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Spock's Guide to the Dominion, part I
by (you guessed it!) Spock What do I know about playing Dominion? Well, not too much. So why am I writing this series of articles? Somebody asked for a guide to playing Dominion and I didn't feel like doing homework. ;-) So, what are the basic types of Dominion decks? 1) Dominion Smackdown
The first type I will divide into two subtypes:
The second type I will also divide into two subtypes:
Of course, the Dominion also has most of the infiltrators…but that's more an option than a deck type, and I'll get to it later. Let's start with what everyone wants to play: Jemmie Smackdown. As far as I'm aware, the term "smackdown" first came into use for personnel battle decks with Alidar's article in issue 20 about his tournament-winning Baby Jemmie Smackdown deck. When building one of these, the following comment tends to come up: They all end up being huge! Well, my decks have a tendency towards that end as well…very rarely do I play a deck with less than 50 cards. I find the trick is to make your draw as close to irrelevant as possible; the more of what you need that you can download with what you seeded, the less vulnerable you are to a Rakal Shuffle. So let's take a look at what we'll need: Of course, the earliest card designed to help you get around a bad draw is still the best, so of course we'll include it: Q's Tent This leads to us to: without good reason The next few cards are similarly obvious: Primary Supply Depot
No point in playing Jemmies if you have no way to keep them alive. Having lost a tournament before because of not drawing a ship in the last game (way back in January 98 ;-)) I give you I'm assuming that your Dominion deck will use missions. My favorites are: Construct Depot -low range, easy to solve, and you can build a Remote Supply Depot there Aid Fugitives - Dr McCoy lessons the power of Hippocratic Oath, but sending medical to the gamma quad is still powerful, and Aid Fugitives can be Subjugated easily enough. I always liked seeding 6 HO combos, since each one your opponent hits makes it harder for him to pass the next.. and you only need to delay him until you can kill everyone. Rescue Founder - High range, but it's in the gamma quad anyway, and it can be attempted without needing another seed card. And of course, you need at least two planets to balance the Construct Depots. Deliver Message - Another AQ mission you can solve without an extra card, this mission shows up in a lot of Dominion (and non-Dominion) decks; the counterpoint of that is that you have to be wary of your opponent stealing it. It can be solved by Hanok (one of the most useful Dominion personnel) alone, or you can seed Tower of Commerce here and use 1st Rule of Acquisition to download Grand Nagus Gint for "War is Good for Business", which also gives you a place to report your (tented) Quark, Son of Keldar for another way to solve the mission. Of course, we need to be able to get to the alpha quad so we can start killing things, so I'll add: Ultimatum The current style seems to be decks which do a lot of downloading in order to get going first turn. In this spirit, how about killing your opponent on turn one? Jem'Hadar Birthing Chamber
Use AMS to get Dr Farek (for his command icon) and another mission specialist. First turn, download Deyos and Temo'Zuma. (Deyos first, so you get the extra card draw) If you drew a Young Jemmie or a tent, play the YJ free to the birthing chamber and flip Spacedoor for a Dominion Battleship; otherwise you'll have to either wait a turn or use Dominion Warship instead. VR Headset allows Deyos to serve as a matching commander, so after your ship moves through the wormhole and is stopped, you can immediately use Make It So to unstop the ship and move to a Construct Depot, where you can download a Remote Supply Depot with either a couple weapons or a weapon and another white; remember that you can play any equipment you have in hand for free next turn. Temo'Zuma has transporter skill, so as soon as you're in range of your opponent's personnel, he can beam your other people over and initiate battle. So, what cards do we have so far? Seed deck:
Q's Tent:
Draw deck:
So far we've used up 11 seed slots. I'd like to add the following:
The 2nd Invasive will keep the opponent from slowing us down with 1 Kevin; the 2nd Make It So will let us download Crew Reassignment. Q's Tent additions:
Whether or not to use the second MIS for CR depends on the type of Jemmies you want to use. Universal jemmies you can switch with the Young Jem'hadar, letting them come out that much faster; on the other hand, unique Jemmies tend to be much more powerful. If you use uniques, you'll need some way to get them to your ship so you can beam them to your opponent's ship; Crew Reassignment in combination with Dominion Battleship accomplishes this. It's a choice of more versatility vs faster reporting and more seed slots. (Of course, no deck should be completely one or the other…a unique Jemmie deck should have a few universals to take advantage of the Young Jemmies, and a universal Jemmie deck will at least want Goran'agar to nullify Hippocratic Oath and Omet'iklan to allow battle against a Dominion opponent. Either way, you have at least 16 seeds slots left, which is about how many I usually end up with; other cards you might use: Battle Bridge Side Deck - use Dominion Battleship as a 1-ship armada! Tower of Commerce / First Rule - easy card draws, but watch out for
your opponent seeding ToC first
What sort of dilemmas should you use? Anything that'll slow your
opponent down…you don't need your dilemmas to kill his people, just stall
them until you can come kill them
Next time: the draw deck William "Spock" Springer
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