Welcome to the first installment of my new series! As a word of explanation, obsolete cards are not the same as useless cards. A card can be useless without being obsolete and a card can be obsolete without being useless. A card is obsolete when another card comes along that can do all or nearly all that the first card can and more. Typically, superior attributes, same skills and identical affiliation is a must.

Our first card is a card that most definitely is not useless. Up until Voyager came out, I still used the U.S.S. Nebula in an occassional deck. Outside of the Defiant class (of which there are only 3 unique cards), the Nebula offered the Federation their best 2-staffing icon ship.

What happened? Enter Voyager, with the U.S.S. Intrepid. Both ships have stats of Range 8, Weapons 7, Shields 8. Both ships require 1 command star and 1 staff star. Both ships have a holodeck and a tractor beam. But, other cards work with the U.S.S. Intrepid. Class IX Shuttlecrafts can report to it. It can be enhanced by Bio-Neural Gel Packs. Outside of the cards, the U.S.S. Intrepid fits in "Voyager only" environment, and it also has a "coolness factor" of being the same class of ship as the U.S.S. Voyager.

Finally, both are universal and both are common. One could argue that Intrepid is more common because since the Nebula comes from a pool of commons that is larger than Voyager's pool (121 commons in Premiere compared to 60 in Voyager), the Intrepid is in fact more common than the Nebula, even given the fact that Premiere gives you more commons per pack. In any given pack of the respective expansion, you have about an 11.1% chance of drawing a U.S.S. Intrepid in a Voyager pack, and only about an 8.7% chance of drawing a U.S.S. Nebula in a Premiere pack.

R.I.P. U.S.S. Nebula. You were loved.

Remaining reasons to use the U.S.S. Nebula:
Nostalgia, or a "TNG Only" environment.

Agree? Disagree? Want to suggest more obsolete cards? Mail me at boffo97@mail.com.

Next up: Hannah Bates