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The History of Star Trek CCG: 2000

Updated May 10, 2004

While 2000 may be a bit sparse for Star Trek CCG "milestones," it had no lack of products, with two expansions and three "boutique products."

First up was the Second Anthology, releasing in March after a long delay due to packaging quality control issues. Like the First Anthology, the Second contained two starter decks (this time, Starter Deck II), six booster packs (2 each First Contact, Deep Space Nine, and Dominion), and six new cards. Unlike the First Anthology's white-bordered previews, the six cards were black-bordered premium cards exclusive to this product.

The next product, The Trouble With Tribbles, arrived in August, with two preconstructed starter decks, six "flavors" of booster packs, and a seemingly endless supply of tribble cards for the newest – and last – side deck to be introduced to the game. The tribble cards – as is the wont of tribbles – even spilled over into a "game within a game": in addition to their use within the tribble side deck, they could also be used to supplement the separate "Tribbles Customizable Card Game" sold as a boxed set, or (if you had enough of them) used to play that Tribbles game on their own (the rules were included in the starter deck rulebooks for any adventurous soul who wanted to build their own Tribbles CCG deck from scratch).

The most intriguing feature of the TWT starter decks – which included reprints of an assortment of cards from previous sets to supplement a selection of The Trouble With Tribbles cards – was the "Tribble-ization" of some 27 cards, the addition of one or more of the fuzzy critters to each of the cards' images. To this day, new players picking up older cards are likely to be puzzled by the appearance of a tribble impaled on a Bat'leth, or materializing along with the Away Team beaming in on Lack of Preparation. One thing our website always lacked was a list of the Tribble-ized cards – and their images – but that oversight has now been corrected!

Just about the time The Trouble With Tribbles released, Star Trek CCG rules guru Evan "Mot the Barber" Lorentz joined the design team full-time, relinquishing the reins of the rules back to Kathy "Major Rakal" McCracken once again. She would hold this position until just before the release of Second Edition.

October brought Reflections: The First Five-Year Mission. (It also proved to be the only "Five-Year Mission", at least as far as Reflections sets went for Star Trek CCG.) Eighteen-card booster packs contained one foiled card – a foil version of one of 100 "classic" rare cards selected from Premiere through The Dominion – and 17 assorted other cards from those sets. The 100 foils were selected following an online popularity poll, and were broken down into 4 ultra-rare foils, 50 super rare foils, and 46 very rare foils. In addition, each display box contained one of four "box topper" foils, and a case of six displays contained a "case topper" foil – Seven of Nine, which had previewed in The Dominion.

October also brought DecipherCon 2000, held in Orlando, and the fourth Star Trek CCG World Championships. After three days of world-class gameplay, Brian Sykes and Eric Johnfauno stood in the number 1 and 2 positions, but Eric edged out Brian in the final confrontation and took home the crown (well, the trophy, that is). For more Star Trek CCG World Championship information and photos, check the DecipherCon 2000 home page.

Besides Reflections, the Decipher Store at DecipherCon was carrying another new, yet-to-be-released STCCG boutique product: Enhanced Premiere. The second "Enhanced" product to be released, Enhanced Premiere introduced combo dilemmas, double-sided missions with built-in outposts, and a whole new play format – Warp Speed, designed specifically for sealed deck play based on an Enhanced Premiere pack. With a small deck, a short spaceline, batch dilemma seeding, no mission-stealing, and other streamlined rules, it was intended to be a fun, fast play format that might particularly interest new players wanting to try out the basic aspects of the game without the huge card pool and rules overhead of the full game. Enhanced Premiere released in November.

Wrapping up the Star Trek CCG year was the second full expansion of the year, Mirror, Mirror. Based around the eponymous original series episode and the five DS9 episodes set in the same mirror universe, it introduced that universe as a separate "quadrant" and brought all the memorable mirror characters to the game including The Intendant, a goateed mirror Spock, Mr. Sisko, Smiley, and the ruthless James Tiberius Kirk.

How did the year compare to predictions? Fairly close, going by a January 18, 2000 article, Engage, by Francis K. Lalumiere. Oh, there are a few discepancies – the Tribbles release is off by a month (and the predicted 5 Tribble cards didn't materialize), and Mirror, Mirror didn't have starter decks – but by and large the product line played out as planned.

But there was one more addition to the game this year, often overlooked because it didn't belong to any set or product: one of the few First Edition promotional cards, the U.S.S. Jupiter. Announced January 17th, this card was included as a premium in the first edition of the computer game Star Trek: Armada from Activision (released late March 2000). The Akira-class starship had a special download for a Chain Reaction Pulsar, which turned up as a Tactic card in The Trouble With Tribbles.

Have more 2000 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