Seeing Double: Star Trek CCG Enhanced Premiere in Constructed Decks

The Enhanced Premiere premium cards, while uniquely designed to enhance Warp Speed sealed-deck play with their two-in-one capabilities, are just as worthwhile in a constructed deck.

Dynamic Duos
The strong main characters appearing on the six dual-personnel cards can enhance any non-Borg constructed deck. One card draw and one card play gets you two personnel worth of attributes and staffing icons, two classifications, and six skills.

What's more, each of the personnel is a new version of an existing persona, so you can exchange them with the corresponding "single" personnel from your hand (or vice versa) for more or different skills.

• 21 premium cards - each "two cards in one"
• 6 combo dilemmas
• 6 dual personnel
• 9 mission IIs

Some skills are selected from previous versions of the persona; other skills are new to the persona, such as the Romulan Picard's Anthropology and several special downloads. Just remember that you can't do half an exchange: you must have single versions of both personnel to exchange with the dual card.

Double Trouble
When it comes down to those 30 seed slots, dilemmas are always in hot competition with doorways, artifacts, hidden agendas, etc. Combo dilemmas ease the pinch by combining two separate dilemmas into one space/planet Dilemma card. A mission with two cards under it looks deceptively easy, until your opponent discovers they represent three or four dilemmas. The combos also shake up expectations about where you can encounter certain dilemmas, with Love Interests and Alien Parasites turning up in space and Radioactive Garbage Scows and Tarellian Plague Ships orbiting your planets. You may need to rethink your crew and Away Team requirements when suddenly you need ENGINEERs to tow a garbage scow away from a planet.

When creating dilemma combinations that include combo dilemmas, keep in mind that if your opponent fails to meet the conditions (if any) of the first dilemma on the card, he will be "stopped" and won't have to immediately face the second dilemma, but now knows what to be prepared for. So choose a follow-up dilemma or Q-Flash that takes advantage of that fact. For example, if he fails Ancient Computer, he knows that he not only needs to meet one of its requirements but also must have MEDICAL and SECURITY to pass Microvirus. Those three to five personnel are an adequate pool for a Q-Flash or dilemma that targets two or more personnel, such as Hunter Gangs; or simply follow with a dilemma that targets MEDICAL or ENGINEER.

It's possible to affect one of the dilemmas on a combo without affecting the other. For example, if you replace the first half of a combo with a Q-Flash, it replaces only that dilemma, not the entire card. Think of a combo dilemma as if it were two separate cards, unless the card affecting it specifies that it affects a card and not a dilemma (for example, Ajur discards all but three seed cards, not all but three dilemmas).

Despite some small wording changes, the halves of each combo are equivalent to the original dilemmas they are based on as far as seeding rules go. If you seed Ancient Computer & Hyper-Aging and Ancient Computer at the same location, the second Ancient Computer encountered will be a mis-seed and placed out-of-play. Combo dilemmas follow normal rules for meeting conditions, being "stopped," and discarding, with the addition of one new term. If the first part of the dilemma says "not repeatable," you conceptually discard that part of the combo after you encounter it, and don't face it again. The second dilemma still remains to be faced, so the dilemma is replaced under the mission.

Double Duty
Each "Mission II" performs double duty by adding the features of another card to a Mission card. The six space missions each have a built-in outpost for one of the affiliations that can attempt that mission -- two each for Federation, Romulan, and Klingon. Each built-in outpost is the functional equivalent of the affiliation's standard outpost (its SHIELD are the same, you can seed a Spacedoor on it or download mission specialists to it, etc.), with two advantages: first, the outpost seeds for free along with the mission, freeing a seed slot; second, if the outpost is destroyed, you can rebuild it without having to retrieve it from the discard pile.

Because built-in outposts don't have the same card title or "seed one" text of normal outposts, in constructed-deck play you can use both versions (Warp Speed format allows only one seeded outpost). So your Romulan deck could use Explore Typhon Expanse II for its only outpost, backing up dual headquarters, or could add Investigate Sighting II and a Romulan Outpost, starting the game with three Romulan-affiliation outposts. You'll never be far from the safety of an outpost, and it costs you only one seed slot.

The three planet missions each have a built-in wormhole. In constructed-deck play it can be a substitute for discarding a Space-Time Portal (although without the same flexibility because one end of the wormhole is fixed). With two or more of the missions in play, you can move between them without any played Wormholes. Using the wormhole text "closes" the wormhole, but you can re-open it for re-use by playing Long-Range Scan there.

While all Mission IIs are based on existing Premiere missions (and represent the same location as the original, so you stack your Excavation II on top of your opponent's Excavation), the planet missions have one extra twist: each has an additional affiliation icon, one each for Cardassian, Bajoran, and Ferengi. Both planet and space Mission IIs are worth 5 points less than the originals, to compensate for the card advantage of the outpost or wormhole. In many cases you can make up the 5 points with a mission specialist or, in the case of Test Mission II, by using Timicin to help solve it for his 10-point bonus.

Kathy McCracken
Major Rakal (MajorRakal@decipher.com)