Monday, April 18, 2011

Good Card, Bad Card #42

I had a "wow" moment playing Trek yesterday. I picked the wrong deck and only won one game, but that's the game that pissed me off. BenHosp was playing Tragic Turn (imagine that), and there was 2 already underneath my space mission. So I went with 4, cutting down on his draws. It worked, at least I thought it did. BenHosp played one dilemma, Tragic Turn. He was throwing a 'hail mary' hoping to consume an All-Consuming Evil. He was playing the right guy, because everybody hits on me. Sure enough, he hit the ace on the second consume. I managed to prevent the kill, unstop my guys with Ruling Council then attempt again. This time I used Damar and gave BenHosp 1 draw, 2 to spend. He was playing the right guy, because he hit a Clown: Guillotine. This time dudes died, and I was unstaffed. At this moment I contemplated murder. Murder on lots of people. But I knuckled down, since BenHosp was playing Borg and I was Terok Nor I was slowing him down a ton, so I knew I could still squeeze the game out, and I did. For years I've been saying Tragic Turn is bad for the game, and now I just got clowned by it played by itself, straight up. It's such an absurd, sad thing for this game that that could happen, I just had so sit back and say, "wow."


What You Leave Behind was Decipher's big "Fuck You, Goodbye!" to ST:CCG. This set is filled with so much 'bad' I don't know where to begin. For this set, they knew it would be their last, so they didn't give a shit and threw every bad idea they had left into it. It's so bad, even the common cards are overpowered, game-breaking cards. Kinda sets the framework for the v-sets now that I think about it. Every card is a walls of text, and tons of skills on every personnel. When did simple, solid cards become a bad thing?


Good Card: Sylvia

Why: They weren't really any good capture dilemmas before Sylvia, and there's really not that many now. The capture dilemmas usually cost too much and have lame requirements. For Sylvia, they decided to 'get around' the cost part this time by going the "-1 for each event" route. That's was a good idea, most capture decks have some events out. The requirements on Sylvia are brutal, one side has cunning > 38, that's easy to track. The other side has 2 engineer and 2 science, most mission attempts don't even begin with that. It does suck that it's a planet-only dilemmas, but you can't have it all. At least now you can Ensnare them early and Sylvia them later.


Bad Card: Navaar, Experienced Gift

Why: This is the worst card in 2E right now that does not have the phrase "prevent and overcome" on it. This card is so far off the mark I don't even know where to begin. Let's see, for somebody who can create any skill you need she brings 5 of her own to the table. One top of that, 2 of them are doubled up. Leadership x2? Does Navaar really need the ability to use Bridge Officer's Test? So you can pop any skill you want just by blowing up a 0-cost event. Fantastic, I have no problem with that. You can do it as many times as you have events, and you get to keep the skill until the end of your turn. Fantastic.... wait, wtf!? No limit really, and till the end of the turn, not mission attempt. I'm getting all this for the low rate of a 4-cost personnel? Goddamn, Navaar must have Jayson Werth's agent. Considering what Navaar is worth she should cost around 9 to 11 counters. Now Design got it into their heads that they wanted everyone to go back to skill-based dilemmas but they didn't addressed these silly cards that can create skill out of thin air. No big picture thinking = shitty game.

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