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. A great moment in Heart of Glory NEEDED to be a card...
PICTURE: A dramatic overhead shot, with all facets of the ritual visible, from the screaming Klingons, to the fallen one's eyes being kept open. You supply the sound. Fun enough that we can forgive that first season Worf ;-). A 4.3.
LORE: While the information is good, the syntax is all over the place. What's that semicolon all about in the first sentence? And "killed warriors..." is hopelessly clumsy. As to the period between the last two sentences, it could easily have been a comma. Sorry, that hurts the card, dropping it to 2.4.
TREK SENSE: What's fun here is that you, the player, have to yell to warn the dead. Just a little bit of role-playing flavor there. (Yes, yes, I know you don't really have to, but it's what I *prefer*.) Klingons all innately have this 5-point goal: "I must die with Honor". So if your Klingon with Honor dies, you can call that a victory of sorts. Score points. It's fun to do the Death Yell yourself, but really, it should be handled by other Klingons present, and those, sadly, aren't required. The last sentence sounds long enough for me to comment here, but it's just "Not cumulative" long-form. I'd say this is a nice Klingon cultural card, which hits 4.2.
STOCKABILITY: Honor decks are a natural for Klingons. I mean, they have plenty of missions requiring it, plenty of Honor mission specialists to take advantage of that fact, and more than one Honor-related support card. Klingon Death Yell is one of these, and it's a fun one. Klingons are always getting into fights, and some of them are likely to be killed. Same thing for some of those mission specialists, especially the universal (you could say "expendable") ones. Let them die (as Kirk once said), then play this interrupt to get 5 points as a consolation prize. I'd say the big problem here is that the card was printed mistakenly (in my opinion) as a rare. In a set as big as Premiere, you can't expect to have enough Death Yells to actually make its use profitable. This is one case where rarity is an issue in the Rolodex. My only copy is from the Tin Set, for Kahless' sake! In any case, 5 points isn't a game breaker, so there's little chance a player could destroy a shipload of Honorable Klingons and then drop a ton of Death Yells on the table. Getting them in hand AFTER reporting personnel is hard enough, but you also gotta consider how hoarse you're gonna be after all that yelling. Plus, Scorched Hand and Intermix Ratio should control some of it. It stands as a cute card that's easily stocked in a Klingon deck for a little bonus noogie. Can't do better than a 3 here.
TOTAL: 13.9 (69.5%) Nothing to shout about... or against.
Comments