Mot's Advice on the Borg #16: Borg and the Official Tournament Sealed Deck

(04/21/1998)

20 new cards, designed mainly for the original affiliations, but a shrewd player will soon realize the dramatic effect they can have on Borg deck. 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. Otherwise, the Borg make out easy. 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. In space, Unscientific Method is easily dealt with by a Bio-Med Drone aboard the ship, to reabsorb the targeted Borg. 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. And as for 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.

INVESTIGATE INCURSION. No doubt Investigate Incursion has drawn your attention. While the ability to report any Borg ship with crew there is powerful indeed, remember that it appears only on the opposing side of the card - your opponent must be using this mission for you to gain this benefit.

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 Sealed Deck product 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 (FC)/Ooby Dooby combo will make staffing any additional Cubes even easier.

In short, the Borg may have become much easier to play. All this from just a few cards that have almost no storyline connection to the Borg. It makes you wonder what enhancements we have to look forward to in the future. We may not have to wait until Voyager for nifty Borg stuff after all...