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Prepare the Prisoner by Chris Brennan Wow! This has a lot of text, like most objectives. But, unlike some other cards, it's not because the card is complex, it's because it has a lot of uses. First, you don't need to relocate Brainwashed personnel to an outpost. That's useful if you're not using an outpost; you wouldn't be able to play Brainwash otherwise. Most Cardassian and Ferengi decks never bother with an outpost at all. Sometimes returning to an outpost to pick up personnel is just plain annoying. Consider a Romulan Brainwash deck with Koval and Chief O'Brien, it might not ever need to return to a facility at all. The limiting of Rescue Captives is a good way of making sure your opponent can't take your capture deck apart with just one card. On the other hand, your opponent will not need an outpost to play Rescue Captives. But how many decks without an outpost would stack Rescue Captives on the small chance the opponent is using Prepare the Prisoner? The real ability of this card is it's recycling mechanism. You can fill your deck with capture related cards and don't have to worry about them slowing down your draws. Just recycle the ones you don't need. This way you're able to stack extra copies of cards like Reflection Therapy. Or stack a few Rescue Captives of your own, recycle them if your opponent isn't capturing. Any card that you can download is a good candidate for recycling. Why play Brainwash from hand when Chief O'Brien downloads it? And then, why download from your hand? Just put the Brainwash below your deck, draw a replacement card, and then download the Brainwash into play. This also works with the other downloads at the Security Holding Cell. And if you draw that Bribery you wanted to special download with Gint, recycle it for a different card first. Many capture cards are not useful right away. What if you don't have anyone to Torture early in the game? Recycle it for a new card, and you should end up drawing another by the time you get a captive. Or recycle Outgunned, since it takes a while to get all those weapons. On the other hand, there are capture cards you really want right away. Romulan Ambush can hurt a battle deck that comes hunting you. So load your deck with them, then you can get rid of the extras after your opponent realizes that attacking you is a bad idea. Multiple copies of the Jovis are good, so you can start cargo runs as quickly as possible. Secret Compartment is another card that might be very useful early in the game, but once you download your artifacts into play, the extras copies will be useless. Prepare the Prisoner itself is capturing related. That means that if you don't want to use a seed slot, you can stock a couple in your deck. Play the first, and recycle the others. The trade-off here is that you gain a seed slot, but lose a draw and play to get a Prepare into play. But wait, there's a way to use Prepare to save yourself a seed slot. If you're playing your homeworld and HQ, stack HQ: Secure Homeworld in your deck. It won't even need a card play. The problem with this is you need to be sure to draw a copy of Secure when you need it. With Prepare, you can stack lots of copies and the extras won't end up wasting space. This is also a good time to use the "recycle to discard pile" function, so you won't end up drawing them again later. Chris 'Rom' Brennan crbrennan@yahoo.com