What a Card: Emergency Conversion

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. This one's from Mirror, Mirror, but seemed to happen a lot.

EXPANSION: Mirror, Mirror

PICTURE: A classic shot of Scotty in a Jeffries tube, colorful and well composed. The only indication that we're in the Mirror universe is that McCoy, at the bottom of the shaft, has a sash. A good-looking central composition with the flash of red exactly where it's needed for contrast. 3.5 here.

LORE:
Sometime in the pre-release timeline, a typo made this card "Energy Conversion", so it had us imagining something different. When my brain is set to "off", I sometimes still refer to the card that way. Anywho, I know they're probably copying the terminology used in the show, but how "field density between universes" can "close" is beyond me, nor is McCoy's part in this really about completing modifications. I mean, he just stood guard. For these reasons, I can't go above 2.4 here.

TREK SENSE: Ok, you're stuck in another universe and need to use the transporter to get back. Transporter Skill, then, makes perfect sense, though Physics would be more useful than Astrophysics. A mention of the ion storms causing the strange beam-up might have helped, but not much. Parallel universes and such (as well as time travel) should really have been put under the heading of Physics, keeping stellar phenomena under ASTROphysics. 2 Physics would of course be required to cross over into a parallel world, but Astrophysics, not so much. In any case, the dilemma really should have been made more generic, especially with that title. The game text, lore, etc. all point to a situation where you must cross back from some other universe into your own using the transporter. How often would you have to perform that particular conversion? To make things worse, the card's a common! Because it's a space dilemma, you can't toy with the idea that the conversion must be made to make transport safe to or from a planet, though maybe it's one of those ship-to-ship deals where the ship is "included" like those Ensign Bobs. An extremely doubtful 1.6.

SEEDABILITY:
A simple common dilemma that makes a fairly good wall for your money. Transporter Skill is still rather rare in most affiliations, and Astrophysics isn't common either, especially doubled up like this. Knocking out ENGINEERs and SCIENCEs beforehand might be indicated, but none of the requirements are really that easy to weed out. Simple and straight-forward, it's one of the few common space walls, and not a bad one at all. 3.5 should cover it.

TOTAL: 11 (55%) Ah, Trek Sense... the bane of many cards.

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