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Mission Strangulation
by Tam Elbrun The general premise of our beloved card game is to score 100 points before your opponent can do the same. These points are usually accomplished through the completion or scouting of missions, which requires personnel. Therefore, the most effective ways of preventing your opponent from scoring points are to either prevent your opponent from completing his missions, or to eliminate his personnel to render him incapable of completing any missions. This leads me to the point of this article, an underused way to complete both objectives referred to above, called...  Basic Strategies: You have two choices with this objective. You can play it on one of your missions to protect it from theft, or you can play it on your opponent's mission to make it that much harder for him to win. From the paragraph above, you can tell which method I prefer. ;-) After all, why spend 4 cards (3 SECURITY and Post Garrison) when you can just use Fair Play and/or HQ: Defensive Measures? However, Post Garrison is most effective when you use it to seal off all of your opponent's missions, eliminating the possibility of defeat. Generally speaking (as always ;-) ), it is easier to blockade a space mission. The ships are available in almost any deck, and they are harder to overcome than a small away team, especially if your opponent's personnel are boosted by phasers or Assault Drones. Furthermore, it will take your opponent longer to muster the forces to destroy your space garrison since ships are a bit harder to amass than personnel to form an assault squad are. Also, since the Romulans, Klingons, and Dominion have the easiest to staff ships and the most SECURITY personnel, they are generally easier to form a Post Garrison deck around. Though it is possible to make a Federation, Bajoran, or Cardassian Post Garrison deck, it raises the difficulty enough to eliminate easy facilitation of the deck. The Borg are a special but interesting wrinkle to this strategy which I will discuss as well. Klingons / Romulans: With the easy to staff K'Vorts / Science Vessels and plentiful SECURITY personnel, you can Post Garrisons with speed and ease. And with the high STRENGTH of almost all of the personnel, you can quickly come to the aid of a besieged planetary garrison. However, it is somewhat slow to get going, and requires a lot of cards to get to work. Fortunately, if you get a Garrison deck going, it can be unstoppable. My advice: Use Empok Nor with Ore Processing and Promenade Shops. It can be a big help. Also, you will have the forces to defend it as well. ;-) The Dominion: The Dominion is the obvious choice when planning a Post Garrison deck. After all, any Jem'Hadar can staff a garrison, not just SECURITY! Add to that the bonuses of K'Vort like ships and common 10+ STRENGTH, and you have a winner! However, there is a downside (again, as always ;-) ). Those same Jem'Hadar will take a while to get shuttled to the Alpha Quadrant, especially if you cannot get a Bajoran Wormhole out quickly, and will require hefty supplies of White. So, if you plan on making a Dominion Garrison deck, stock plenty of Remote Supply Depots and be sure to seed an Establish Dominion Foothold, or your forces will soon turn on themselves. Also, a massive offensive on one Garrison can overrun your forces while reinforcements are still in the Gamma Quadrant, a particularly depressing turn of events if the Bajoran Wormhole is closed. The Borg: As Eisenhower's Cold War policy dictated, the threat of force is sometimes better than the real thing. Your opponent will certainly hesitate before attacking your 4 Assault Drones at his mission (total STRENGTH of 60!), especially with your Assault and Talon drone filled Cubes nearby, and Add Distinctiveness flipped! In the same vein, Borg Scout Vessels work just fine at a Garrison'd space mission with a Cube or two stationed nearby. ;-) However, the problem remains of how to get your Borg down to the planet in the first place. After all, Assimilate Planet + A Change Of Plans is a bit too wasteful! Enter Emergency Transporter Armbands and Near Warp Transport. These two cards allow you to beam your Borg wherever you wish, any time you want, with one Cube providing support for 3 locations! The only problem is speed, which this deck does seem to lack along with a good probe ratio. One Final Note: Well that's it! You can certainly do a lot with Post Garrison, if you can do it fast enough. On a humorous note, I played a Post Garrison deck against a friend (with a Post Garrison deck) while researching this article, and the resulting game played a lot like Star Wars, or maybe Young Jedi. But either way, it was a lot of fun! Try it sometime! :-) Happy mission strangulation! ;-) Tam Elbrun, Federation Security Chief |
