I have discussed building decks occasionally with new players and I often ask What is the goal of your deck - how do you want to win the game?. By this I am interested in getting the player to consider the theme or focus of their deck.

Ideally every deck should have a key combination of cards which work together towards a goal. That goal should generally be one that you can summarize in a single short sentence.

Example Deck Ideas

• Flag planets so that I can make use of National Prosperity effectively to outbuild the other player
• Deploy Spaghettification early to seize citizens and Cannibalize them
• Play as many ship cards to as I can ( to dominate the map) and use planets only to create citizens, (allowing me to win votes).
• Take only Life tech cards, so as to reach powerful influence and destiny generation early, and win by destiny.

By building a focus for a deck, a player can decide which cards fit a deck and which cards will actually detract from its success. For example if you are playing omior and have a deck generally heavy in life cards, it probably is counterproductive to splash order in to add Fighter Escort ( 1O 2L). Adding off focus cards to a deck may seem like a good idea ( and some well built decks thrive on odd combinations) but eventually you find yourself in game wishing your key cards were in hand while staring at cards you have no place or tech to deploy. If you find yourself discarding it regularly in the hopes of pulling the card you REALLY NEED, you should at least consider whether it should be in the deck in the first place.

By way of example, I recently started building a Droid deck. Given that the Droids benefit greatly from splashing 1 order tech, I started with the cards I wanted to splash in.

Eventually I chose:

• Logical Sacrifice - to make those droid ships return if destroyed
• Satellite - to deny destiny to the opponent by blockading artifact planets
• Pirate Liason - to get build points at the expense of an opponents weaker ships ( tossing pirates at them I could easily handle)

I then set out to build a deck which broke into 3 themes.

General Android Map Control

• 4 Android Cruiser
• 4 Antimatter Bomb
• 4 Engine Upgrade
• 4 Planetary Bombardment
• 4 Gamma Ray Burst
• 4 Logical Sacrifice

Pirate Stuff

• 4 Brigand
• 4 Pirate
• 4 Refitted Buccaneer
• 4 Pirate Liason

Satellite Stuff

• 4 Satellite
• 4 Scientific Expedition

48 Cards

This seemed a fine deck. The Droid fleet could rule the skies, the pirates would harass the opponent, weakening his ships and paying for new builds through the Pirate Liason. The Satellite would keep his destiny down, especially with Scientific Expedition played on them. Trouble all around. All good cards.

There is even a sneaky combo in the deck. Satellites with Antimatter Bombs played on them could be detonated by Gamma Ray Burst at my leisure. My opponent would never get never get out of his home system.

In play however, the key combos seemed slow to come up, and the deck only won about a third of the time. I found myself dumping cards searching for a better fit.

The solution was to break the deck into two seperate decks, each building on their own theme.

Here are the revised decklists:

Droid Pirates - 1 Order splash

General Android Map Control

• 4 Android Cruiser
• 4 Antimatter Bomb
• 4 Engine Upgrade
• 4 Planetary Bombardment
• 4 Scrapyard Scavengers
• 4 Logical Sacrifice
• 4 Expert Crew

Pirate Stuff

• 4 Brigand
• 4 Pirate
• 4 Refitted Buccaneer
• 4 Pirate Liason

44 Cards

The goal of the deck : I build strong ships, and fend off pirates - you build weak ships and the pirates wear them down - I profit either way.

The second deck:

Droid Satellites

General Android Map Control

• 4 Android Cruiser
• 4 Antimatter Bomb
• 4 Engine Upgrade
• 4 Planetary Bombardment
• 4 Scrapyard Scavengers
• 4 Gamma Ray Burst
• 4 Logical Sacrifice

Satellite Stuff

• 4 Satellite
• 4 Air Support
• 4 Scientific Expedition
• 4 Slash and Burn
• 4 Obliteration Beam

48 Cards

The goal of the deck - use my fleet to hold my half of the map (or more), and the satellites to slow the opponent's destiny and wreak havoc behind his lines.

The Satellites can now be used to blockade ( alone), use Planetary Bombardment to kill your citizens, take a planet with Scientific Expedtion or Air Support, destroy your Artifact planets with Slash and Burn, or kill ships with Obliteration Beam or the Antimatter Bomb/ Gamma Ray Burst combo.

Conclusion

By splitting the two conflicting themes in the original deck, two stronger, more developed, focused decks have been created. Cards fitting each theme could be added to each deck, adding to the core combos. In the original version, in order to keep the card pool below 50 card, (and small enough to predict which cards might be drawn), many complimentary cards could not be added.

Good Luck and Have Fun!