As you may have heard, The Ninja Scot and Dr. Telek R'Mor have decided to do a one-page review of every card in Holodeck Adventures.  That's right, all 131 cards!  Better set aside lots of reading time for this…  (DTRM is doing evens and TNS is doing odds)  The opinions, of course, are those of the authors :-)

Card #22: Transwarp Hub

Seed and deck slots are so annoying. The limitation of thirty has existed since the start of the game, but options to take up those precious slots have increased dramatically in the last seven years. The Borg are no exception to this: their seed slots, instead of being used on cards such as Holoprograms, Assign Support Personnel, and Assign Mission Specialists, are assigned to cards such as Establish Gateway and the Unicomplex -- same basic concept, though. The same holds true for deck slots, especially cards like Transwarp Network Gateway -- you don’t want to stuff your deck full of them since they’ll end up taking up slots where you could be drawing a Counterpart or Queen, but you’ll most likely need more than one, meaning the Tent’s usefulness is limited here.

Enter the Transwarp Hub. For all intents and purposes, there’s almost zero reason to use the basic Borg Outpost over the Hub -- with an increase of twenty SHIELDS and the improvement of the Transwarp Network Gateways, the Hub surpasses the Outpost in every possible way, with the exception of where it can seed. Delta Quadrant Nebulas aren’t too common, but they include Inversion Mystery and Study Protonebula, both Fair Play-protected space missions (which is all the Borg should really concern themselves with when trying to select a space mission).

So what advantages does the Hub give? Card efficiency, which is a stumbling block most Borg players have -- they can’t use cards like Mutation, The Power, and Data, Keep Dealing without stuffing their deck full of bad probes. The Hub won’t increase a deck’s method of drawing cards, but it will decrease the number of cards a player is forced to use. Instead of having to have a Transwarp Network Gateway for every single time you want to send a ship to or from the Delta Quadrant to the Alpha (or Mirror or Gamma) Quadrant, all you need to do is seed a Hub. It makes the first or second turn Cube even more efficient because there is no reliance on having to use the Transwarp Drone to download a Transwarp Network Gateway simply so you can move.

The question is why even leave the Alpha Quadrant when there is the advantage of home territory and (more importantly) the Unicomplex to contend with? Two answers: Counterparts and defense. The Counterpart bit is simple: there’s no homeworld in the Delta Quadrant to assimilate. If you want those forty points (and a chance to Stop some First Contact), you’ll have to do it in the Alpha. Simple enough (especially since Population 9 Billion -- All Borg is a lot more powerful than Harness Particle 010). The other reason is a bit more sly, but just as good: defense. The armadas of the Delta Quadrant are quickly assembled, be with Kazon Warships serving as roving armadas or the Hirogen who download their vessels with only the effort of a card play, destroying a Borg Cube isn’t that large of a challenge for the Delta Quadrant affiliations. Even if not using the Quadrant where you seed a Transwarp Network Gateway, at the very least it gives you a place where you can shuffle your ships around while they have to first draw a Wormhole (best again the Hirogen who don’t have the mass ferrying abilities of the Kazon). This trick works every turn and, if you use the right missions, can put a considerable gap between you and your opponent. You can even run the runaround on them in the Delta Quadrant: put the Hub on one end of the spaceline and the Transwarp Network Gateway on the other and watch them chase after you…futilely.

In conclusion, a cool card. Proves that you don’t need some unique, five skilled personnel or a 9-10-12 ship to make an affiliation a bit more powerful.

Combo(s):
Transwarp Hub + Transwarp Network Gateway (in a different Quadrant) + Space/Time Portal = You’ll never catch me.