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.)
Mot the Barber
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Other First Contact articles:
All Space Decks Beware!
Duty, Honor and Glory: Personnel Battle
Phasers: Don't Get Caught Without One!
The Strategy of Hidden Agenda Cards
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