First, I apologize to anybody I may have inconvenienced by deciding to skip Classic Tricorder (which I said I would do next).  I made this decision for the same reasons I skipped Arne Darvin and 1,000 Tribbles: there's simply not enough of the set that's been revealed to decide whether or not Classic Tricorder is worthwhile (I'm not even sure if they've shown any personnel who could benefit from it).  So, until then, you've got the already nefarious bovine sound-provoking card, the

I'm sorry, but this card can best be summed up by the following quote: "What a piece of junk!"

Really.  Unless I've missed something bit, by far, it's the worst of the cards revealed to this date.  Where to start?  Let's look at the possible benefit derived from this card.  How many ships can an average attack deck expect to take out in a game?  Having played an armada deck in the past four tournaments, I'd say one's average, two or three max.  Although the new anti-battle cards slow attack decks down, that doesn't mean that the opponent will be using more ships.  Especially once you pop this card out (it isn't a hidden agenda), they'll attempt to consolidate their personnel on just one ship (preferably a cloakable/phasing/landable one) and prevent playing more ships to limit your benefit from this card.  They probably won't even play more than one or two ships in the whole game, as this is one deck type that'll be really obvious -- why else would you play with missions worth 25 points or less?  I wouldn't rely on doing it at Qo'noS either, especially with Defend Homeworld and the likely increase in HQ use making it really easy to trip Dal'Roks there.  So, from ships, you can expect between seven and twenty points.

What about personnel battle?  Well, unfortunately, for all their weapons, Klingons are one of the more difficult affiliations to play Smackdown with.  At least the Cardassians have the Stolen Attack Ship for easy invasive transporters.  Klingons will have to rely on personnel being stopped on planets, or Treaty with the Federation to use the Stolen Attack Ship, or Memory Wipe a Spacedoor-ed Alpha Attack Ship, or something much more cumbersome.  Or, there is always the option of seeding Starry Night at Qo'noS, and doing a Council of Warriors, downloading Croden's Key and a Varon-T, then proceed to slice up personnel on facilities.  Another problem: yep, ships.  Your opponent can keep his personnel on landed ships, and there's not a thing you can do about them.  Land a ship where his outpost is, and he can report a personnel, beam him down, and move him onto the ship on the same turn, all without you being able to do a thing about it (except for Barclay's Transporter Phobia or Thine Own Self, the latter of which can be countered by moving three people from the landed ship, beaming down, then moving them all back in)  It's even worse if your opponent is playing a Romulan Tal Shiar deck or Bajoran, and gets Koval or The Emissary on a landed ship.  Once he's ready to go do missions, a Transwarp Conduit (DS/TC, although more versatile, has been limited by Q the Referee) or Engage Cloak will keep him out of your ships' range long enough for him to solve a few missions.  Mission Debriefing and hoping your opponent attempts planets seems the best option for Klingons here.  Equipped with several hand weapons, you'll be able to take out most of their personnel... a good-sized crew, if you score big, could land you seventy points here.  So, your opponent would naturally be wary of such a thing, and probably stick with space missions, perhaps solving a planet for the last points needed to win (also dodging The Big Picture).  Personnel battle seems to be the big scorer here, but it's also the more difficult option for Klingons to accomplish.

Well, you may say, what's so bad about this card?  I mean, I'll take twenty to seventy points any day, right?  Look at the restrictions on the card.

Here's the biggest one: You have to be able to solve a mission in two turns without Scanning or using assistance from non-Klingons.  That's tough.  Even with Scanning and help from non-aligneds (especially Suna) it often takes more than that.  Something like DNA Clues would put you in a real bind: waste a turn, and hope I won't get stopped by anything else, or keep on going and hope you'll be able to get by the more stringent MEDICAL dilemmas.  Either way, you're not going to be attempting the mission until you've got a lot of personnel out.  Chula: the Chandra/Q is a virtually guaranteed stopper.  Redshirting it early is definitely not an option.  This is what kills the card.  By the time you have a lot of personnel who can bust through dilemmas in two turns, your opponent probably does too.  And for battle to be effective, it has to be *fast*.  If your opponent is already out solving missions, most of the time you've lost the game by that point unless you've got a ship right on his tail.  You have to slow your opponent down to the point that you have enough ships to start locking him down before he starts doing missions.  Same with personnel battle.  You have to suppress him early on, so that if nothing else, he devotes resources to avoiding your ships and personnel instead of solving missions.  This card virtually eliminates the possibility of that speed advantage (barring something like Captured/Prisoner Exchange, but there's supposedly a bullet for that in Tribbles), because not only do you have to beat the dilemmas, but you have to do it in two turns.  Your opponent can take as long as he wants to solve them by redshirting early or Scan to his heart's content, meaning he'll be able to start attempting it long before you could.  And if you battle early (which won't be easy with Obelisk of Masaka, etc. around), you've destroyed many of your potential targets for this card.

And there's the thing about the low point value of the missions.  This by itself virtually eliminates ship battle as a viable point-scoring method with this card.  If you can solve a mission in two turns without Scanning, why not do a big-point missions?  Impose Order's got easy enough requirements, and it's a 35-pointer.  Those extra ten points are just what you would have gotten for ship battle... except now they're non-bonus points and you've earned them several turns earlier than if you hunted down a destroyed a ship.  Or even a big mission: Wormhole Negotiations or Pegasus Search is easy, and those take you more than halfway to the magic 100 if boosted with AMS points.  If you're worried about them being stolen, try Warped Space or Investigate Alien Probe.  Either way, you end up with probably more points than CoW would have provided, and you don't have to expend a card play to get the bonuses either.

The real nail in the coffin?  If you can solve a mission in two turns, Scan-free, why not solve another mission and win the game?  Example: use two Impose Orders with both mission specialists, and self-seed a Barclay's disease under one of them.  One hundred points.  It took you two extra turns to win the game...  but in those turns if using CoW you probably have just destroyed one ship if you're lucky.  So why not just dodge Intermix Ratio and go solve another mission?

OK, any ships/personnel killed in battle go under the card, so they can't be Regenerated/Palored/whatever.  But this wasn't really a big deal for battle decks anyway.  They're already loaded with Kevins to nullify Q-Nets, Supernovae, Establish Landing Protocols, and... Regenerate. Long Live the Queen wasn't uncommon either.  Although HQ destruction is a lot riskier, you can still just keep a Captain's Logged K'Vort supported by a BBSD, which is capable of damaging just about any ship, just hanging at the HQ waiting for your opponent to move a ship away.

Or you can use your Arbiter of Succession to score 18-19 points instead of ten.  Too bad that those extra 8-9 points could have been made up by simply solving a higher-point mission in the first place, which would even still be protected by Fair Play.

The final verdict: Ick.  Unless you can capture a massive Away Team on a planet with Mission Debriefing, there's really no reason at all to use this card.  And even in that case, it's much more reliable, and often just as fast, to go solve another mission.  If both are 35+ points and you've got some AMS points or other bonus point sources (Phoenix, Arbiter of Succession, etc), you win the game anyway.  When you aren't scanning and have to solve a mission that fast, you have to be prepared for nearly any dilemma contingency, so solving a second mission should be a snap.  I guess at this point I'm just rambling, and milking that second mission thing for all it's worth (groan).  At least Ultimatum had other useful abilities.

Next: Lt. Sulu (Trouble... on the Bridge will also have to wait for the Storage Compartment Door)

Steve "Sergei Rachmaninoff" Boyles