This Card-Review article was written by Nathan Miracle and was published first on "Decipher's Website (decipher.com)" at Jul 28th, 2006.
It is a sequence of events eerily familiar to anyone who has seen an episode of Star Trek: five crew members go on a mission; four of whom you recognize and that one guy in the red shirt. It is none other than he, the one who's about to die a horrible death. A death which motivates our heroes to press on and save the day. Well, now you get to play that scenario out in the game!
Yes, William T. Riker, Skilled Commander loves to bring along some redshirts with Leadership. And if they happened to be killed by a stray Trabe Grenade, so much the better! Just discard any two cards from hand to download any personnel with the . Bring along some random Leadership personnel, such as Rixx, Rixx, and Rixx (did I mention he is non-unique?), and you'll be downloading key personnel in no time. For even more downloading madness, combine Riker with Jean-Luc Picard, Vintner.
But there's more to this "Skilled Commander" than getting redshirts killed and pulling old versions of his captain from the future! He's also got his dream job, commander of the U.S.S. Enterprise-D. Use him with Mission Accomplished and any version of the U.S.S. Enterprise-D, and you could win by completing only two missions. Granted, you could use William T. Riker, Wistful Admiral or Jean-Luc Picard, Starship Captain for the same purpose, but there are advantages to using Skilled Commander. He has more skills and better attributes than Wistful Admiral (except for Cunning when attempting a space mission), and he allows you to use a different version of Picard (such as the aforementioned Vintner).
Even if you don't want to use Biology missions with Vintner, this version of William T. Riker can help out in any Next Generation deck. In addition to his downloading ability and commander status, Skilled Commander has... well, skills. Every other version of William T. Riker has four skills, while Skilled Commander has five (plus an extra dose of Leadership). He goes a long way towards completing missions like Advanced Battle Simulation (just add Engineer or Security for the skills) and Clash at Chin'toka (just add Engineer).
So go out there and show the world the skills of the Skilled Commander!