Toreth and Nu'Daq- the other, other white meat...

Remember this game? SO MUCH WORSE THAN ATTACK WING

I've focused a lot on the Federation in the past few weeks, working on tooling up an Enterprise D, and taking you through some of my reasoning for doing so. I want to start this week off with a review of some other upgrades in the base set that I think are worth looking at and including in your lists.

To begin with, I'll discuss the base set captains, Nu'Daq and Toreth. 

Nu'Daq (Klingon/Starter) 
Captain Skill: 5
When attacking, you may convert 1 [BATTLESTATIONS] result into a [DAMAGE] result.
Cost: 3
Elite Talent Upgrades: 0

Right off the bat, Nu'Daq was designed to allow the early klingon player to do something with their battlestations results. Playing with the Base set only, he's the captain that's going to be going last most of the time. Nu'Daq gives you reliability in terms of your attack rolls. You have 5 attacks on the Vor'cha, and that gives you a higher percentage of rolling the useless blank, and the useless battlestations (for Klingons at least!). He's a good middle of the road captain that is not going to make it into every build, but would be great on a secondary ship in your build. You're not going to build around Nu'Daq, but he would be great on a Ch'Tang enhanced by Martok/Gowron. 

The Klingons so far are very synergistic and Nu'Daq does what any good Klingon commander should do- make your attacks more effective. 

Toreth (Romulan/Starter) 
Captain Skill: 7
When attacking, you may convert 1 [DAMAGE] result into a [CRITICAL] result.
Cost: 4
Elite Talent Upgrades: 1

Toreth has been overlooked by many players up to this point. That's because the Klingon build became so obviously the best build in OP2. Two groups of ships are going to fly directly at each other- you want to be the player playing the Klingons. OP2 played right into the Klingon's strengths that it was silly. It was a very poorly designed mission in my opinion- or maybe everyone just got myopia and focused on the most obvious strategy and didn't deviate. Maybe our games were supposed to go on for two hours as we chased each other round the planet. 

So Toreth is going to be seeing a lot more play in the coming weeks. Mr. Baldrick on Dakka pointed out a nifty use for him and I give him all the credit of seeing that Attack Pattern Omega was MADE for Toreth. A 4pt upgrade just got a LOT more consistent. Here's attack pattern omega for you:

Attack Pattern Omega (Federation/USS Defiant Expansion) 
If you damage and opponent's Hull with a [Critical], you may immediately discard this card to search the damage Deck for a 'Warp Core Breach' card instead of drawing a random Damage Card. Re-Shuffle the damage Deck when you are done.
Cost: 3

I hadn't really given Toreth a second look. This is a perfect example of new cards giving "old" cards new life. It's an 8pt consistent Warp Core Breach that you only have to drop once you've actually landed a crit. Toreth just jumped up a lot of pegs in my estimation. 

He's Captain skill 7, so you're going to be attacking before most of the klingon captains and are going to land some serious crits on your opponents. It's a great combo and is relatively inexpensive for how swingy it is. See, this is the kind of consistent combo that is not only actually devastating but very simple to activate. 

What ship should Toreth go on? It really depends on your build, but the Ch'Tang is a great ship for him given the consistent target lock nature of that ship. You could also throw him on a Valdore getting pumped up by Martok skill 9.

Toreth is going to finally start getting some love in the coming weeks.