Playing The Borg No.16:
Borg and the Official Tournament Sealed Deck
by Evan Lorentz (evanl@earthlink.net)
Star Trek CCG Official Tournament Sealed Deck contains 20 new cards, designed mainly for the original affiliations, but a shrewd player will soon realize the dramatic effect they can have on Borg decks.
Here's a look at some of the possibilities... and dangers.
DILEMMAS. The Sealed Deck product introduces a couple of nasty dilemmas to
the game that go hard on "red shirting." Armus - Sticky Situation and
Unscientific Method cannot be passed by a single Borg scout on a planet
surface. You will need an Adapt: Negate Obstruction to get by these, or some
way of sending down more than one scout. Make Us Go targets an individual
Borg, and it's no trouble for the Borg to muster the 24 CUNNING to get that
personnel back. Hippocratic Oath may help you more than hurt you, by moving
a Borg drone over to another planet location you can begin to scout even
before your ship arrives there. It may move the Queen, which could prove
inconvenient, but at least it won't kill her. With Hide and Seek, the Borg
make off very easy indeed. In almost all cases, this dilemma will stop only
the first universal Borg selected before the dilemma is discarded. There is just one dilemma you really need to worry about, and that is....
UNSCIENTIFIC METHOD. I've already mentioned the planet dilemma side of this
-- you'll need to Adapt or arrange for multiple scouts to pass it. The space
side of it is potentially even more deadly, at least if you brought a Queen
along. When an Interlink Drone is present (and when is one not?), the Queen
is by default the most CUNNING SCIENCE present. If she dies, then one Alas,
Poor Queen will send you packing. You have a few ways to deal with this. You
can leave your Queen at home, using her from your outpost for downloading
but ignoring her skill changing abilities. You can pop your own copy of
Unscientific Method early in the game with a different ship so that you can
Adapt to it later when the Queen is around. Or simply remember to reset your
Queen's skill to Treachery or Greed unless otherwise called for -- and be
very careful of changing it at a space mission if you don't know what other
dilemmas might be waiting for you!
INVESTIGATE INCURSION. No doubt Investigate Incursion has drawn your attention.
Let's look at the opponent's side first. While the ability to report
any Borg ship with crew there is powerful indeed, remember that it appears
only on that side of the card -- your opponent must be using this mission
for you to gain this benefit. Your side of the card is much more interesting:
Your Salvage Starship objective may target this location. This gives
you a universal location for this 30 point objective without having
to first pave the way with an Eliminate Starship. It also creates a
solid three-objective win that doesn't rely on assimilating a six-skilled
counterpart. Just pack your own Locutus of Borg and Assimilate Earth
for 40 points, then complete two Salvage Starship objectives for 60
more. Just be aware, while Assimilate Homeworld probes on a Communications
icon, Salvage Starship takes Navigation or Defense. You'll need plenty
of cards with all three subcommand icons in your deck to pull off this
variety of probing; reliance on drones alone won't do it.
SPACE/TIME PORTAL. This card does wonders for a Borg deck. One of the most
difficult tactics for a Cube-oriented Borg deck to overcome is the "field
trip to Montana" deck, where the player uses Wormholes to send their
opponent's ships back to the Montana Missile Complex. The problem was,
Wormholes in a Borg deck will drastically reduce the ratio of successful
probes, and Temporal Vortex is an Alternate Universe card (a seeded AU Door
often proving a waste of space to the Borg). Now the Space/Time Portal can
be seeded, and discarded from the table to return a Montana-bound ship to
your hand with everyone on it. It may take a bit of time to report the
personnel again, but at least your probe ratio is no longer compromised by
attempts to counter this strategy.
It has been pointed out that Space/Time Portal also throws a bit of
a monkey wrench into a Borg deck -- specifically hindering the Assimilate
Counterpart objective. A targeted personnel could vanish, along with
the ship they are on, back to their opponent's hand, nullifying your
objective. This may be true, but consider also that this is the "field
trip" issue in reverse -- you've just made your opponent return a ship
and crew to their hand, and now they'll have to report them all over
again. This intimidation could buy you the time to complete an extra
objective or two. (An Eliminate Starship might make just as good a threat.)
The remainder of the OTSD is largely uninteresting to the
Borg -- a personnel, ship, event, and outpost you can't use, and objectives
you don't really want to use, since you can only have one objective in play
at a time. But there is one last card in the Sealed Deck product, and this
one paves the way for an entirely new kind of Borg deck.
SPACEDOOR. This card allows you to download universal ships to a matching
outpost. Which affiliation has the strongest universal ships? The Borg, of
course! One of the main hindrances to building a Cube-oriented deck was the
need to stock some 7 or more Cubes to insure getting one in the opening
turns. While their subcommand icons help with probing late in the game, that
fact remains that it's more ships than you honestly need.
Spacedoor changes all that. By placing one on your Borg outpost during
the seed phase, you can have a Cube at your disposal on the very first
turn. (It can even be the only Cube in your deck!) A few Activate Subcommands
and Awakens, and it could be staffed and ready to go in just two turns.
What's more, since the Spacedoor gives you a means to run very low on
ships and very high on the personnel-downloading cards, you can use
it in a frightening new Borg deck archetype: the Cube Swarm Deck. All
you have to do is discard one card from hand at the end of a turn to
flip the Spacedoor back over, and next turn you can go grab another
Cube. You'll not likely get the half dozen ships on the spaceline you
can in a Scout Swarm Deck, but really, three or even just two Borg Cubes
constitutes a swarm. Having just one extra Cube will help you deal with
issues like Cytherians, or travel time between spaceline locations after
a successful probe. A Borg Queen/Ooby Dooby combo will make staffing
any additional Cubes even easier.
In short, the Borg became much easier to play thanks to the OTSD. All
this from just a few cards that have almost no storyline connection to the
Borg. It just goes to show you, we won't have to wait until Voyager comes
along to get some great cards for our Borg decks!
- Mot the Barber
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