Shadowfist Deck: Borg by Stefan Vincent

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Home > Decks > Decks: Borg (almost no-rares)
[posted 25 Oct 2003]

I wanted to experiment with a Peacock deck, so I put this fun deck together in 1998 to show how I'd do a "Borg" theme deck (from the Star Trek series, just in case you live under a rock or something). The Borg want to take control of opponents' Characters (obviously Ascended at heart), but that alone wouldn't quite capture the theme. The "adapt to service us" angle came in with Peacock Summit and Orange Senshi Chamber -- every Mentored Character would boost me a little. I was still trying to make no-rares decks, but this theme cried out for a Borg Queen, so I made two exceptions.

The core of the deck comes from another combo I'd been playing with, Shadowy Mentor + Shaolin Surprise. Once a Mentor is in play (yours or someone else's) you have a huge opportunity for moving it around and messing with attacks or interceptions. The third leg of this combo turns out to be Positive Chi. Most people thought of Positive Chi as a last-ditch defense card that lets everyone bring out a big hitter to stop a winning attack, but I wanted to find a way to use it offensively. After you get a Mentor in your smoked pile (it will happen :), the Positive Chi is armed. Play it during the player to your left's turn; the timing is such that you will reveal what you have chosen last. Everyone will choose a big Character (they always, always do, unless they've seen this trick), you choose a Mentor. Since you reveal last, you get your pick of the big characters on the table. You can even nab a Queen of the Ice Pagoda this way—because the Mentor enters play on resolution of Positive Chi, there isn't an opportunity for the Queen to generate her state-smoking effect before you get control of her. After you do this once, people will not bring back big characters when you Positive Chi, and that's fine too, since it slows them down, and gets you a Mentor back for 1 Power. Play it on any available Character (yours too) so it's available for Shaolin Surprising.

The MegaTank is here for thematic reasons, plus it's awesome to shift around with Shaolin Surprise. You could make a much more tightly focused version of this deck if you dropped the Peacock and Tech angles, but then it wouldn't be thematically appropriate :) Fair warning: I did make a pure Asc/Hand version with more Positive Chi, Wind on the Mountain, and the usual annoying Hand and Asc cards. It slowed the game down to a crawl, since no one would make the first move after I Winded a bunch of Positive Chi, Confucian Stability, and Shaolin Surprise back to my hand. They concentrated on decking me instead :)

I didn't get to play this deck in a tournament since I was running the events at GenCon 1998, but I did get a win in a friendly game with some of the London crowd. And Mike Nickoloff adapted this deck (more hitters and some of the typical power Feng Shui Sites, primarily) quite successfully for his win at the GenCon 1999 multiplayer tournament.

The best moment I've had with this deck was to have the MegaTank on the Queen and launch an attack with her and a Mentored drone (Silver Fist). I Surprised the Tank three times during the attack to suck up Architect denial on the way in and keep both hitters intact (I'd have taken the site anyway with either of the two hitters so it was a bit of overkill, but the Borg are supposed to be unstoppable, and I couldn't let my opponents see any weakness :)

Borg: You Will Be Assimilated.
(63 cards)

Foundations (Drones)
5 Golden Candle Society
1 Kung Fu Student
1 Student of the Bear
4 The Pledged
3 DNA Mage
1 Redeemed Gunman
1 Just Another Consumer
1 Sinister Priest
1 Ice Healer

Specialty
1 Vivisector (he's gotta be in here!)
1 Xiaoyang Yun (Seven of Nine)

Hitters
1 Queen of the Ice Pagoda (Borg Queen)

States (more hitters :)
2 MegaTank (Borg Sphere)
5 Shadowy Mentor (you will be assimilated)

Edges
1 Shield of Pure Soul (quick repair)

Events
4 Violet Meditation (regeneration cycle)
1 Neutron Bomb (the cutting beam)
1 Into the Light (we'll make more)
2 Positive Chi (just when you thought you had them down)
5 Shaolin Surprise (adaptation)
2 Wind on the Mountain (never-ending supply)

Feng Shui Sites
2 City Park
5 Inner Sanctum
5 Peacock Summit

Sites
1 Secret Headquarters (where the heck is the bridge on this thing?)
3 Secret Laboratory ('nuff said)
3 Orange Senshi Chamber (your technology, adapted to service us)

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