People seamed to like the first article in this Good, bad, ugly lineup so this week I will be doing another 3 cards. This wont be the only articles I do, I will also take request from the community, and I have received a few request and am currently working on them, it will just take me a little longer to get thoughts done so in the meantime here is part 2 of the good the bad and the ugly.
The Good
Skilled First Officer So last week we talked about a one point upgrade that does not see play very often in the Ugly category, but now our other one cost card finds its place in the good category. I get it Skilled First officer does not look that great compared to other officers but let me tell you the reasons he is in the good category. Skilled First Officer (SFO) is the cheapest slicer tools protection points can buy, especially for ships that are just spamming one command over and over again, but even if you are not chances are you would probably rather have the command under the dial that got sliced, however what puts him in the good category is his iteration with command 2 ships. SFO is able to make your command 2 ships a command one ship for a single turn let me give you and example. Lets say you are flying an Arquitens, they are ships that really hunger for a con fire command, but the nav chart makes it hard to give them one never fear SFO is here! Once you reach the turn you know you will need the con fire and don't need to nav set your bottom dial to a con fire then use SFO and boom you have your con fire command and then get set both dials at the end of the round. So it really might not seam like much, but we talked about squeezing every last little bit of value out of your fleet in the last wright up, so that one dice you get from a con fire can make or break the game, I just played a game where if I had done one damage less I would not have killed a ship. He is not flashy or fancy but for 1 point SFO can more often than you think be a deciding factor in your game. So if you are leaving an officer slot open especially on a command 2 ship you really want to think about putting this guy in that slot for 1 point he can be the difference in getting the engineering command your ship really needs to not die or could give your ship that little extra firepower to take out a ship, or give you the nav to keep you from flying off the board, he just does so much for 1 point so he lands himself in the good slot. The Bad
Sensor teams Sensor team this card is just bad so, so bad. Still not the worst card in the game but lets see why it is so bad. First this card takes away two dice worth of potential damage as you drop one dice to change one dice to an accuracy, we have so many better was to generate accuracy then sensor team, that does not cost us a dice to spend H9 is one example. In Armada odd amounts of damage are what you want to have to break the “brace bracket” so 3 damage is just as good as 4 if the other player has a brace so, lets say you roll 4 dice and get 4 damage you spend sensor team dump one dice then change the other you are left with 2 damage and a locked down brace, but you would have been just as well off keeping the 4 damage so that brace would be spent. So lets say you roll the same 4 dice and get 5 damage you spend one dice lose a damage turn a dice to an accuracy lose one more damage you have 3 damage left and locked down brace again you would have been better off keeping the 5 damage. So sensor teams is never good for locking up a brace, it could be good at locking down a single redirect to finish off a ship, but in most cases two damage witch is what you are most likely giving up to get your accuracy is enough to negate a ship that only has one redirect. This card is good for only one thing, you roll 4 dice and get 2 damage then spend one blank and turn the other blank to an accuracy so the brace cant reduce the damage to one damage. Sensor teams is really only good at “saving” bad rolls, and you need at least 4 dice to make it worth it. Every ship that can take this can take some type of way to re-roll dice and that is better at saving bad rolls than this card, if you want accuracy generation take H9s, Home One, Jounus anything other than this card, witch is sad because for whatever reason I like the artwork, and that is the best thing I have to say about this card.
The Ugly
Hardened Bulkheads There are a few cards in this game that prevent certain archetypes from happening, this card is one of thoughts cards. This cards keeps the Rieekan zombie ram list from happening as as soon as it starts to pick up speed this card will keep it in check. This card does have more use than just that, but it just has a nice effect that can prevent your ship from taking damage, but 5 points is a fairly steep cost, especially if you want to take a bid, but if you have a large ship that is not taking any other offensive retrofit and you have points and don't care much for a bid, and don't have any other upgrades you want to take in your list put this on your big guy, but make sure you have everything else you want before slapping this on, but I would take it only if I had everything else I wanted in my list and had the points to include it and don't care for a bid. It is a card that would be the last card I would put into a list, but it is a nice card, and by its mere existence keeps an entire archetype at bay, so it finds a spot in the group of our ugly cards. Hope everyone is enjoying this series, I will continue to do this series, as we still have some cards that we don't see very often to cover, but I do have some other articles in the works if you have suggestions or anything thing you would like covered please let me know and have a happy Thanksgiving!
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