10) Parallax Arguers – Complex. Confusing. Annoying.
9) Anti Time Anomaly – Destroying every personnel in play, which may have taken your opponent a dozen turns to get out, has too large a potential to ruin the game for a player. With more an more dilemmas requiring large numbers of personnel to pass, this card has the possibility to slow games down more and more. How quickly can you get out enough personnel to muster the 70 STRENGTH required to pass Founder Secret?
8) Horga’hn – Taking double turns is too powerful an effect, even for an artifact. There’s a reason that despite a bunch of counter cards, this is still the most frequently used one of them all.
7) The Sheliak – Devastating when used in conjunction with a good follow-up dilemma, the Sheliak’s mission destroying capability is far too powerful an effect. If it existed in a vacuum, where it always took 3 turns or so to get back to the original mission, it would be bad enough. In a world with Q and six mission spacelines, it’s a nightmare. Completely ruining a mission for the opponent is too powerful an effect for one dilemma.
6) Future Enterprise/Defiant – Chase cards create horribly overpriced singles that make it difficult, if not impossible, for players to have the access to them that they need. While these two weren’t particularly useful ones, they’ve created a trend that we’re about to see generate some chase cards that are really useful.
5) Computer Crash – First Contact revitalized the game. One of the ways it did so was through the addition of downloading, which sped the game up and just made it more interesting in general. But in a misguided effort to stop Assign Mission Specialists, Computer Crash brought that to a crashing halt. More and more cards came to use downloading, and Computer Crash stood as an impediment to every one. In addition, Computer Crash has been used to protect abusive strategies by keeping the opponent from getting a needed counter-card (such as The Devil or Intermix Ratio) out of the Tent.
4) Q – Bad in one of its uses, horrible in the other. Q-Bypass has been a problem since the first game of Trek. It completely eliminates a large part of the game, and is widely viewed as completely cheap. In its use as a “normal” dilemma, Q simply requires too much too pass, and has too powerful an effect, especially when combined with The Sheliak.
3) Black Hole – This card has the potential to devour the entire spaceline. No spaceline, no game. No game, no fun. Ergo, the Black Hole is no fun. A strong deck built around this card will almost always result in a boring, dull, frustrating game.
2) Add Distinctiveness – Good first function. Evil second one. While it’s a neat effect, and good for a fun game, it becomes much more sinister in a tournament. First of all, I feel that opening a pack in the middle of a constructed game is totally out of place. The two tournament formats are entirely different animals, intended to be kept apart. And, of course, there’s the financial problem. You can reduce your differential when you’re losing … but only if you’re willing to pay $2.50. And as for the argument that “it’s your choice whether or not to use it” I think that anyone who gives that knows that it’s ridiculous. If you’ve sunk a ton of money, and a ton of time, into a CCG, it’s not worth it to give it up over something like this. But that doesn’t mean that something like this should exist.
1) Raise The Stakes – Thank whatever higher power you believe in that Decipher banned this one. Being forced to play for ante would have been a horrible, horrible thing. I don’t know why this card was even made, as it was already clear from Magic’s experience that people just don’t want to risk losing the cards they used their hard-earned money to buy.