No Light Switch Here

When I play my personnel, I prefer that they stay in play to do my bidding. Call it a God complex as it were, but sometimes dilemmas take out my personnel, and I don't like that. Once To Boldly Go releases, at least my Hologram personnel won't be as easy to kill.

Not Easily Destroyed is a non-unique two-cost core event that rounds-out Holograms with that indestructible feeling. For the cost of a single discard from hand, your Hologram that is about to be killed by a dilemma can be stopped instead. No need to use an Emergency Transport Unit. No need to discard Not Easily Destroyed. Yes, you can save as many Holograms as you want without ever having to play another copy. This can free-up your hand for other personnel-saving cards like Sickbay, for those non-Hologram personnel in your mission team who can't be saved in any other way. Of course, you might not need them if you're using an all-Hologram false-attempting mission team. After all, it's hard to worry about Holograms if they aren't going to die. Once they're done, it will be easier for the real team to complete the mission later.

How many decks use Holograms as a primary focus? Admittedly, there are not many that I'm aware of. As of the time of this article's posting, there are just seven Holograms in the game, two of whom are unique. All of them released with Strange New Worlds, and five of them are Non-Aligned. We are getting one more in To Boldly Go, however, and his name is Cyrus Redblock, Civil Criminal. Go ahead and check him out. Pickpocket, Smuggling Run, and The Orion Underworld never looked so good.

But I digress; back to Holograms. They're immune to Kelvan Show of Force, they can be played directly to qualifying ships with Holodeck Grid, and can gain a +2 bonus to all their attributes as well as a skill of your choice -- for the rest of the mission attempt -- with Cluttering Irrelevancies. Keep in mind, however, that they're not great at ship staffing, and they have only a handful of skills each. There are some exceptions to this generalization. Dr. Leah Brahms, Holographic Representation, for example, has some skill-granting game text.

For the most part, Holograms fill the role of assistants, but with cards such as Not Easily Destroyed, their value is only going up. If you're going to take advantage of using a lot of them, it will be difficult to pass up a reusable Escape in the form of Not Easily Destroyed.