Storage Compartment Door (#10, C)
Doorway
Icons: Trouble with Tribbles
Place one atop Tribble side deck during the seed phase.
Side deck is now open and in play.  Once each turn, you may draw up to 3 cards from side deck, then play or discard each.  OR Stock in deck and play (once each turn) to download from your Tribble side deck one Trouble or Tribble card, or to nullify any card that is closing another Storage Compartment Door; then discard doorway.

Because this card has two entirely different functions, this review will be split into two major parts: the seedable, and the stockable.  The seedable use is listed first, I'll discuss it first.

Since the seedable use is pretty basic, I'll take this opportunity to discuss the entire mechanic it opens the door (no pun intended) for.

I've seen a broad range of opinions on the viability of a Tribble Side Deck (TSD), ranging from "utterly useless except as a stalling mechanism" to "extremely cheesy and broken."  The consensus of most players seems to be that it has moderate power, but not enough to justify its inclusions in most decks (compare with Q's Tent, which is powerful enough to be in virtually every deck).  This happens to be my opinion as well, which I'll try to explain in greater detail.

There are two basic parts to every possible strategy in a CCG that in general determine its strength.  It's an instinctive, common-sense process, but as always there is a benefit to analyzing it in greater detail.  Here are the two fundamental questions: (1) How strong is the effect? (this also includes how much of the field it will be effective against)  (2) What is the cost of setting up the effect? (this also includes the cost of defenses against ways your opponent might try to stop your strategy).  If the effect is weak, no matter how easy it is to set up, it's unlikely to be useful, simply because the effect it has will only be nominal .  Conversely, regardless of an effect's power, if the price to reliably use it is too high, you won't see it being used much either.  Extreme ends of the spectrum can be represented by the personnel card Neral and the Q-card Gift of the Tormentor.  Neral has extremely low cost: he can be played to a compatible facility without any additional setup, cannot be directly nullified by a card like Kevin or Mandy, can be played for free at either Romulan HQ, and can be downloaded with Assign Support Personnel or Going To The Top. However, he's rarely played because his effect is so weak.  V.I.P. + Treachery + Youth is completely overshadowed by personnel such as Sela, and many others who don't even share the skills, because all are either relatively worthless to or extremely common for the Romulans.  Gift of the Tormentor, on the opposite end of the scale, has a potentially game-winning (literally) effect.  Combined with Are These Truly Your Friends, Brother? there is a chance of scoring 100 points all in one shot.  However, this strategy isn't very common because the costs of getting it to work are too high.  You have to ensure that your opponent doesn't have zero points (in which case the strategy would backfire), you have to wait for him to attempt a mission where you seeded a Q-Flash with two or more personnel, hope that he'll encounter Gift of the Tormentor before Are These Truly Your Friends, Brother? (if not, the second ATTYFB will be ignored and you'll have to wait for the next mission attempt), make sure that his discard pile has more cards than personnel in the attempting crew/Away Team, and then get lucky enough to pull the ATTFYB out of that discard pile, which has a minimum size based on the Away Team, and prepare if your opponent is playing with Countermanda.  This is just way too many elements to hope to control.  You can control a few of these (for example, stocking Amanda against Countermanda, or stocking killers to simultaneously feed the discard pile while thinning the Away Team) but in the end it still all comes down to many circumstances beyond your control and even blind luck.  Of course, most cards/strategies lie between the two, such as Retask (great effect, but with great cost).  Because these two factors are so important, it's always worthwhile to consider these when analyzing any strategy.

So, first: what is the possible effect of a Tribble side deck?  If the effect is only mediocre, regardless of its ease of use, it's not going to be greater.  However, if it's extremely powerful, it may compensate for difficulties in ease of use.  We'll see what the effects are first:

- Once per turn, a randomly-chosen personnel where you have a 1 Tribble card is stopped. - Each personnel loses their first-listed skill. - Non-Klingon personnel are CUNNING -1. - Klingons are INTEGRITY -1. - Mission attempts require 2 Leadership and 2 Exobiology. - Colony points cannot be scored. - Ooby Dooby card draws are prevented. - All non-Dilemma probing at a spaceline location is suspended. - No personnel may report for free. - Planets are worth 10 points less when solved. - A ship is WEAPONS -1 and RANGE -1. - A ship is "stopped" after it moves unless it has 3 ENGINEER aboard. - Ore Processing and conducting services are suspended. - Matching commander benefits are suspended. - Mission attempts are limited to 10 personnel.

Whew!  That's quite an annoyance to your opponent.  Note that many of the effects complement each other: personnel losing the first-listed skill makes   2 Leadership and 2 Exobiology harder to attain for attempting missions, for instance, and compensating for the 10-point loss on planets with a Colony is also restricted.  That's definitely a good start.  Note that right now I'm not considering the time it takes to get these set up, or how reliably these effects can be applied.  All I'm focusing on is the power of the effects without regard to the ease of attaining them.

There's no doubt about it: no player would pass up these effects if there was no drawback.

"A gift, yes, but at what price?" -- Cazaqal, "Nine Islands"

Unfortunately, it's the price of the Tribble deck that leads to most players   deciding that it's only of moderate overall power.  Its effects have prerequisites: you can't have the effect of 100 Tribbles without having played a 10 Tribbles card.  (OK, there *is* the option of ten 1 Tribble cards, but the time that takes is so great that it can be assumed that any 1 Tribble -> 100 Tribble jump is concidental rather than planned).  And you only draw three cards out of your deck at a time.  Because you can't do *anything* at all with your TSD until you draw a 1 Tribble or 10 Tribbles card, it is definitely worthwhile to stock lots of these.  Most players' Tribble side decks seem to be 20-30 cards in size.  If you split a 30-card deck evenly among the six denominations of tribbles, the odds of drawing a 1 or 10 on the first turn is 1 - (20*19*18/30/29/28) = 71.9% which is decent. (In case you're wondering about the calculations, it's easier to calculate the probability of *not* drawing what you want, then subtracting that from one.)  In a tournament, you can expect to get your breeding started first turn in all but one game.   By the second turn, the odds that you can start breeding are 93.5%, which is almost certain.

As with all things CCG, the odds increase as the size of your tribble deck decrease.  As an extreme example, a six-card TSD with just one of each denomination has an 80% chance of drawing a starter (1 or 10) first turn, with an absolute guarantee of having one by the second turn.  Of course, the tradeoff is similar to any reduction of a deck's size: a loss of versatility.  You can only have tribbles at two locations in this manner, and all your opponent has to do is beam his personnel somewhere else to sidestep all of your Tribble effects.

If you keep the proportions even, you have a good chance of drawing what you want within a turn or two.  The more tribbles you play, the better the odds of drawing what you want, and in a 30-card TSD you've almost got a three in four chance of drawing what you want in *one* turn.  What happens if you shift the balance of starters higher?  You do increase the chances of starting early, but I'd say that the odds are already high enough that there's really no need to add more.  The probabilities are already better than those of a typical deck aiming to get an early Q's Tent.  On the other hand, what happens if you shift the balance lower?  My question would be, "and replace it with what?"  Trouble cards?  I'd recommend replacing the *higher* denominations with Troubles, not the lower ones.  Starters can be played without regard to conditions; however, until you have some starters down, Troubles and higher-denomination Tribbles are dead cards in your hand.   I wouldn't sacrifice the ability to reliably start in the first two turns just to add some extra hassling with Troubles; rather, I'd sacrifice some of the later-game benefits of the higher-denomination Tribbles.  Plus, the sacrifice isn't necessarily too high, as after you play a couple turns of Tribbles you're already thinning out the lower denominations so the odds of drawing higher ones when you re-shuffle is automatically greater.  On the other hand, if you don't have an early starter, you might as well have wasted a seed card.  If you're still on the 1, 10, or 100 Tribble effects after the sixth or seventh turn I'd say that the TSD is almost a waste.  By this point a fast deck has either won or is very close to winning, close enough that a few random stops or preventing a few free reports won't matter too much.  So, here's general rule #1:

General Rule #1: If adding Troubles to a Tribble side deck, lower the percentages of higher-denomination Tribbles, not lower-denomination ones.

Well, it still doesn't look too bad right now.  The odds are excellent for getting what you want; even the higher-denomination Tribbles can frequently be reached within six or seven turns, where the effects can start to slow your opponent down significantly: reducing a planet's points by ten, for instance, or requiring the more obscure 2 Exobiology to attempt a mission. So where does its main flaw lie?

Here's the biggest problem: it's relatively easy for your opponent to sidestep the effects of the Tribbles.  How?  The easiest way is to move personnel away from the Tribbles.  It is for this reason that it's not necessarily advisable to start the breeding on an opponent's facility: when he plays a ship and moves personnel aboard, you have to start all over. Even with Trouble... in the Transporters you've been set back significantly, and a number of your Tribbles will be left idle on the outpost, where they won't be able to affect much.  Another option for moving the personnel is to simply play another ship, with similar effect.  Or, on planets, beaming down will avoid all those nasty complications with losing first-listed skills, etc.  Even the point reduction and added requirements to attempt the mission are often avoided this way, because only ten can follow through the transporters.  Unless your opponent's been stopped on the planet for a number of turns, the only way to keep the effects there is to breed them on your own ship and drop them off at the opponent's planets.  This is a very cumbersome and unreliable process.  If you only drop Tribbles on just one planet, your opponent can simply go to the other one.  If he's playing a planet-based deck, it's even tougher.  Even to get a 100K on two planets is six turns absolute best case -- that is, assuming you draw the right cards to breed right on up to 100,000.  More realistic -- even accounting for moderate usage of the stockable function of Storage Compartment Door -- is seven or eight turns.  And if your opponent sees you're trying to breed up the tribbles, he'll speed up his attempts on planets.  After all, if your opponent is planning to do a drive-by Tribbling, you can see it coming a mile away.  Why else would he be playing Tribble cards on his own personnel?

// Editor's note: you could also play the tribble cards directly to the planets, but then you // need a 10, a 100, a 1000, etc, for each planet, or send a ship over to move large tribble // groups

   You could try to account for this by seeding cards like Dal'Rok or Dead End that punish premature mission attempts... but seven or eight turns is plenty of time to play enough personnel to pass a Dal'Rok (especially with AMS/ASP/DH and all the new duals), and Dead End will probably just force him onto another planet.  In any event, good speed decks have nothing to fear from this.  Many of the more successful decks at Worlds were already winning by the time that you could just be starting to drop 100Ks on planets with ideal draws.

And there's other ways around it too.  One lone Transporter Skill can keep the Tribbles from increasing in denomination, and two is enough to start removing them.  In many cases one will be plenty, because to keep at that level you'd have to draw the right denomination.  If you don't, the Tribbles will just keep disappearing...

The ease of beaming Tribbles makes the drive-bys even less effective. Don't want to deal with 100,000 on the planet?  Simple, beam it up.  You have to stop a personnel, which can be an annoyance, but hey, I'd stop a personnel (and I have some degree of freedom in whom I choose) to prevent a ten-point loss.  Transporter Skill's not to tough to come by.  A number of support personnel have it, and let's not even talk about SECURITY that can be downloaded with Defend Homeworld.  A lot of them (Lore, in particular) are very useful even if you aren't especially worried about Tribbles.  And as for the Borg, they deal with Tribbles in their characteristic way of doing things: beam 'em off en masse!  One Transport Drone and an Interlink, and there's plenty of Transporter Skill to pass around.  Although the 1K effects are rather harmful to the Borg (lose the Queen's selectable skill and Interlink-ing), all that's needed is one Transport Drone to get around it.  Have it beam off the 1,000, which restores the rest of the personnel including the Interlink, and you're all set.  And getting that Transport Drone into play is a snap, as it can be downloaded by Awaken or the Queen's second skill without any hassle to the average Borg deck.  Two 1,000s can cause trouble... but that's why Borg players should never let that happen. ;-)  Beam them off while still at the 100 stage, or if your opponent is breeding up a couple 1,000s on a ship, Change of Plans for Eliminate Starship or download a second Transport Drone preemptively to speed up the process.  Or, if you have Tomalak of Borg in play, simply cloak your Cube.

And this is how most players concluded that Tribble side decks were only mediocre in power (although probably in fewer words :-).  Sure, it has powerful effects, some of which almost force your opponent to expend time getting rid of the darned things.  And stopping personnel -- even randomly from the 1 Tribble or voluntarily by carrying or beaming a tribble -- is annoying.  There's no way around that.   Every personnel in a deck is there for a reason, so there will be some harm in stopping him/her.  However, the minor annoyances of sidestepping the effects are well worth it.

In the end?  I wouldn't use one; I'm too selective in my deck-building taste.  I imagine it will need a booster card a la Beware of Q.  Prior to DS9, hardly anybody used a Q-Flash.  Why?  The cards are only a minor annoyance.  (Sound familiar?)  Even after BoQ came out, most players didn't start to realize its power until the last few months.  But in those few months, a significant majority of the better players are seeding Beware of Q/Q-Flash, its true power finally realized.

OK, enough about the seedable use.  How about the ability to download a Tribble or Trouble card?  Or to re-open a closed Tribble deck?  Either way, I'd call it a Tent card.  IMHO getting the proportions right in the TSD is far superior than compensating by stocking a number of SCDs in your draw deck.  However, if you're planning a strategy that requires high numbers of Tribbles early (such as planet lockdown, although again I wouldn't recommend it: re-read the first section) I'd advise putting a Storage Compartment Door in your Q's Tent and going a bit heavier on the Palor Toffs than normal. Use the SCD if you're having trouble breeding up quickly, and Palor it back if needed.  Meanwhile, the Palors will be greatly useful even if you don't need the SCD, and will rarely be a dead card in your hand.

Or, for general purposes, if you have the Tent room I wouldn't question the place of a Storage Compartment Door (unless, that is, you aren't playing with a Tribble side deck ;-) because it can overcome the occasional poor shuffle, plus be useful for its second function in case your Tribble deck is Revolving Door-ed.  For that function a Wrong Door is usually superior (instead of nullifying the Revolving Door, slam it back on your opponent!), however WD won't protect you from a Door-Net (yes, I have seen it, and it's even cost me a game when I couldn't Tent to keep from drawing out) and WD can be countered with Mandy.  Oh, and there shouldn't be a worry about Revolving Door locking out your Tent, because Quark's Isolinear Rods will nullify any RD on it while also letting you get a Wrong Door or SCD to re-open your Tribble deck.

I would be very reluctant to stock it in the draw deck, though.  For one, it's more subject to the probabilities you're trying to circumvent if you have one or two in the deck as opposed to one in the Tent (where you have 4-5 Tents in the deck).  You're much more likely to have easy access to it when you need it.  And secondly, it'll never be a dead card in your hand. If your draws are going fine and your side deck's staying open, there's really no need to play the Storage Compartment Door.  Q's Tent, on the other hand, is essentially a wild-card -- it's almost equivalent to being your choice of any of the cards in your Tent.  If you can't use the SCD, there's something else that's worthwhile.

The final verdict: As for the side deck, I only find it so-so in terms of effectiveness.  It's too slow to touch the fastest decks out there, but against decks that aren't top-notch it may give you the time needed to win if your deck's a little sluggish.  Another option might be to play it if you're going for speed yourself.  It may give you the turn or two you need against another speed deck.  In any case, I'd really think about it before devoting a seed card to it, which could easily be another dilemma or hidden agenda.   Before including it, think to yourself: is the Tribble deck going to serve me better than, say, a Mirror Image or Dead End?  Think about it.  I can see some situations where it may.  I can also see a lot of situations where it won't.  Either way, be sure you give some thought to the decision. As for stocking it in your deck, that's easier: put in the Tent.  It's there when you need it -- and only when you need it.  So there you have it. Welcome back. :-)

Next: Classic Communicator

Steve "Sergei Rachmaninoff" Boyles