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 :-)

John Watson
Card 99 – Personnel – Non-Aligned – MEDICAL – If with Sherlock Holmes, you may discard your hand at start of turn – ENGINEER – Physics
Integrity 8 – Cunning 8 – Strength 6

 While I don’t remember Geordi ever going to medical school, I certainly won’t argue with the effect that he can have on a game and more importantly, on a person’s ability to draw cards.

 First, he’s one of only five people with the skills of both Medical and Engineer (the others are Parthok, Tom Paris, Dereth and Thaden) which in and of itself rather interesting, which makes him available to apply himself to any number of situations – Help cure things as diverse as The Swarm and The Cloud to leaving with Hippocratic Oath and help resolving Crystalline Entities on the planet, all with one simple guy.  He can work on many different levels, dilemma and mission-wise.

 However, he’s really all about the special skill and what a dandy it is.  Since you’re able to choose your start of turn actions, it’s like butter.  Discard your hand, then let Sherlock draw your hand up to your opponent’s hand size for those extra cards to go through.  Plus, with certain cards, you can pick and choose whatever cards you want which you just discarded to net those card draws.  While you can’t convert those to downloads (which would’ve been one really messy situation if you start to think about it), the mere fact that you can get all of these cards for essentially free, what would be wrong with that?

 First of all, this is rather dependent on what your opponent is doing and whether they have a whole lot of cards in their hands.  This can be circumvented by a variety of means, the most obvious of which is having very few cards in your hand.  Things such as Containment Field holding two cards which you don’t need, decks which convert a lot of their card draws into downloads, a deck that gets rids of as many cards as it draws, there’s many ways to limit their effectiveness.  But the biggest hurdle between making John a necessary card to use is the time involved to get them into play in a timely fashion.  The obvious amount of time involved is to get him into play with the Holoprogram: 221B Baker Street download on turn 2 with Sherlock Holmes downloaded first which makes him a relatively slow-acting card drawing mechanism.  Then, of course, the fact that if Sherlock Holmes dies, your card drawing is shot, doesn’t really appeal to me.

 His can be a very potent ability to draw cards by discarding cards, especially combined with selective returns from the discard pile; just make sure that Sherlock doesn’t die.

Combos – War Council + Q-Tent + Holoprogram: 221B Baker Street + Holodeck Door + Quark’s Isolinear Rods – Use the Holoprogram to download Watson, use the Rods to download to hand Carlos and report him for free, Tent for Sherlock.  Next turn, persona exchange at the start of your turn, then use Watson to discard your hand, then use your new Sherlock Holmes to draw up your cards on turn 2.  It’s the fastest way that I can figure out how to make it work; there are probably others however, so keep looking.