Add Distinctiveness
Incident
[HA] [BO] [preview/promo]
Seeds or plays on table. X varies, where X is the number of [skill] icons on personnel you’ve assimilated as drones. Also, if you’re behind by 40 or more points, once per game, you may open a sealed First Contact expansion pack. Play or place in hand any or all non-seed cards in that pack (non-Borg cards are assimilate or stolen, as appropriate), then place the others out-of-play.
[X]
Population 9 Billion – All Borg
Incident
[HA] [BO] [preview/promo]
Seeds or plays on table. If your Borg have completed Stop First Contact
(or Build Interplexing Beacon), place incident on Earth; you may download
a Borg outpost there. Your [Borg] cards may subsequently report on Earth
or to that outpost; and your subsequently completed [BO] objectives targeting
missions in the Alpha Quadrant score double points.
Add Distinctiveness: Using Add Distinctiveness to the full extent of its abilities with Assimilate Counterpart requires a fairly heavy commitment from your deck. You need several Talon Drones so you can abduct and assimilate your opponent’s personnel. You need several Assault Drones so your Talon Drones can reliably win their combat pairings. (Try that other function of We Are The Borg to help grab more copies of these guys). You’ll need several copies of Assimilation Table, as there will probably be an increase in the number of Disruptor Overloads floating around, as Equipment becomes more important. And you’ll need several copies of Assimilate Counterpart. Not only do you need to make sure you can draw it, but there are several ways your opponent can get rid of your target, thus discarding the Objective (using STP to return the target to their hand, getting the target killed in a mission attempt, killing the counterpart by using Disruptor Overload on the Assimilation Table after the target is strapped in). Also, your seed deck will need to include several homeworlds in order to make sure your Counterpart has something to do after he’s been assimilated.
Add Distinctiveness should enable you to only have to complete one Objective after you’re done with Assimilate Counterpart. If you open up by stealing an opponent’s space mission, then getting 20 points off of Assimilate Counterpart itself and 40 off of Assimilate Homeworld, you’ll need to net 15 points off of Add Distinctiveness. This will probably require 5-7 personnel. Since you probably won’t have brought this many Talon Drones along, you’ll need to use the "trick" of Assimilate Counterpart. The Objective says that your Borg "may" abduct and assimilate … they don’t have to. A couple turns of battle should easily get you the personnel you need. And since you should be stocking multiple copies of Assimilate Counterpart, it won’t hurt you too much if your target is randomly killed at the end of the battle. In fact, you could just keep on battling until he does die, then take your assimilated personnel off to help do some more traditional scouting.
You’ll have put a large dent in your opponent’s ability to solve missions, and if they build up another clump of personnel, you can slap down another Assimilate Counterpart and go hunting again. One possible game plan might be: steal one of opponent’s missions with Establish Gateway, use Assimilate Counterpart to assimilate a stack of personnel as drones, but never assimilating the target as a counterpart, going and completing another Establish Gateway, then playing a second Assimilate Counterpart to grab more personnel, this time actually assimilating the counterpart for those final points.
This strategy has several appealing aspects. Both Establish Gateways can be seeded, so you don’t need to worry about drawing those (and when you complete them, they’ll let you grab the Assimilate Counterparts you want to follow up with). You get to grab that early Horga’hn, which is always nice. By wiping out their personnel, you can prevent your opponent from getting a chance to tow away the Garbage Scow and complete the mission you cleared. After you hit them with the first Assimilate Counterpart, then walk away, they might not expect you to come back with another one. Finally, since you won’t actually be assimilating the counterpart until later in the game, you don’t have to worry so much about getting to your Assimilation Table.
Add Distinctiveness can also be used to just grab a handful of points. If you include Borg Servo, you can get points from the personnel so assimilated. Don’t forget, however, that if the personnel you assimilate die, that you lose the points you got from Add Distinctiveness. So unless you can get the newly made drones off of your opponent’s ship, you probably won’t have those points for long.
Finally, there’s that second function … its primary use is going to
be to reduce your differential by a few points. If you’re down by 40, the
chances of opening another pack actually turning the game around are quite
slim. On a personal note, while I find this ability of Add Distinctiveness
to be fun and interesting, I don’t think it has a place in a constructed
tournament. As such, I’ve sworn off its use.
Population 9 Billion – All Borg: Stop First Contact is the single most difficult Borg Objective to complete, and it adds a good number of bad probes to your deck. You have to assimilate a counterpart (or play with either multiple copies of Locutus or a lot of Q’s Tents (bad probe) to make sure you can fetch him quickly). Then you have to complete scouting on Assimilate Homeworld on Earth, which your opponent, if playing Federation, is sure to seed very heavily (and if he’s not Federation, then you get no benefits for Stopping First Contact). Then you have to play Montana Missile Complex (bad probe) or Stop First Contact, once again probably wanting multiple copies to make sure you draw one. Then you have to go back in time, using either Temporal Vortex (bad probe) or Wormholes (bad probe). Then, despite all those bad probes, you have three chances at most to get a good one. And since Stop First Contact only probes successfully on [Def], a large number of your drones, as well as the best accessory cards (Adapt: Negate Obstruction and Transwarp Network Gateway), are bad probes. Add in the fact that your opponent can nullify it in several ways, forcing you to fall back on Build Interplexing Beacon, which can itself be nullified (resulting in a 10 point loss for you), and you have one heck of a job on your hands. In addition, for all this work, you get zero points more than you would have if you just Assimilated Homeworld on Earth. If your opponent is Federation, you only get a benefit that’s marginally greater than that provided by Assimilate Homeworld, and one that even removes cards from your deck, if you’ve got Human species drones (such as Seven of Nine). And if your opponent isn’t Federation, you get nothing (barring the removal of the occasional human non-aligned personnel). With the 40 points from Assimilate Homeworld, you’re still at least 2 Objectives away from winning.
Population 9 Billion – All Borg changes that. While it doesn’t double the points from the Assimilate Homeworld itself, since Assimilate Homeworld is completed and scored before you can flip over Population 9 Billion – All Borg, it will still double that Salvage Starship you complete a couple turns down the line. And a 40 points Assimilate Homeworld plus a 60 point Salvage Starship (or a slightly more difficult 80 point Assimilate Homeworld with an EFC Counterpart after using He Will Make An Excellent Drone on Locutus) equals a nice two Objective win for the Borg. And that is what Population 9 Billion – All Borg is about. You get an outpost in the Alpha you can report to, but your Cubes let you do that already (though the Outpost will let you report another Cube directly to the Alpha, should you need one). You can do some objective other than Salvage Starship too … but Assimilate Homeworld plus a doubled 25 point Objective is still going to leave you needing a third Objective to get the win. And since you can get a three Objective win without the bother of Stopping First Contact, then, well, why bother?
To most effectively complete Stop First Contact, you’ll have to dedicate a large portion of your deck to it. You’ll need multiple copies of Stop First Contact, Locutus, Wormhole/Temporal Vortex, Build Interplexing Beacon, Assimilate Homeworld and Q’s Tents to fetch whichever of the above you didn’t manage to draw. You’ll want to make sure that you don’t have very many Human species drones, as all of them (except those on your time travelling ship) will vanish when you complete Stop First Contact. Since stop First Contact has such a limited successful probe (and especially with all those totally bad probes in the deck), Zalconian Storage Capsule/Mercy Kill might be the way to go.
You might want to try bluffing your opponent. Seed four Homeworlds, and they’ll probably think your deck is geared towards Assimilating a Counterpart from them, and might not seed Earth so heavily. Or seed Earth and Mars, with a Federation mission set, so make them think you’re using VCM on Earth. They might not make the dilemmas on Earth easy in general, but they’ll probably seed them to be most effective against the Federation, rather than the Borg. Anything you can do to keep dilemmas off of Earth will certainly pay off bigtime.