For my second contribution to this wonderful site I bring a much longer, though decidedly less strategically viable, piece; at least until Voyager is released.

More Affiliations!

    With Voyager we will be getting two new affiliations, the Vidians and the Kazon.  That brings us to 12 affiliations.  I have been listening to debates recently about whether that is too many, and how are they going to be effective affiliations with such a limited card base to draw from.  I intend to answer these questions in this article.
    So now we have 12 affiliations, well 10 “real” affiliations and 2 “not so real” affiliations.  Folks I’ve been playing this game since the beginning, I still put my outpost under the mission (Though in tournaments…), though I am forced to play the Non-Aligned and Neutrals as affiliations, I still don’t think of them as affiliations.  Yet I digress; since I have been playing for so long I have seen all the new affiliations come out.  Every time a new affiliation comes out people say the same thing: “Another One!”  Well after living through 5 new ones I can safely say that another one won’t hurt the game.
    Personally I think it will be a good thing.  Every time you get a new affiliation you expand the tournament binder.  When I used to play with the first 3 expansion sets you would go to the table expecting to see only a few different deck types (Shudders as he remembers the days before silver bullets).  Nowadays when I go to a tournament I have about 15-20 different decks I might see.  That makes it a lot more fun.  Instead of playing against only a few deck types two or three times each tournament; I get to play against many different deck types while almost never seeing the same one twice in the same tourney, (Note: in my region getting 8 people is a chore so don’t crucify me with the 36 person tourney have 4-5 decks of the same type).  A more recent example that a great deal of players can attest to is the metagame after BOG and before ROA:  Out of eight people you may have had three to four using a Klingon Empok Nor deck, and six to eight of the people would be using dedicated battle decks.  That isn’t a very balanced metagame, and the time when tournaments are most fun is when the metagame is balanced.  Variety is fun, not playing against the same type of deck over and over again.  Right now we have a very balanced metagame, though we do have our cheese (HOTE/DRGS and Friendly Fire/End Transmission specifically).  Still we are still seeing a lot of different decks in tournaments these days.  These new affiliations should help the metagame by widening it, and making the Delta quadrant big enough for 4 affiliations.
    Two months from now we may be blessing the Vidians and the Kazon.  They may be the only things stopping Voyager or the Borg from taking over the Delta quadrant.  When the Dominion first came out one of their biggest decks consisted of: Drop Black Hole in the Alpha and never leave the Gamma.  These non-interactive Dominion decks were not fun to play, nor play against.  As soon as a silver bullet capped this deck’s major advantage, Black Hole, they stopped being abused.  You can still stay in the Gamma quadrant but you don’t have as major of an advantage in doing so.  In an effort to prevent any blatantly non-interactive decks Decipher made it incredibly difficult to win in the Mirror quadrant with the release of only 3 mirror missions in Mirror Mirror.  Now with the next set, Voyager, we are getting another quadrant.  I honestly can’t believe that Decipher will make it impossible to win in solely in the Delta quadrant since this would not fit well with the story for the Vidians and the Kazon.  So instead of making it impossible to win you must make sure there is opposition in that quadrant.  With four affiliations, and two to three tournament worthy deck ideas each it is unlikely you will be able to go to a tourney and not be opposed in that quadrant for at least one or two games.  This makes it a lot more difficult to exploit the quadrant.  So these two new affiliations may be a blessing in the long run, and they will have a long run.
    There has also been a lot of talk about how these two affiliations are going to grow after the Voyager set.  There has been many to point out the fact that they are both, for all intents and purposes, dead races.  In the first few season of voyager the Vidians and the Kazons were the enemies that Voyager faced.  Yet after those season we never saw them again, and it is very likely we will never see them again in a new episode or movie.  Therefore, one would initially conclude that these two new affiliations would be doomed to failure from the start.  Quite the contrary; one must remember that when First Contact came out the Borg had very little screen time compared to the other races.  Decipher had the same, if not less material, to work with then they do with the Vidians and the Kazons.  Yet today the Borg are a real threat in the game, they have become that way with only using one card that is truly from Voyager, 7 of 9.  Therefore, if Decipher can make the Borg work it is very likely they can make the Vidians and the Kazons work..
    Though at this time all of these arguments are nothing but simple conjurations by my overactive imagination, with the release of Voyager and the ripples it will create in the metagame, perhaps some of it will prove true.  Regardless, don’t judge a species by its organs.

Jolan Tru,
Ruwon
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