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A Brief History of Time Travel

    Submitted by Telak on Tue, 03/28/2017 - 22:00

    Temporal Conduit

    Doorway Doorway

    Seeds on table. Your Alternate Universe cards may seed and play (one per turn). Twice each turn, you may place a card from hand beneath draw deck to relocate your Away Team or staffed ship from a time location to the corresponding spaceline location, or vice versa. Once per game, you may download Stone Knives and Bearskins OR Out of Time OR Temporal Investigations.

    Characteristics: time location related cards.

    Card logging info: First edited by Telak at Mar 29th, 2017. Please support openCards and validate game text of this card!
     

    		Temporal Conduit

    This Card-Review article was written by Matthew Zinno and was published first on "The Continuing Committee (trekcc.org)" at Mar 28th, 2017.

    For years, time travel in ST:CCG has been easy. Too easy. All it takes is a Temporal Vorteximage to allow any time travel you want while it's in play on your time location. It has a countdown of 3, except it really doesn't. With Temporal Vortex sporting a icon, it can be rather freely obtained from your deck or even your discard pile, and can be cycled away (for later re-retrieval) before its countdown expires. 

    With so many modern deck types (including an entire affiliation, in two quadrants) based on reporting at a time location, CC Design has been releasing several new time-travel cards over the years, in the aim that something could eventually replace the versatility of Temporal Vortex. There was Out of Timeimage, which requires a temporal agent. There was Protect the Timelineimage, allowing any ship to travel but giving particular benefit to timeline natives. Still, its limitation of one trip (per ship) per turn has proved to not be convenient enough. I know; I've tried it in my own The Original Series decks, and there's almost always a turn somewhere in the game where I have my ships on the spaceline, and report people to the time location because I want them this turn. PTT doesn't give me enough travel, so I break out the Temporal Vortex to allow me a return trip. 

    Now the Broken Bow set gives us Temporal Conduit, and I think that its two-trip limit will be just what is needed for decks based on a time location. There's a cost to each trip, but it's a quite acceptable one: placing a card beneath the draw deck.  (Even no-hand Starfleet should be able to do this, with Watch Dogimage emptying to your hand at the start of the turn.) It won't replace Protect the Timeline in the decks which will still want its free reports, but since it also provides Alternate Universe reporting and seeding, it can replace the STP/TMW/AUD that such decks would probably have been stocking. 

    I'm looking forward to a trip through the Conduit. How about you?