Good Card, Bad Card #81

Maybe there's a "War on Christmas", maybe there's not, I don't know. But I know the people who get bent out of shape about it (every other story on Fox News is about it) have their history wrong when they defend it. They say America is founded on judeo-christian values and that this is part of who we are. Actually it's not. The first Puritan settlers saw no justification for celebrating Christmas in scripture and it was forbidden. Christmas wasn't big in New England until the mid-1800's. I think it's all pure silliness. A few wacko left-wingers, and right-wing t.v. nuts who blow it out of proportion to fill time on cable t.v.

Anyways, back to cards. We played a sealed event around here last Sunday. I usually hate, and do terrible, at sealed. But this time I was running it, so it was going to be awesome. "Jersey Sealed". Special rule: 'you could play anyone to an HQ, pay +1 if that person doesn't normally do so'. This lead to some unusual, and fun, collection of personnel. Each player drew two booster packs at random. I pulled a Captain's Log pack. I had a Romulan starter. So I basically had 1 cost Remans running around with a few Voyager personnel. Marquay is a beast in sealed. I went 3-0, but the MVP was the Deyos I pulled in that pack. Switching integrity requirements with cunning was clutch in sealed. For GCBC I'm picking two Premier starter cards.We must go back, fix whatever damage they have done....

Good Card: Shady Resources

Why: You always remember your first. When it came to cheaters in the early days, it paid to be shady. We were weird in Jersey back then. We played Cardassian before it was fashionable. So naturally this card fit. In the sealed this basically won me two games. There nice to get pass those pesky Premier "have a personal with 2 of this skill, or 2 of that skill" dilemmas straight up. Doesn't hurt in sealed when you have Marquay and Deyos running around with their treachery and mad skills. This card doesn't see much play anymore and I'm not sure why. There's tons and tons of personnel with treachery. It just became too easy to pop any skill I guess. But I think this card will become sexy again. Worse case scenario you use it to pitch a guy into your discard pile to screw your opponent's Caretaker's Guest. Also, a good side effect for Stricken Dumb too. Those 'discard a card to' cheaters were annoying back in the day, now they're a good defense.

Bad Card: Cry "Havoc!"

Why: What's the first thing you do when you open a starter deck for sealed? You take out all the D'Arsay Archives (the leftover 1E in my brain always calls this card Masaka Transformations) and Cry Havocs. Why? Because everyone is doing two planets first in sealed and all you get from this card is one lousy kill. Back in the stone ages of 2E design they overestimated the cost on this result, as they did capturing a personnel (see last week's Apprehended). 3 cost + stopping a ship = one random kill. Funny math. It's not their fault, it was a new game they were designing, and battle in 1E was pretty much anything goes. They were so afraid of the 'lockout' that could happen in 1E they got uber-conservative at the start of 2E. But I had an light bulb go off during the sealed. Next special rule: Cry "Havoc!" kills three random personnel. Can't wait for that, that'll be interesting to watch.