Playing The Borg No. 13:
Borg Support Cards

by Evan Lorentz (evanl@earthlink.net)

Last time, I talked about cards you can use to combat an opponent's anti-Borg strategy. This time, cards to promote your own. There are a lot of ideas below on cards to use to support your plans as a Borg player and keep your opponent at bay.

It's time once more for that all important reminder: as a Borg player, probing is your livelihood. If you cannot probe successfully, you cannot win. Probing on the first try will save you far more time than any other method of speeding up your Borg deck. So, while I recommend the cards below, I do not recommend using all of them. Do not clutter up your Borg deck with too many support cards without Borg subcommand icons. It's the surest way to sabotage yourself -- far more than you'll sabotage your opponent. That dispensed with, on with the show.

Anti-Time Anomaly. This is a great Borg support card. So much of a Borg deck is expendable already -- you'll be sacrificing drones in scouting planets, sacrificing Scout Vessels in space, and throwing cards and caution to the wind. So you might consider cleaning out your opponent of personnel every now and then. This is a great way for the Borg to counteract an opponent abusing Red Alert, or Assign Mission Specialists, or any other abusive "rapid report" strategy (especially the Q-bypassers). Wait for a turn or two for your opponent to get a somewhat large crew on the table, then play the Anomaly to wipe them all out and "reset the game." Of course, if you know you'll be playing an Anomaly, you can plan ahead and not be playing your own personnel until after the fact.

Destroy Radioactive Garbage Scow. Since the Borg completely ignore the Radioactive Garbage Scow dilemma (it affects mission attempts, not scouting), you may want to stock a few of these in your own deck. And as long as you're doing that, how about these interrupts to match? You can lower the value of the missions your opponent will try to steal once you've completed scouting. Or do something even nastier... more on that later...

Hail. Stalls your opponent long enough for you to get Eliminate Starship into play. Also lets you control where battles will take place -- very important if you want to be Salvaging Starships.

Humuhumunukunukuapua'a. You might try this interrupt in an aggressive Talon Drone or counterpart strategy. With a Youth-ful Borg Queen in your hive, you'll have a +4 bonus to your STRENGTH for each Borg on the attack.

Launch Portal. Combined with Engage Shuttle Operations, you can land your Scout Vessels on planet surfaces. This is the best way to shut down a Patrol Neutral Zone deck. There's nothing your opponent can do to stop a landed ship, and it will become a permanent opposition in the Neutral Zone if you land at Covert Installation or Iconia Investigation. Launch Portal also provides a little extra firepower to deal with ambitious attacks (or an escape route when your back's against the wall), by its ability to download a ship.

Lower Decks. It shouldn't take much convincing that this card, which gives a +2 bonus to all attributes of all of your drones, belongs in most any Borg deck. Ready Room Door protects it from nullification as well.

Mission Debriefing. This will stall a non-Borg opponent while not harming you in any way. Your opponent will have to stop after every mission attempt. The Borg, of course, do not attempt missions, so this card won't touch you. Best of all, this can be seeded if you like, so it won't tamper with your probe outcomes. Combine this with Eliminate Starship to destroy a ship when the Away Team is stopped from last turn on a planet surface, and you've really got your opponent in a bind. Even more cruel, since all your Cubes have Tractor Beams you could tow a Garbage Scow to a stopped Away Team and use the Destroy Radioactive Garbage Scow I mentioned earlier to kill them all off.

Rogue Borg Mercenaries. This does rather fly in the face of my suggestion to keep your probing optimized. Nevertheless, a very effective Borg deck can be constructed by using the Rogues for support. Single Rogue Borg attacks on each of your opponent's turns will keep them in check until you can get to the Alpha Quadrant yourself. En masse attacks aided by a Crosis will finish off anyone trying a quick, "all-eggs-in-one-basket" approach (like Q bypass). For a particularly off the wall use for the Rogue Borg Mercenaries, report one of your Navigation or Communications drones to an otherwise empty Cube. Play three Rogue Borg on your own ship -- they'll defeat the STRENGTH 5 drone. Then grab a Lore Returns to take command with your Borg commandos. You can "staff" your Cube by playing only 5 cards instead of 7, and attack your opponent at will, with no objective, and keep scouting and probing with your regular Borg at the same time.

Shipwreck. A very powerful card. You can play it at the start of a battle, making a very nasty surprise for your opponent. It nullifies all ship attribute enhancements to all ships. Without enhancements, your Cubes can beat anything else, every time.

There are of course many other cards that are good for slowing your opponent down that are good even if you aren't playing Borg: Abandon Mission, Incoming Messages, Klim Dokachin, Telepathic Alien Kidnappers, and Temporal Rift, among others. But these ideas should get you started on ways to level the playing field between you and your non-Borg opponent.

Well, I've now written 13 articles covering everything I know about conventional Borg strategy. Perhaps a word or two is in order about other strategies.

NEXT TIME: Unconventional Strategies