[article] History of STCCG (orig. intended as a follow-up to MD's survey) ... Reginald Barclay ... [3/24/99 00:34]

…but this grew so gigantic that I figured that it would be better as its own article. Heh. Well, anyway, let's dive into the expansions, going by chronological order…

v Premiere, 363 cards. (I'm not covering the Collector's Tin since it would be the same as Premiere.) Horribly broken. It's been said that the set had to be rushed out onto the market to meet the release date. Well, I don't know how true that is, but it shows. The Federation is clearly the strongest affiliation, because they have multiple personnel with 4-5 skills, the only affiliation with super-classification personnel, the only personnel with a special skill (Exocomp), and (at the time) the only personnel with 6 skills, Picard; the downside is that they are (without exception) ALL rare, forcing players to buy multiple boxes to be competitive with the Federation and instilling the stigma that the game was a "big buyer's" game for a long time.

Klingons and Romulans were the weak cousins of the Federation. The Klingons' strategy was straightforward; build an Armada and destroy your opponent OR go Borg hunting. Skillwise, they had only one personnel with 5 skills (B'Etor) and only 4 with 4 (Duras, Lursa, Kurak, and Kurn). They were obviously not meant for mission-solving while the opponent was still around. Romulans were a joke. They only had one personnel with 4 skills (Sela), and Firestorm would toast most of them without fail. Against a decent Fed deck, they had no chance. At the very least, the non-aligned personnel helped fill some stopgaps (think Vekor).

Some skills were borderline useless; SCIENCE and SECURITY were not needed for mission attempts (but absolutely vital for some dilemmas), Physics, Geology, Empathy, Greed, and Exobiology were not needed at all for Dilemmas (in fact, Physics is STILL useless for dilemmas, as ZERO dilemmas require it), and the artifacts ranged from broken (Horga'hn with no way to nullify it) to useless (Varon-T Disruptor, until the new personnel battle rules were established in FC). Additionally, most dilemmas were not much of a threat to a mega-crew; just send down enough personnel that can overcome every dilemma in the game, and you win.

Some things were just deadly. As mentioned before, Firestorm destroyed the Romulans. Alien Probe + Telepathic Alien Kidnappers was so bad that it was banned in tournaments for a while. Red Alert and The Traveler (at least) were restricted to one-a-deck in tourney play. And some dilemmas could wipe out anything (Barclay's and Borg Ship, Borg Ship still being lethal even today). Nothing stopped a player from seeding 6 planet or 6 space missions, causing many of the opponent's dilemmas to become worthless unless they were playing almost all planet/space dilemmas (all but two of which were rare) - hey, I know I played like this for a long time.

And then, of course, there was Raise the Stakes. May this card burn in hell. (Especially because in my naïve days, I ended up losing a *Borg Ship* to this card and never got it back.) I'll get to the counter cards when I discuss Q-Continuum.

True, Premiere seems less unbalanced with the passage of time, but while it was the only thing out, it's easy to see why people didn't want to play it seriously.

v Warp Pack, 12 cards. I'm touching on this briefly since for the longest time, it was all we had to weather the long delay before AU. Six missions and Gorta - whoopee. Neutral Outpost - okay, but no repairs and little protection against fly-by Borg Ships made it unpopular. Sensitive Search - a mission we would not get until the 2PG, but easy to do (but eminently stealable). Scotty was a nice addition, but only reinforced the power of the Feds (especially since he was a super-classification). Yellow Alert was nice, but 1) getting it into play was a chore (unless you got a Betazoid Gift Box real quick - and you would end up slowing yourself down anyway), and 2) it could be easily countered (more on this around Q-Continuum). Finally, Countermanda. A card to "fix" Telepathic Alien Kidnappers or the Res-Q/Palor Toffing abuse on artifacts (which was later fixed). Still, you had to draw it, and with deck size limitations back in those days… This did not quite live up to its claim to make starters playable.

v Alternate Universe, 122 cards. Some nifty new concepts, but still a lot of problems. First, the good. Restricting Federation attacking was necessary (since Roga Danar was a staple of every deck, and until AU, he could lead a Federation force into battle). Seed deck strategy took a new twist with the Cryosatellite. The skill pool for dilemmas widened (especially Empathy, which gained newfound use). The Devidian Door is one of the niftiest cards ever invented (even if it was limited with the release of First Contact). Captain's Log made deck design a little more strategic. Klim Dokachin punished all-unique personnel players (and even today, it can still be useful). Major Rakal and (to a much lesser extent) Stefan DeSeve gave advent to the Romulan mission theft deck.

And now, the bad. The Ultra-Rare, the Future Enteprise, caused massive complaining (ironically when people had asked for it). The power of the Federation was reinforced with great rares (especially Rachel Garrett and Alt Tasha). The Klingons got only 3 personnel, one of which is a mere animal. Also, K'mtar was hard to use to his maximum effect. Commander Tomalak was one of the worst cards to come out of Decipher R&D. Ajur and Boratus were rarely used, since usually people were now seeding 3 dilemmas tops per mission. Isabella still ranks high on my list of cards with hideous art.

There was the Ressikan Flute deck, which was broken beyond relief. The problem with 6 planet/6 space was still unresolved, but at least there were many easily accessible planet/space dilemmas to remedy this.

And finally, there was Seize Wesley. I have five of this card and have never been able to trade one off.

Eventually the lustre of AU wore off when people realized Feds were still dominant, and when the announcement came down that the game would be over on 1/1/1998, we were in a rut. (Somewhat commemorated in Senior Staff Meeting.)

At some point, the old Decipher website on marvin.macc.wisc.edu (later www.itis.com) was recommissioned by Decipher and turned into the high-quality website which has evolved to the point it has reached today.

There was a long lull, and then we finally got…

v Q-Continuum, 121 cards. It finally came just days before the announcement came down that the game would live on. Additionally, all of the cards were leaked on the website at once, causing the most significant slowdown ever in Decipher website history.

The new side decks were great. Q's Tent finally eliminated some of the guesswork of determining what cards needed to go into your deck. Q-Continuum side decks were neat (but hellish to build), and were only effective if you used a specific pool of cards (mostly centering around Mandarin Bailiff and Penalty Box), since many of them were useless. Though in a way, the Q-Continuum side deck discouraged megateaming, since you hit one Q-card for each personnel in the encountering AT. Colony was the first effective way of scoring without doing missions (sort of). Manheim's Dimensional Door was fun for a while, since decks were becoming ominously homogenous (more on this in a bit). Every player got access to Androids, powerful and flexible cards. Two killer dilemmas, The Sheliak and Yuta, came out of this set. Finally, finally, we got some power personnel the Federation couldn't use. The Klingons and Romulans finally got some deck staples (I can't think of a single card in QC for the Feds which is still a staple for them today). And then, of course, Terraforming Station, the ultimate in fun.

Unfortunately, there were still several glaring problems. The free Cybernetics reporting ability was broken (more in a minute). Aplayer could still use 6 planet/6 space without penalty (and at this time space decks became more popular, since nobody wanted to face down the dreaded Sheliak/Q unless their deck was built specifically to counter it). The three weakest Artifacts in the game came out of this expansion. Some of the Q-Continuum cards were worthless (Guilty - Provisionally and Subsection Q, Paragraph 10 come to mind). And some of the Q cards were built specifically to stem one thing - counters.

Now I get to discussing counters.

From the beginning, there were the three counter cards - Kevin Uxbridge (for Events), Amanda Rogers (for Interrupts), and Q2 (to defeat Kevin and Amanda). These became dubbed somewhere as the "Troika of Terror". By the time QC rolled around, counters became absolutely necessary to be competitive. There is a specific reason for this, a specific reason which honestly IMO should be remembered by every player who plays this game.

The Q deck (seed Q last and then sweep through it, clearing out all the dilemmas for free) was not an unknown thing; it was a powerful deck, and was still powerful through Alternate Universe and Q-Continuum. Enter one David Flesch, who would come to be known as Sela's Consort. He perfected the Q deck. He was very crafty with the seed phase, holding out as long as possible, forcing his opponents to seed or either pass and risk a pass by him, which would leave the spaceline mostly unguarded by dilemmas. Then he would seed his Qs. He used another abused card, Kivas Fajo, to get quick and easy draws. Playing against this terror, if he ever got one Kivas off, you were most likely going to lose. Why, you ask?

Back in the days of the 60 limit (30 seed cards max, remainder of draw deck must bring the total to 60), you needed every dilemma you could get. And then you needed to be absolutely perfect with the draw deck. The Consort stuffed his deck with the perfect balance of four specific cards: Kevin, Amanda, Q2, and Kivas. Then he included just enough Romulans (and a couple ships) to get the needed 2 Leadership and 61+ INTEGRITY; a Red Alert was in the deck.

Given the Law of Averages, if you include more of x card in a deck, you stand a better chance of drawing it in your opening hand. The Consort always seemed to draw a Kivas and several counters. He played a Kivas; either you countered it or he drew 3 cards, plus his end-of-turn draw. Most likely he will have drawn another Kivas. If you try tou counter it, he sends down a Q2. Unless you got lucky, he would out-counter you. Then, he would continue this until he was on the verge of decking out, then would play Red Alert (with massive protection fron his counters), play all of his personnel (and a ship) in one swoop, then solve as many missions as he needed to (with Qs on top) to win. This deck was deadly enough; he only lost once playing it.

And then he tweaked it again, taking advantage of the Cybernetics rule as it was back then (where Cybernetics present at a valid place to report cards, could report any number of free androids per turn). With their INTEGRITY of 7, he only needed Sirol (Leadership, INT of 7), Sela (Leadership, INT of 6 and in there instead of Dathon because of his handle), Telak (Cybernetics, INT of 5) and 6 STAs (7x7 = 49 INT total) - that's ten personnel - to blow through Q. With this variant, you had to be playing almost the same deck to beat him. I accidentally helped him out by getting him to add Mannheim's Dimensional Door to my deck, since every time I tried to lay down a counter, he would do a "hiccup" and play a Kivas, then well figure it out yourself). He eventually lost, but not before stringing together a legendary win streak.

Eventually the Q deck was denounced (after he disappeared for Navy duty), but for a long time it was the strongest deck ever constructed. Still, this expansion was better than AU. And besides that, we got a new contract, and the next product to come out was…

v The 2-Player Game. Long delayed due to the Paramount-Decipher fighting. Consisted of two fixed decks (one Federation and one Klingon) made up of all commons (some were WB versions of AU cards), 12 new missions (included in the fixed decks), a Premiere booster, an AU booster, Spock, Data Laughing, Admiral McCoy, and three premiums dependent on whether you bought the Fed ("blue") or Klingon ("red") box. A highly critiziced product for many reasons: first, though the decks were playable, they weren't great. Second, no Romulan box was available (prompting 1997 STCCG World Champion David Bowling aka Tomek to come up with a Romulan version of the 2PG deck). Third, reintroduced Data Laughing (a card previously only available through a mail-in offer for a BradyGames STCCG book which was otherwise laughable), a move which brought scorn from collectors (Decipher CEO Warren Holland once lamented that he "should have burned every copy of Data Laughing"). Fourth, criticized for requiring collectors to buy two boxes to get all of the premiums.

There is a bit of good to this - the Klingon premiums are GREAT cards. It's better than Premiere for new players, but not by much. The next product was:

[end part 1]

Reginald Barclay