REFLECTIONS SENSATION Marcus Sheppard Oooh!" "Aaah!" Re-Trek-tions? Trek-flections? Reflec-Trek? Call it what you will, Reflections: The First Five Year Mission is blinding us all. You know the drill from Star Wars CCG's version -- one of the game's top 100 rare and ultra-rare cards, foiled and packaged with 17 other random cards from any expansion set up to and including The Dominion. To our surprise and delight, some other premium cards have mysteriously found their way into the mix. We all know how good these cards play, but how good do they look? The Borg Ship dilemma is dangerous and spooky. It's a very dark card anyway, but the black ship on the black background manages to light up black when you tilt the card. All Premiere set foils look better than what we are accustomed to anyway since they are in their black-border versions. The Devidian Door really glows with energy, just like at the end of the Next Generation episode Time's Arrow. The space missions with stars or "shattered space" look amazing, but my personal favorite is Investigate Rumors. Whilst I have never actually been in a nebula myself, this card looks just like the real thing. :-) The Reflections sealed-deck tournaments this weekend are played with a Starter Deck II and 4 packs of Reflections -- that's 124 cards from which to build your deck. The refreshing thing about this format is the diversity of dilemmas you will face: it's much more difficult to guard against this than it is with an OTSD box, when you know all the cards come from just two expansions sets. Standard sealed-deck mentality prevails here... all your personnel (except Borg) can work together thanks to the mandatory seeding of Memory Wipe by all players, and advanced strategies that rely on combinations of cards just aren't viable in this environment. It's your best one-shot events and interrupts all the way with the sharp game-winning decisions being made during play. Roger Gardner pulled an ultra-rare foil Jean-Luc Picard, with an ultra-rare non-foil Future Enterprise in the same pack! The excitement must have affected his concentration as he came in last, but obviously still had the biggest grin. I don't pretend this to be representative of all boxes in any way but in this sample of 24 players, three ultra-rare foils were pulled from 96 packs. Wess Victory lived up to his name and won the tournament with a score of 8 (+235). The Reflections sealed-deck tournaments continue at DecipherCon and, once the product is on sale, in a clubhouse store near you. Next time you face an Interrogation, you'll be in no doubt that there are FOUR lights! Marcus Sheppard DecipherCon 2000 Guest Writer