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Seeding Shenanigans by Steven Livanes The seed deck, and the sub gaming element it encompasses, can sometimes be seen as a tedious process of alternating one card at a time with your opponent; a lull before the storm. The seed phase is much more than that. It creates the universe in which the game will take place, the interactive regions of space your cards will travel along. Through experience I have found that it will control the game, so care is required to design it to your favor. Enough with the preamble, let's get on with improving the seed phase. Spaceline If you have slow moving ships try to avoid large spans close to each other; you'll need an "open" spaceline to avoid getting bottlenecks in navigating missions and your opponent. Take a long moment to examine the spaceline after seeding it. Can you see a prime mission where your facility should be? Probably. Try and anticipate where your opponent's will be too and seed dilemmas accordingly. Maybe a well placed Sheliak or Borg Ship will ruin his game? Dilemmas More often than not, your dilemmas are considered your best form of defense. They are designed to slow your opponent down either by killing his crews and away teams or requiring large amounts of skills or rare skills to pass. Often, the advanced player will make sure that a suitable wall is placed early in his combo to ensure that the remaining dilemmas cause sufficient "pain" to pass. Not only will it slow the red-shirting player, but it will set up the combo for maximum effect. Example of this: PLANET: Crisis / Alien Parasites / Berserk Changeling A 2 wall setup combo. Crisis ensures that a ship must have a crew ready to receive any infected Alien Parasited crew. Lots of conditions and a largish away team needed to get past this one. Add a filter like Hide and Seek or Chula the Chandra between the Crisis and Alien Parasites to affect even large away teams. Of course, kill your opponent's crew against the waiting Berserk Changeling. The dilemma combinations seem to slowly rotate in my tournament area. The Sheliak and Berserk Changeling have seen a new prominence in the dilemma combinations recently. Players are very wary of these, and therefore allocate cards to deal with them, Temporal Vortex being a popular choice as it also takes care of the ever popular Borg Ship. Time to freshen up those combos with a little unexpected variety. Some older forgotten dilemmas will help here. Once again we want to cause maximum effect, no red shirting allowed here. SPACE: Lack of Preparation / Rhetorical Question / Cytherians Almost impossible to pass on first turn, and will delay opponent immensely. Seed Beware of Q so that the Rhetorical Question will come into play. Lack of Preparation will make sure all the required personnel will go for an unwelcome trip down the spaceline, meanwhile making the mission unattemptable for the trip there and back. Even if a Space/Time Portal gets the ship back to hand, the LoP should force a largish crew for him to report again. In both example above, we wanted to inflict maximum damage by piling up personnel first. Not necessary in every case. Consider: MIXED: Common Thief / DNA Clues / Hippocratic Oath Pick off any stray Exobiologists if necessary with Common Thief, or some MEDICAL if not. Hippocratic Oath then requires 3 MEDICAL personnel to pass. Examples of reinforcing this combo include a Plague Ship if in space, or a Shot in the Back if on a planet. Q bypass is still a problem in the tournament scene, but can be accounted for. The new ruling that recycles Q-Flash cards is very welcome, as Hide and Seek can come back into play again and again. Fighting words can be used to reduce skills. Diplomacy is often found as the first or second skill on personnel, so a Shaka When the Walls Fell will be effective. Smart dilemma placement is very effective. Using the mixed combo above, it would be unwise to place this combination on a mission requiring Exobiology. It is far more effective to place dilemmas with skills that are not part of the mission requirements, as this forces the opponent to expand his skill set during the attempt. Psychology As mention above Q bypass is still a problem. Any person who plays this strategy always fears not getting his Q dilemma(s) down last. You can get him to fear any upside down cards on the table that are still waiting to be seeded. Sites and Facility Phase cards are a prime example. The opponent will be looking worried at those cards that are still waiting to enter play. Occasionally glance at them, just don't seed them, and be wary of Spacedoor, it's double sided. ;-) The sites can also be used to cause confusion. Last tournament I always "accidently" left the site cards face up on table after seeding a very Cardassian looking spaceline, only to surprise the opponent once the Borg outpost was played. I've only just scratched the surface on how the seed phase controls the game. Hopefully this article has given you some ideas on how to be more effective in your STCCG strategy. Good gaming, Steven Livanes