This is the second Call to Arms sealed event that I played in, the first being run by OKCoyote (Dan Matty) as part of the Return to Farpoint Season I series. I wanted to pull either the DS9, TNG, or Borg starter, so I was pleased with what I got.

One weakness of the Borg starter is that there are less possible cards to pull from the packs. I got a lot of great Non-aligned personnel, which I cannot use at all. For that reason, the deck shouldn't look too different from the Borg Starter.

Overall, I think I won this game because I pulled the better starter. Though I've never played the Dominion Starter, it seemed to have some weaknesses. Addison and I played equally as well.

I had 3 ships in hand rather early, but was also spewing cheap drones o ut quite easily. I opted to play a cube first, as it had the best range. But I had a hard decision of whether or not to attempt on Turn 3. I only had 6 personnel, and the ship itself has a staffing requirement of 5, so if Addison could kill two, I'd be destaffed. Still, I went for it and this paid off in my favour. Addison played Inside Collaborators for a full stop and dilemma bounce, but I played Analyze to make it get overcome. This was a big factor in this game, as the Dominion starter has a good number of Ds that the Borg just can't do. Namely Inside Collaborators and Command Decisions. Getting them under the missions was key to victory.

I was able to play many more drones on my next turn, return home,fly back out to the mission, and do a big attempt. Here, Addison stopped my personnel and managed to kill two as well. This is how things would go. On my third attempt he stopped me but had enough under that the 4th was a certain solve. Meanwhile, he did fly out to attempt a mission, but due to the range issue of Dominion, he could not fly home and restock without losing a turn to attempting. Instead, his initial crew re-attempted each turn and got zero or 1 under each time while losing a couple here and there to kill Ds. It wasn't until he had played a second ship and staffed it that Addison was able to bring the personnel out to solve.

But the best play of the game came when I attempted my second mission. Again, it went 3 attempts over three turns with one Inside Collaborators doing a full stop, a second attempt with 3 under but a decent amount of death (this time taking out my Strength boost drone and Seven of Nine) and a third attempt which managed to stop the solve but put enough under to guarantee a solve on the next turn. But this time, I actually got the Queen to the mission and then Addison offed her with a well played Parting Shot! The best part being that I had turned my other Borg Queen into the graveyard using this queen's ability, so I was all out of Queen. Ultimately, that didn't matter as two copies of Analyze ensured that the Inside Collaborators stayed under the completed missions.

Ultimately, Addison got through his second mission by doing multiple attempts and being able to solve with very few thanks to very strong Jem'hadar. But he never got D's under the third mission since I had successfully called him having no Anthropology or Arch due to having not played the former and having his only Arch stoped and left behind at his planet mission.

I was able to eventually solve the third mission as Addison was inevitably out of dilemmas that worked well against me, though it was getting scary as I only had 2 Security in play and with the Queen dead, losing one more Security could have made the mission hard to solve.

Like Addison, TJ had the Dominion starter. But unlike Addison, he had a lot of Anthrolopology and even a dude with Archaeology. This made it very hard for me to hold out the missions, as he had a good amount of the skills on my dilemmas and the Founders + Jem'hadar have amazing stats.

Things started out poorly for me, even though I left home first, as I tried to throw light at missions in order to have more to play later and that just ended up with TJ being 2 missions ahead of me rather quickly. I did a bit better at the final mission, which was the space one as I recall. I recognized that the skills he needed for the mission were on one particular person and was able to stop her by picking odff skills unique to her. this bought me some time.

But where TJ really destroyed me was on my mission attempts. The dilemmas that come in his starter target Diplomacy and Officer quite a bit and it took a while for me to find a queen. So most of what I saw was random deaths. Somehow and with amazing proficiency, TJ picked off my Security personnel with these random selections and left me digging in my deck to find more (as it is in all my missions requirements). The deck is not particularly weak on Security if it stays in play. Since I kept losing my mission requirements, I ended up working on two space missions and putting a good number of dilemmas under. This set me up for one more turn where I was certain to solve both and be able to fly to my planet mission and give it a go.

Of course, to do that, I needed to hold TJ out one more time, and that is not how it went. As a result, it looks like I was further behind that I was, but I am certain that he would have won, I just would have liked that one more turn to get the missions solved.

I was beginning to wonder if there were only Borg and Dominion starters in the field, but then I faced Ted and he had Klingon. This should mean that it was an auto-win for me, but Ted actually drafted quite well.

Ted managed to pull Lore (The One) from his packs and Lore not only has the best Cunning in the game but all the skills for the Klingon missions. Suddenly, Ted went from having a horrible starter to a very good one. What's more, he drew and played Lore on Turn 1, so my hopes of an easy win were dashed quickly.

This game went a lot like the one vs. TJ. On the first attempt at Ted's first two missions, I through two dilemmas, which was enough to stop him and then one more which read: unless you have skills X, y, and Z : Lore dies. This put one extra dilemma under but had the chance, based one the early random stops, of hindering Ted considerably, however both time he managed to have the skills and I just made it harder to hold him out on the next attempt (fewer dilemmas to draw and play).

Plus, my mission attempts did not go too well until I drew into the Queen. At that point, I started giving everyone the skill of Officer and his dilemmas didn't work as well against me. Still, there was a point where he was up two missions and I only had a good number of dilemmas under the two space missions. This time, it was because of ship range but still, I was playing to solve them both on one turn and be able to fly to planet in the same turn.

This time, I got my chance and was double attempting planet. But I made a fatal mistake. After making two crews with the skills to the missions, I made one last minute change and that left the second crew short a Security. This meant that I had the people to solve but had not brought the skills, even though none of the key skills were stopped. I had to hold Ted out one more turn and he could also double attempt.

So, I took a big risk. I knew that I did not have Timescape and that I needed to put as few dilemmas under on the first attempt or the second could just walk through. So, I gave him two dilemmas (only one going under) where the second said effectively: if you brought Lore, then you win the game. Well he hadn't. For the second attempt, I correctly predicted that he would send both copies of Meraht with Lore and that turned out to be true. So i got one more turn and could double attempt again, which was plenty.