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Tenth Anniversary Collection:
Dominion Invasion

'A Dominion Defiant? Yes, as many fans of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine know, the Dominion commandeered the U.S.S. Defiant in the episode "One Little Ship." It was a most impressive debut for the Alpha Jem'Hadar. Kudak'Etan and the U.S.S. Defiant make a great new addition to the Dominion and can actually push them over the top a bit in some situations.

Kudak'Etan offers the Dominion another Jem'Hadar with a command star staffing icon. While that may not seem that big of a deal to some, any Dominion player knows how important it is to get personnel with command stars out on the table. And as all fans of the Dominion know, each Jem'Hadar has either Officer or Security and Kudak'Etan has Officer along with a few other skills that make valuable to the Dominion.

Of course, it is his corresponding commander status of the Defiant that makes him interesting. Because of cards like How Would You Like A Trip To Romulus, Captain on the Bridge, and Standing Your Ground, this guy makes the Dominion Defiant a ship to worry about.

Oh! And he has a pretty cool ability too. No need to pack Dimensional Shifting any more with this guy around. Just pitch a Vorta that you already had in your deck and jump on an opponent's ship and break loose with some combat.

The Dominion Defiant is my favorite card in this tenth anniversary collection. I don't remember how the idea of giving the Dominion a Defiant started but I do know that it was originally in the Necessary Evil expansion. Its original game text had something to do with events that triggered off of an event's cost and there was a high cost event that the Dominion could use that went along with it. When that event was cut from the set during development, the Defiant needed to be redesigned.

Game Designer Evan Lorentz and I sat down to try and make this card work. Now, I don't think it has been publicly stated before or not but designers don't often work together on a single card. A card may pass back and forth between designers (and often does) but it is a rarity when a single card needs to be designed (or redesigned in this case) and two designers sit down to start from scratch on a card. The reasons why are mostly because everybody thinks differently and people's creative processes don't always work the same way. But when two people can sit down and hammer out an idea together and it works well in the end it can be a fun experience. As was this one.

One thing that was on our side was that we knew what the stats and staffing for the U.S.S. Defiant were going to be. Those attributes – as Dominion players will notice right away – don't strictly follow the regular Defiant lines but rather reflect a bit of the Dominion. We all know that Dominion ships cost a bit more than most ships but their staffing is less. We could make the staffing less for this U.S.S. Defiant but how can a seven cost ship cost more? We could have added a discard from hand when the ship was played or maybe some other sort of 'tax' like the non-aligned Data, Loyal Brother, but early on we chose to reflect a bit of story line as the added cost and made it so that an Engineer had to be on board in order to staff the ship.

When I sat down with Evan at his desk, I knew we were a bit under the gun to figure out something cool and figure it out fast. Hmmm, that is the same way that Elim Garak, Agent of the Obsidian Order happened... Anyway, we quickly found a theme we wanted to go with – an incentive for a Dominion Gamma Quadrant deck to want to hop to the Alpha Quadrant. We talked about attribute bonuses and other things that would be a bit hard to track and then came across the idea of moving dilemmas between missions.

Originally the number of dilemmas that were moved depended on having different Dominion races aboard the ship. You could move three dilemmas if you had a Changeling, Jem'Hadar, and Vorta aboard the ship. But there were questions about stopped personnel and if a player ever didn't have one of the three species aboard the Defiant they felt a bit cheated. Development wisely changed it to a flat number of dilemmas.

Both Kudak'Etan and the U.S.S. Defiant add a nice boost to the Dominion. A ship that can make a third mission really easy to complete with all of the Dominion's high attribute personnel (I suggest Plot Invasion with the Necessary Evil Jem'hadar) and a corresponding commander for it to boot. And The Tenth Anniversary Collection just gets better and better.

Brad DeFruiter
Decipher Game Designer

March 12, 2004