Playing The Borg: Probings

by Evan Lorentz, aka "Mot the Barber"

Everyone is talking about First Contact, and mostly about the Borg. It seems they are "slow," "not to be taken seriously for tournament play", "easily beaten", and more. I've been playing Borg almost constantly since the set came out, and I simply haven't come up against these problems.

In response, I've decided written a mini-series of articles on playing the Borg. I should warn you now that I am opinionated, and these express my personal experience with playing the Borg affiliation. There are other ways to play the Borg, and if they work for you, don't let me or anyone else tell you to change things around. In fact, you should share your discoveries, since we'll only benefit more from everyone's experience as we find our way around this new affiliation. I will sign especially opinionated information with the warning, "MOT'S ADVICE." Feel free to take it or leave it..., but again, it's how I play.

Also, these articles will rarely focus on the actual rules of playing Borg, such as how skill-sharing works, or how the Borg deal with dilemma X, etc..

So, introduction now out of the way, time to dive in.

MOT'S ADVICE ON THE BORG #1: PROBING

For the Borg, probing is first and foremost. If you cannot probe successfully, you cannot win. Here, I'm just gonna go over the basics.

Taking a quick look at the Borg objectives, you'll find that the needed outcomes for success on all of them are the subcommand icons of the Borg Collective: Communications, Navigation, and Defense. (Yes, Eliminate Starship is an exception to this rule -- but I consider destroying an opponent's ship and immediately drawing a card a benefit of its own, regardless of the outcome on the probe. Throughout this article, I will be ignoring this objective.) You should build your deck to include the highest possible ratio of cards with those subcommand icons.

Fortunately, you'll be using most of these cards anyway: Borg drones, Adapt cards, objectives and Borg ships all have the subcommand icons. Some cards have all three icons, so be sure to use some of them: Awaken, Activate Subcommands, Retask, the Borg Queen, Locutus, Borg Cube (and also the Queen's Borg Cube), and Assimilate Counterpart.

More importantly, you should minimize the number of cards in your deck that don't have Borg subcommand icons on them. There's no question that extra Events and Interrupts can slow your opponent down. But don't forget they'll slow you down too, later, when you're trying to probe. So when adding these kinds of cards, evaluate whether they will hurt your opponent more than they will "hurt" you. Try to put such cards in your Q's Tent whenever possible, keeping them out of your draw deck.

MOT'S ADVICE:
I would also recommend against including Kevin Uxbridge, Amanda Rogers, or Q2 in your deck. The reason for this is two-fold. One, they are not successful probes for your objectives. Two, you are bound to take a point loss for them on The Line Must be Drawn Here -- and when playing Borg, you do not have points to spare. Only in the rarest of games can a Borg player score 100 points off three objectives. They'll usually have to complete four objectives to win, and since the most accessible Borg objectives only score you 25 points, you'll end up with exactly 100 points when all is said and done. If you lose any points along the way, you'll have to go through another objective to win. You shouldn't put yourself through that unless you absolutely have to -- and my own solution to that has been to simply remove the temptation by stocking no "troika" cards in my Borg decks.

When building your deck, you should even go so far as tailoring your Borg personnel to your objectives, or vice versa. If you choose mostly Defense Drones for your deck, don't choose Establish Gateway as your most common objective, since a Defense icon won't be a success for you there. Instead, focus on Assimilate Planet. If you loaded up on Navigation Drones, the opposite would be true. If you can, try to have a lot of Communications Drones in your deck, since this icon will succeed on every Borg objective but Salvage Starship. (And don't forget Adapts have Communications icons, and Transwarp Network Gateways have Navigation icons -- one good reason to stock the Gateway itself instead of the Transwarp Conduit interrupt.)

When you build your deck for probing, you remove one of the greatest speed barriers working against the Borg. You'll find yourself succeeding at probes on the first try more often than not. Basically, if you are ever playing Borg and fail to probe successfully three turns in a row, I'd take a look at the deck and start removing extra cards that don't have the subcommand icons.

NEXT TIME: Downloading.

(I always welcome questions, comments, and suggestions -- but especially on this series, so let me know what's on your mind.)