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DECIPHER.com > Star Trek CCG
> Tenth Anniversary > Timeline
The History of Star Trek CCG: 1999
May 28, 2004
Note: The Blaze of Glory and Rules of Acquisition fact pages now have links
to the original expansion pages, rescued from the archives! Fair warning
– some links on those pages to obsolete areas are broken, but all the
major article links have been adjusted to work.
January
1999 started off with a bang – back-to-back releases of Enhanced
First Contact and The Dominion. The first
gave the Borg some powerful new incidents – a new card type –
plus more assimilated counterparts and a couple of very useful drones. The
second introduced the Gamma Quadrant baddies with slippery Founders, smarmy
Vortas, and kick-butt Jem'Hadar to infiltrate and smack down the Alpha Quadrant
natives. It was around this time that Michel "Siskoid" Albert
launched his Siskoid Space website to house his popular Rolodex card review
series (still going strong today with over 2000 reviews!) and an ambitious
new AtoZ series of "dream cards."
February
February heralded the beginning of a "retro" tournament series
for Star Trek CCG. Return to Farpoint had five phases, starting with
a limited card pool and adding on more sets in each phase until the final
phase 5 included the full existing card pool. Although it was fun to "go
back in time" and play, say, a simple, classic Romulan Treachery/Archaeology
deck for a change, doing without some cards for a while that had come to
be taken for granted (like Spacedoor) also served to remind us how far the
game had come since Premiere. More than 300 sanctioned Farpoint tournaments
would be held worldwide.
March
Regional designations were revised
for the second time, with this third iteration adding a Neutral Zone region
(for all countries not included in another established region) to the existing
21. Other changes included the addition of Prince Edward Island, Nunavut,
Washington DC, Iceland, and Portugal to existing named regions.
June
Evan "Mot the Barber" Lorentz joined Decipher's marketing team
in June, taking over the reins of rules support for Star Trek CCG
for the next year until his full-time transfer to the design team. And with
the Return to Farpoint series wrapped up, drawings
were held for two trips to The Star Trek Experience in Las Vegas: one selected
from all the winners of Farpoint events, and the other from all tournament
directors of Farpoint events.
August
A sealed-deck Blaze of Glory pre-release
tournament at Gen Con set a record for the largest Star Trek CCG tournament
to date, with 100 players – and there were more who wanted to play
but had to be turned away for lack of product. Blaze
of Glory was the long-awaited "battle expansion" originally
intended to be part of The Dominion.
November
Even without a product release (that would come the following month), November
was a big month for Star Trek CCG. Evan Lorentz became a part-time
member of the game's design team, diving headlong into Tribble design. He
still had time to be head judge for the third World Championships, held
as part of the first DecipherCon (with guest celebrities Chase Masterson
and Aron Eisenberg), in Virginia Beach. Mike Harrington took the title with
Dan Allman as runner-up. And most important of all, Warren Holland announced
at the finalists' dinner a major expansion of the Star Trek license:
the addition of rights to the Original Series and the first seven feature
films, and the right to develop an online "digital" version of
the card game, with the extension of all rights through 2005.
(I'm looking into restoring the DecipherCon 1999 section of the website
– unlike later DecipherCon coverage, it was housed in the "Event
Calendar" area, which is no longer part of our website. However, I
think I have it all archived!)
December
A holiday season offering that looked more like Halloween than Christmas,
Rules of Acquisition released December 1st and
unleashed the Ferengi on Star Trek CCG. World Championship finalists
at the previous month's DecipherCon had already had a taste of Rules of
Acquisition play – a number of powerful counter=cards against various
abusive strategies, including the Writ of Accountability, were declared
legal for the finals and made available to all finalists.
Have more 1999 highlights? Send them in to me at webmaster@decipher.com
for consideration.
Kathy (Major Rakal) McCracken
Star Trek CCG Intelligence Officer and Tal Shiar Agent
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