And How to play it

The Dominion have 2 unique abilities that scream to have decks designed around them. The first is Infiltrators, and the second is Invasive Beam-In. While most people can readily see the power of Invasive Beam-In, the lack of Dominion decks in the tournament environment indicates that many don’t believe it is worthy enough to compete against the established deck types. They Are So Wrong!

I have made two different versions of my Invasive beam-in deck, but have only used the one in a tournament environment. I thought it would do well, but was shocked at how well it did do. By the end of the day, a lot of players including myself were trying to think of ways to beat the deck. Our end conclusion was that the Dominion are more powerful than people realize. My personnel conclusion was worse than that. I lacked some cards I wanted for the deck, and didn’t have a chance to tune it as I did make it in a rush. Because of this I believe the deck could have been stronger, which means it would have been too powerful and in many ways I think, excluding luck, unbeatable.

Now that I have your attention, I can hear you saying to show you this marvelous deck. Calm down J First off a few notes. The deck list I am providing is the one I used in the tournament. It was set up to go against the metagame in my local area. This will be different to the metagame in your area so remember to modify it. Also remember I haven’t fully tuned this deck, so I encourage you to practice a little with it and tune it for yourself.

I will provide here the deck list, followed by a short piece of how I played it. This should be enough to get you started.

For those who need to know more, I will then go through the deck discussing why everything is in it, why I put it in, what I might change as well as how it works.

Senator Cretak’s Invasive Beam-In deck (v1) –

Seed Cards:

Intelligence Operation

Aid Fugitives

Construct Depot x3

Botanical Research

Space-Time Portal

Q’s Tent

Ultimatum

Invasive Beam-In

Establish Dominion Foothold

The Great Link

Primary Supply Depot

Gold Pressed Latinum x3 (at the Primary supply depot)

Neutral Outpost

Spacedoor (on the Primary supply depot)

Dilemmas: (encountered first to encountered last)

[s] Borg Ship, Strict Dress Code, Gravimetric Distortion

[s] Borg Ship, Cytherians, Maglock

[p] Dalrok, Hippocratic Oath, Odo’s Cousin

[p] Berserk Changeling, Friendly Fire, Founders Secret

[s/p] Dalrok, Hippocratic Oath, Chula: The Lights

[s/p] Dalrok, Hippocratic Oath, Shaka When the walls fell

Temporal Vortex

HQ: Secure Homeworld

Ketracel White

Invasive Beam-In

Regenerate

Kar’takin

Jem’Hadar Disruptor Rifle

Omet’iklan

Full Planet Scan

Jem’Hadar Warship

Reflection Therapy

The Traveler: Transcendence

Remote Supply Depot

Martok Founder

Kira Founder

Leyton Founder

O’Brien Founder

Lovok Founder

Odo Founder

Founder Leader

Founder x3

Weyoun

Kilana

Gelnon

Goran’agar

Inglatu x4

Nick Locarno

Thomas Paris

Kasidy Yates

Lore

Roga Danar

Suna

Jem’Hadar Warship

Karemman Vessel

Q’s Tent x2

Devidian Door x2

Kar’takin x2

Jem’Hadar Disruptor Rifle

Palor Toff x4

Wormhole x6

Kivas Fajo – Collector x4

This deck is fairly straight forward. The Idea is to kill all your opponent’s personnel, then casually do your missions. To do this you must keep cards coming into your hand, Kivas Fajo and the traveler in the tent, in combination with Palor Toffs makes this possible. Founders report for free and the other dominion personnel report to the primary supply depot. Once you have a Warship (downloadable) and an Inglatu you move to the homeworld and exchange the Latinum for the 3 weapons in the deck (or the ones in the Q’s tent depending on what personnel you have). By this stage (turn 4) you should have between 4-7 personnel present and at least one wormhole in your hand (preferably 2),as well as transporter skill and someone to initiate battle. Wormhole to where your opponent is. Many players by at this stage will have any personnel they have reported together in one group (hopefully still the outpost). Beam aboard and kill everyone. You should be able to hopefully do this in one turn. Continue to eliminate all your opponents personnel while you draw and play cards, preparing for your mission attempts. Do the missions and win the game. Pretty simple stuff ;)

Well already I am sure many of you are saying – "but what about if ‘this’ happens". And "how do you handle ‘this’ ". This is a natural reaction many people have when reading a deck on paper and having someone rave about how good it is. The best way to find out if it is good is to try it yourself. Just remember that this deck was designed for my playing style and to go against the players I play in my area. If you want it to work for you, it will need to be changed to your style. In the end the core concept still remains the same. You win by killing your opponents personnel, and then completing your missions. In many ways it plays like an armada deck so many should find it easy to use.

First off, let’s have a look at the seed aspect of the deck. Mission selection is very important for the Dominion. I had to use the homeworld for the great link, and needed another planet for the primary supply depot. The best choice was Aid Fugitives. This allowed me to use a lot of Hippocratic Oaths (I only had 3 unfortunately) which would remove a person from them quite nicely. This left the Alpha Quadrant. The best missions are often the ones with low range. I chose Botanical Research because the requirements were very easy for my deck. I would have used more but could only find the one. So in my haste I added in 3 construct depots. The problem here was that I only had 1 source of physics (O’Brien), and even with reflection therapy I still didn’t feel safe enough to do the missions.

Possibly the best mission for the Dominion in the Alpha quadrant (And definetly the best if you are playing the Jem’hadar version of this deck) is Study Plasma Storms – but in my version, astrophysics is non-existent, so I did not use it.

The Great Link was a must, and the primary supply depot was used for 2 reasons. First I could put a spacedoor on it, to guarantee a ship. The second is that I could seed 3 Latinum, and in combination with the Inglatu, exchange them for 3 weapons. There is no other affiliation that can start with this many weapons on the table. Only the Klingons with Kor, Kang, Koloth and Jadzia come close to equaling the kill potential, but even them together are no match for this deck. This only works if you play with a lot of acquisition (Inglatu’s). Unfortunately I only own 4 and figured it would have to do. Mind you with the combination of Kivas’s and the traveler, I always had at least one down when I began my attack (and always by turn4).

In the Alpha quadrant I seeded a neutral outpost. This would often be my last seed as I would like to get it as close to my opponent as possible. The reason for this is that I had to make up the transporter skill out of Non-aligned people. To make it possible for me to attack quickly It helped if I could pick up the required transporter skill from the outpost and still have the range to get to my opponents outpost .

The Q’s tent is obvious, and so is the space time portal. It is worthy to note that you can use STP to complete a wormhole. This has three advantages. You only need one wormhole in your hand to get into the alpha quad. Risky – but it is needed in some situations. It makes a backup for when your opponent Amandas one of your wormholes. I would have preferred to have seeded 2 Space time Portals but seed space was at a premium.

Invasive beam-In is also an obvious seed and is the life blood of this deck. Note that it is NOT immune to ‘Kevin’. In my area, Kevins (as well as the other counters) are few and far between. I felt safe with my palor toffs and an extra copy in the Q’s tent. If counters are heavy in your area, consider an extra Invasive Beam-In in the deck as well as using Oof!.

Ultimatum was seeded so that I could use it to download a remote supply depot in the alpha quadrant (as well as 2 more weapons :). While a good option I found it was very rarely needed, and will most likely drop it when I tweak the deck.

Establish Dominion Foothold was seeded to provide me with 10 extra points for one of my missions. While this sometimes meant I could win in 3 missions, I found that it was also not essential. Once I eliminated my opponents personnel, scan and a bit of patience made it easy for me to walk through my missions.

In regards to the dilemmas, I chose combinations that were nasty to small groups of people. Dal’rok is extremely nasty against someone trying to avoid my hit squads, and I seeded those combinations where I thought they would drop their outpost, just to be extra nasty J

The Draw deck is fairly obvious now that you understand the concept. Not all the founders are in there because they all weren’t needed. Same with the Vorta. I only included those that provided necessary skills. Goran’agar is always there, and you can never get tired of his nullify Hippocratic oath skill. As said before the N/A were chosen because of their mix of skills and stats in combination with leadership and transporter skill. Devidian doors are very powerful, and I always recommend using as many as you have. Beware their drawback though.

Finally I will leave you with some observations I noticed during my games. Being a Ketracel White-free deck you have the option of leaving people behind to harass any deployed characters. I found this particularly strong against people with ships with cloaking devices. Two Birds of prey at their outpost will ruin your game. This is because they beam to one and cloak. Next turn play some character, uncloak, everyone beams to the other ship and cloaks that one. By leaving 1 or 2 people aboard each ship it would force my opponent to report more ships. What some people will do is cloak their ships with your people aboard and leave them like that for the rest of the game. This can be annoying. The best way around it would be stocking a commandeer starship in your tent. On the positive side though, I believe not having the restriction of having to reset or maintain Ketracel White makes this deck stronger than other versions, simply because it allows more flexibility in your gameplay.

Well that just about covers it. I realize this has been a long article, but I tried to cover everything so that even new players could understand how to play this style of deck. I have been playing for many years now, and in that time I have seen very few decks that are as brutal as this one.

I hope this will force players to give the Dominion the respect it deserves.

I hope you enjoyed this article. You can find it and all my other articles on how to play the Dominion at:

If you would like to make some comments or have some queries please feel free to email me at:

mythos@ozlinx.com.au