What a Card: Henreid

Being a look back at cards from the Star Trek CCG, and what I thought of them back when they were fresh and new... in EPISODE order. More Excelsior staff? Okay...

EXPANSION: The Motion Pictures

PICTURE: A solid image, with the guy in action (at the helm) and stuff happening in the background. Nice colors and tense atmosphere. A 3.3.

LORE: Puts us right in the moment with that second sentence. It seems like a trivial point though (not the theft, but that he was called to the helm). It is a rather obscure joke however: The character's name was taken from the same actor's role in Stephen King's The Stand ("Lloyd Henreid"). So he's called to STAND in for someone. Cute, but like I said, a little obscure. Universality is far from acknowledged though. 3.2. from where I'm standing.

TREK SENSE: I guess he's meant to be a "typical first officer" from the CF era, and his skills lend themselves well to that. I mean, they're pretty generic. Officer and Leadership are naturals here, but I'm wondering about that Staff icon. Not Command? Well, I'm not opposed to it, seeing as in both the Original Series and the Classic Films, first officers don't have the same function as they do from TNG onwards. Spock doubles as science officer, for example, and ranks are all over the place with the entire Enterprise crew eventually being Command level personnel no matter what their posts are. Furthermore, Henreid is first officer of an experimental vessel (at this point), so they may not have put an experienced commander aboard. Navigation he gets from sitting at the helm just there. Astrophysics is more of a mystery. It's a possibility, and might have something to do with the mechanics of transwarp drive, but it's not shown in the movie. His Integrity's a bit low for a Starfleet officer, but the crew of the Excelsior were pretty much known as arrogant jerks, so that explains it. They let themselves be fooled by Scotty, so there's no reason to give him high Cunning either. Strength could go with his age and build, but we must also remember that the era is a little rougher than TNG's. In all of that, there are a couple attributes that seem quite specific to the Excelsior's first officer and wouldn't translate well to the "typical" CF XO, but otherwise, it's not to hard to buy into it. An ok 3.

STOCKABILITY: Whenever Decipher creates a new affiliation, or in this case, sub-affiliation, we get personnel like this. They've got nothing special going for them, but they patch skill holes to make that affiliation fully playable. He's a universal with three skills, all of them useful, if a bit common. In a Fed deck that uses a few CF cards (as simple AU, or on a CF ship among non-CF ships), you can do better. In a CF-theme deck, he's a cheap source of skills, especially Astrophysics, which is much rarer than the rest, otherwise only found on unique CF Feds. Hits a 3.

TOTAL: 12.5 (62.5%) The kind of card I'm really ambivalent about.

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