CE alien survey #22: SHADOW

First appearance: Eon Expansion #3 (as "Assassin").

Plain-English power: After Destiny is flipped, send a ship of that color to the Warp.

Loved by: Healer (easy healing), Zombie, Warpish. Vacuum can spread the hurt around to others. Masochist, of course.

Loathed by: Macron, most of all. Kamikaze is no fan of Shadow, either, but Macron is truly hosed by Shadow.

Three ways to win as Shadow:

• Bide your time. Your power is going to matter more as the game goes on, as the Warp gets full. Cudgel and Vacuum speed the game along towards that point, which is nice. Which leads to the second point ...
• Manage your own ships well. Why? Because you want to be in a position where you don't need to play a Mobius Tubes. Got the Tubes? Play out your hand and let it end up in the discard pile.
• Take out the right ships. Never randomly toss someone else's ship in the Warp. Always make sure it's a ship that the player hates to see go. Foreign colonies are almost always the best choice, but not always, so be mindful of what Destiny cards have been played. When a Wild is drawn, you've got a free choice — don't waste it. If Virus is in the game, you are part of the solution to de-bug him.

Three ways to win against Shadow:

• Go big when you go for foreign colonies: three ships at the least and usually four ships on offense. Sorry if you don't like it, you simply must (super sorry if you're Macron).
• Don't let the game drag on. If you are not playing a combat power, you may want to even consider a shared win if it becomes an option. A smart Shadow is going to be elminating foreign colonies left and right when the Warp is full, with his own ships safe.
• If one Mobius Tubes has been played, watch for the next. You need it. Do what you have to do to get cards from the deck, both to get the second Tubes and to force the discards to be re-shuffled. That second Tubes needs to be played before Shadow can get the game to the exact place he wants it to be.

At CE Online? No.

Anything else? The Wild Shadow is an amazing Flare; it's positively nuclear. It says, "As the defense, when you lose an encounter and your opponent played an attack card, you may send one of your ships not in the encounter to the warp to take all opposing ships to the warp with you. In spite of winning, the opposing players do not receive colonies on your planet."

— Submitted by Rob Burns