and some restricted cards. I could post the list if you like. Play and draw engines like Alert and Transcendence were definitely restricted (not banned!), as was Palor Toff. But those specific old-school tourney rules are, really, house rules.
I do have many old documents (as does Wowbagger's FTP site) if you'd like them; there may be more official tourney rules in those.
We will likely have a 4 player game so should we play towards 200 points instead of 100 etc?
MP (multi-player) games last longer to begin with. My experience has been: change as little as possible; but we did benefit greatly from some other MP house rules.
The Player's Guide from Brady had some pointers for MP, and there is an "official Decipher experimental MP rules sheet", but neither is optimal IMO. I really feel we nailed it, with our 'keep it simple' mash-up of all the available ideas.

A link to a whole topic on MP -- starting with my group's MP rules -- can be found through my ((full?) profile >) signature > "your" > list at bottom of that post. Howl if you can't find it!
Are equipment as bad as i think they are? would you play one in your deck?
I think I remember weapons being the least useless, speeding up against Nausicaan rebels and the like...?
 
By Thabg3
 - New Member
 -  
#538804
thank you both, those posts were very helpful. I can pass that info along to the group and we can go from there.

I build a [1E-Rom] [NA] and used mostly missions with easy points for treachery and [1E-Rom] only or [Kli] only as i suspect the most powerful cards everyone is going to open (*myself included) are gonna be [Fed].

I also have some powerful dilemma i believe? and have heard in our text chat "omg rofl borg ship etc." so i expect some of those and am gonna play a hugh.

Thanks again for the input everyone
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By SudenKapala (Suden Käpälä)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#538807
I am always very approving of packing any kind of Tactic drone. :borg:

(Did you find the MP topic? Hard to link on my phone, but I will if you need me to.)

Husnock ships are also a way of surviving Borg, and more common. And the episode is only slightly less awesome (but still hugely so) than Hugh's, which is also a factor for me. 8)
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