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. Next up is Home Soil, which produced two cards. First is a mission...
PICTURE: A simple planet's dark side, it is still distinguished by its uncommon russet color. Soft on the eye, without really going for anything spectacular. A 3.3.
LORE: As simple as they come. Where else would you go with this? (Well, I would have been partial to a mention of "ugly bags of mostly water", but it's not a perfect world.) Your usual, average 3.
TREK SENSE: Two possibilities here. The first has both Biology and Exobiology which is nice since you're essentially changing a planet's exo-environment into your own. I'm not sure what the Medical is doing there exactly that the two other skills aren't, but it lays the groundwork for the general feel of the mission - checking for unforeseen viruses created by man's unnatural manipulations, etc. The other possibility has a specific Engineer - Geordi Laforge - check out the station itself, accompanied by, this time, two Meds. This one is much less satisfying. Why only Geordi (as per the episode, I understand) and not just any other Engineer? Something to do with the VISOR? Detecting those micro-organisms with it? Here, the less-important Medical from the first possibility is doubled. I'm sure among them, they'll often have Bio/Exo, but not necessarily. It's almost as if this were two missions: Evaluate Terraforming and Evaluate Terraforming Station and Its Personnel (and tend to their wounds, if any). One is the mission the Enterprise was ordered to complete, the other is the one they wound up doing. No Geology (except through Geordi), no card relationship with Terraforming Station... that's not so good. As a Federation project, limiting the affiliations to just Fed is fine. The points may be a little high, however, for a mission that's just evaluation. Not terraforming, mind you, simply checking up on terraformers. A split personality on this one makes me give it a mere 2.8.
SEEDABILITY: A staple of many Federation decks, it's great for a lot of reasons, but mostly because it's easy to complete. Beverly Crusher, Alyssa Ogawa (FC), Julian Bashir and Dr. McCoy all have what it takes to solve the mission alone, and they're not even the only ones with a Bio/Exo combo, so you could just send any doctor with Keiko for example to solve it. Or a couple of doctors with Geordi for that matter, though I bet that option will be used much less. Why bother? Other than that, the mission is not so easy to steal with its single affiliation attemptability icon, and still covered by Fair Play. It IS targetable by Assimilate Planet, of course. Still, not too much risk for 35 points, and it's not like you weren't gonna use those great doctors, right? A 4.
TOTAL: 13.1 (65.5%) Well, I always liked this one, anyway - Arguer points for playing Terraforming Station here. ;-)
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