Dan and I had similar decks, though I think it could probably be said that I had a bit more luck in the drafting. We both started with the Klingon starters and had kept enough of the original missions to share three (two planet and a space). This left each player with one unshared space mission and two unshared planet missions.

We each had a Mirror Nor and one Mirror Planet mission to seed it at. Mine was Mirror Terok Nor at mirror Bajor and his the universal Mirror Nor at Mine Dilithium. We each seeded 3 dilemmas under the shared planet and 2 under the shared space, but that succeeded in making each of those look formidable and none were attempted. I put 5 each under Dan's unshared planets and then 3 under his unshared space, intending to defend that with a battle fleet.

My opening hand earned me a Process Ore, which became my card play, and then I used Defend Homeworld to get SC Garak to set up my play engine and draw engines. Dan had to spend the first 3 turns Ops Downloading for Process Ore and two Mirror Klingon Engineers, but that high cost netted him a great deck cycling ability which more than paid him back. It took me a while longer to get two Engineers in the Ore Processing Unit, but once I ddid we were both blowing through our decks with ease.

By the time that Dan had attempted the mission and executed 3-4 red shirts, I had cycled through my deck once, got off all my free play personnel, and had quite the fleet. I moved the 3 ships in the MQ over to the AQ (all having one Science and one Engineer each) and met the rest of the fleet at my outpost. Then I sent the ships with the worst range on ahead and cloaked them.

I first fired on Dan's Outpost the turn before he found the Dead End, as I recall, and I nearly had enough ships to one shot it. Dan had wisely docked his two ships there, so I wasn't going to stop him from running away with what few people he had. But then he did something really balsy: after playing a new ship and realizing that he could only staff 2 out of 3, he decided to undock them and stay around to see the carnage. I played and staffed an additional ship, flew all but two of my ships to the neighboring mission, and attacked his Vorcha, thereby destroying it. In return, Dan destroyed my Mirror Vorcha with all hands. Next I moved over two more ships and destroyed the K'tang. Dan retaliated by Damaging my normal Vorcha. Finally, my final 3 ships flew in and nuked the Battle Cruiser. This left Dan with 4 personnel in play: two MQ Klingon Engineers in the Ore Processing Facility, The Intendant in the Guest Quarters, and a Lone Romulan on the outpost who happened to get distracted by a Tribble during the evacuation.

On my next turn, I destroyed the outpost and the Romulan.

In retrospect, I should have flown at least one ship away to get a head start toward missions. I had sufficiently crippled Dan, especially since his deck was relatively low on Mirror personnel and that was now the only place he could report. But instead I ended up taking a few turns after the destruction of the Outpost to move across the spaceline to a mission that I could attempt.

With a score of 0 to -10, I was in a good place, but did not want to bungle it by failing a Lack of Prep and since I had primarily played personnel and ships intended for battle, I was really scrounging for mission skills. I also had little desire to attempt a shared mission as all of my unshared missions could be protected by Ref and there was still a danger of clearing out a mission only to have Dan walk over and steal it. So I ended up flying all the way out to my unshared space and clearing it to the last dilemma (it had three as I recall). I couldn't get through the Emergency Conversion as I only had one Astro in play. So on my final turn, I played the Astro and shuffled ships to solve that mission.

Given more turns, I could have solved an unshared planet and then shuffled over to steal Batleth Tournament for a 100 to -10 win, but what's the point really? The game would have been one sided for most of that (and boring for Dan), while Differential is dead last in Tie breakers and well after CVP (which is already a coin toss).

I do find it funny that so many people have asked me what happened in this game, since I have turned in this result dozens of times in online tournaments just in the last year. one should think that it would be considered my MO.

I made a couple changes to the deck between R1 and R2. I tightened up the non-fighting personnel (dropping the MQ scientist due to a lack of Science Lab), dropped the MQ Vorcha due to now less easy to staff and realization that it could not play to the Docking Pylons -> which were changed to ports).

My game vs. Rem went much like that vs. Dan, except that his deck did not draw as well as Dans (was fed) but was a better solver. I drew up and built a fleet to go blow him up, but Rem played a Where No One Has Gone Before and fucked off to the other end of the spaceline to clear missions. Not much I could have done about that, so I nuked his outpost.

He easily solved two missions too far away for me to do anything about but had to come back to Klingon Territory for the final mission. This is where I got lucky as the dilemmas happened to pick off just the guys he need to get by dilemmas and solve. I had to destroy the outpost again to prevent him from bringing in the skills and meanwhile actually completed some missions for myself.

This game went my way for most of it. Both Ken and I had battle decks, but mine drew better (due to a hell of a set up on process ore) and got the ships + commanders together first.

But Ken's deck had this going for it; it could shift to solving - which mine was quite poor at. A wise decision to get the Bajoran/Klingon treaty going meant that he could easily staff a Bajoran Warship. That thing schooled my fleet on range and Ken single attempted most missions. He was always one mission away from me, but if he had gotten stopped up (as happened to Rem), it would have been hard to rebuild. I had damaged the Bajoran Warship by this point, so he never would have made it back past the fleet to restock if the people couldn't solve the last mission.

But no, turns out the reason that I (and Rem) saw few of the best skills was because Ken was cleaning them out of packs before passing them down the line. He's the champ for a reason.

My game against Mark was just crewel and unusual punishment. He was processing Ore, but no where at the speed of my deck and I had a fleet on his doorstep before he even considered venturing away from home.

Wisely, he bailed from the outpost and retreated to the MQ before I blew it up. Then he started working on Mine Dilithium (which we shared). Given the number of people he had in play, he should have just walked right through it. But the skills needed to bust the dilemmas and solve were split between KCA and AQ Klingon dudes. This allowed me to swoop and steal it, meanwhile Mark went out to another shared mission and single attempted through it. I caught up with him in time to knock out the ship in orbit and he spent the rest of the game Processing Ore to try and get the Outpost back while I putted through missions.

Hey Mark, I told you it was just like Talos IV.3 all over again!