With the release of The Exiled (and the Gen Con Championship) only a few weeks away, we thought it was time to make you all drool. All of this set is designed to change the way the game has been played up to now, but Mastermind is the card that has the most potential to adjust the pace of play.

While its block of text appears dense and intimidating at first glance, Mastermind’s effect is actually very simple. It is played during any management phase (most likely your own), and enables a CEO to choose a number of ships from a single region, and return them to her hand. She can then tally the combined cost and assembly time of the recovered ships, and choose any number of ships from her hand whose total costs and assembly times do not exceed those totals, and place them into the targeted region.

This enables Amarr and Gallente players to essentially piece the construction of large ships out over several turns by building an initial fleet of smaller ships. And because the smaller ships are returned to hand, rather than destroyed, they can be brought back into play immediately. This tactic will almost certainly weaken the active player’s defenses, but the potential to dramatically increase the size of an attack fleet more than makes up for the risks involved.