The second deck introduced in Magic: The Gathering Star Trek precons is Federation Fleet. A Red/Blue/White deck that appears to focus heavily on card draw.
At first glance, this deck does feel like a disappointment. I expected it to focus more on Spacecrafts, considering that makes up the Federation.
On top of that, if you follow spaceship logic, you can’t fly a ship without officers to operate its different stations. This deck itself is filled with officers, doctors, advisors, and everything else that makes up a full crew worthy of operating a starship.
After I took some time to think about it, a deck focused on card draw might not be a bad idea. We have 100 cards to play through, and that advantage might be just what the Federation needs if they plan on taking on the Borg.
Originally I wanted to combine this deck with cards from the Edge of Eternities Counter Intelligence Precon. After reviewing the cards, that may not be the best idea. While they share the same color combination, these decks have nothing else in common that would work together. Federation Fleet cares about second card draws, while Counter Intelligence is artifact focused.
Though, that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything from EoE we can use (Which i am still sifting through). And much like our Borg upgrades, I couldn’t help but “cheat” away from a Star Trek / Edge of Eternities exclusive deck.
Deck Upgrade Parameters
Unlike the Borg precon, our Commander options for this deck is limited to Jean Luc, or Janeway. Janeway is great for creating officers, though her ability requires dealing combat damage which is not always guaranteed. For this reason, I chose Picard as my Commander choice.
Having a historic enter (Legendary, artifact, and sagas) seem a little easier to accomplish early game as I set up my board.
With his abilities, I want to build my deck to focus on:
- 3+ mana historic cards
- Card Draw
- Proliferate (add one additional type of counter)
Ambassador K’ehleyr a great choice, but she is already in the Klingon Fury deck. To keep this deck more original I chose to take her out. The only benefit I see in this card is that she gets +1/+1 for each nonland revealed. While it is a card draw ability, it is focused on her and does not help my other creatures in any way. At best, the only reason I would keep her would be to buff her up, and use her to station my spacecrafts or as a heavy defence.
Captain Jean Luc Picard feels like a better fit. For the same mana cost this Picard is a 2/3 and gives other creatures a +1/+1 buff. On top of this, each creature of spacecraft we cast will create an additional 1/1 red officer and thanks to Picard, these officers become 2/2.
This will be a great help when I begin casting Spacecrafts and need to station them up.
Geordi Laforge Inovator is a great card to keep. Though the deck itself only has five spacecrafts, In a 100-card deck, your chances of having those seem rather slim which might make him less of an advantage.
I’m not too concerned about losing a card draw, especially when this deck already has plenty of card-draw abilities. And our next card cut will give us that draw back.
Lt. Commander La Forge may seem questionable considering I just mentioned the lack of spacecrafts in the deck, however my end goal is to include more after I have the opportunity to play the deck.
Tuvok Chief Tactical Officer seems like it may be the best course of action to swap. While he is a great defensive creature, unless you can return him to your hand for a second volley, he is only going to redirect one attack phase.
Scrawling Crawler, on the other hand, adds the extra card draw we want this deck to achieve. With this card in play, you can quickly advance the second card draw ability, while at the same time forcing your opponent to draw and take damage. This will also be a great help when we have Howling Mine
Enterprise-C seems very appealing for card draw. However while that is our goal, I don’t want to draw myself out of the game. For five mana you can cast, and another three power tap to station we have a nice 6/6. Though this Enterprise doesn’t do much else for use other than flying. I would be willing to cut this to had something with a little more advantage.
Enterprise-A costs five mana to cast, so there is no change in mana cost. However, upon entry, we create three 1/1 officers that we can tap on the same turn to charge this Spacecraft. With another three (which isn’t hard to do) we can have this Spacecraft creature ready with Ward 2, flying and Lifelink. Considering this deck does not have a lot of lifegain, this seems like a better option.
Just like our Borg deck, this deck seems pretty well built for a precon, so there really isn’t too much I would change other than finding more ways to take advantage of the card draw triggers.
What do you think? Is there anything else from the Star Trek set you think would help advance this decks strategy?
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