you all know my mentor, the Traveler. And who of you wouldn't want to take a little encounter with his abilities? Well, maybe a few less after experiencing
Let's for starters overlook the "if" and "unless" clauses and just go with the basic concept. Instead of just requiring INTEGRITY <5 (as in Firestorm) here a total of two scores must be less than 12. Seems a lot harder to cope with (5.5 average instead of 4 still means death), but I'll have to go over that doing some counting.
For Federation: 3 killed by Firestorm, 8 hit by Thought Fire.
Klingons: 8 killed by Firestorm,19 by Thought Fire.
Romulans: 19 dead from Firestorm,15 with Thought Fire.
Non-aligned: 14 Firestorm victims, 12 Thought Fire casualties.
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44 54 = 23% net gain
So interestingly enough the prime Firestorm candidates are better off when hit by this than with a Firestorm and those that escape a Firestorm nearly unscathed now take some more hits. And it gets really bad for the Klingons. Just they have no Empathy so they are even worse off. The Romulans at least have Rakal and Fed Empaths are quite common. So this might be the anti-Klingon variant of Firestorm (somehow logical if you remember typical racial attributes:
Feds have high Integrity, fair Cunning and lousy Strength.
Klingons have high Strength, fair Integrity and low Cunning.
And Rommies are high on Cunning, fair Strength and lousy Integrity).
So you hit those most who have a weakness (Cun) and cannot compensate for it with a high (Int in this case) score.
The Empathy escape clause? Well, it steepens this curve some more but benefits the non-aligneds a bit. And as I would estimate that about 1 in 4 away teams have Empathy, the net gain from above is eaten up.
And now for the prerequisite of having a Traveler in play. It is really common to see this card as it is fairly strong and any deck can use more cards in hand. The only deck that can go without one is a slow stalling deck. Now ths could do some leveling to the playfield. But it does miss that goal as the really fast decks are either Fed (and thus don't have so much to fear) or Klingon attack (not very likely to attempt a mission early so they'll have more time after eradicating those pesky outposts). But on the other hand you can use this card in space which also somewhat cancels out the limitation as Planet missions are more commonly played than space missions and games with The Traveler in play are more common than those without.
So about a Firestorm. More or less. More less than more :-)
- Hologram Ruse + Thought Fire: Those with low Int or Cun will have to include every man and woman and then you'll get something to kill.
Wesley's rating: 5.0 Cole's rating: 2.0 Conner's rating: 5.5 Data's rating: 5.0 Hal's rating: 6.3 Heather's rating: 7.0 Jack's rating: 6.7 John's rating: 6.0 Q's rating: 4.5 Ranger's rating: 7.5 ---------------------- AVERAGE RATING: 5.55
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Wesley Crusher, the new STCCG Lord
"A couple of lightyears can't keep good friends apart"