I remember a thread where, as part of another discussion, the argument came up and someone stated that drawing a Quorum card over playing an XO is a big mistake. (Unfortunately I can't find that thread again and, regardless, it was about another topic anyways.)

Personally I don't quite follow. Yes, there are characters more prone to drawing (and playing) Quorum cards than others...Tory for example. And there is Laura Roslin who has trouble drawing more than one Quorum card per turn (due to her illness). But that said...Quorum cards are somewhat specific and a President loyal to the human cause may want to gather a good combination of them to be ready to meet any peril that may loom at the horizon.

XO's on the other hand are fairly vague and could be used by a Cylon against the human...especially when you make the mistake of XO'ing the player to your immediate left.

Personally, I don't see how a statement such as "you should never ever choose to draw a Quorum card over playing an XO' is realistic. There are certainly situations where the President needs to act and he/she needs Quorum cards to meet certain dangers...like stopping a Cylon boarding party, throwing someone in the Brig, raising food or morale, or making sure the next choice of jump destination is performed by a player you can trust as opposed to the Admiral who has so far evaded a thorough look into his motivation(s). And I certainly don't see how someone like Tory would opt for playing an XO instead of drawing and playing a Quorum card -- but maybe this above statement was made by someone who either hasn't played the Exodus expansion or, alternatively, the statement specifically mentioned that it was true until Tory was added as a character.Unfortunately I don't remember and I can't find the thread/post where it was mentioned.

Now, I'm interested what people have to say about this. Do you agree with this statement? And if yes, why?

I agree with you. It would take a very strong strategy for me to agree with any statement that was phrased as "you should never do x instead of y."

I'm personally a big fan of the quorum deck, but I do agree that it's usually a better idea to have the president XO someone than activate the president's office. However, other people should also be XOing the president on their turn so they can stock up on Quorum cards. Authorization of Brutal Force is frequently better than XOing a pilot, and almost always better than XOing someone to shoot at a centurion. Especially if you've got the yellow card that negates the risk of losing population. Brig manipulation without a kill check is also nice at times. Regaining lost resources is also pretty good.

Now, if the humans are in the hick of it the Quorum is probably a really bad idea barring special circumstances. But that's why I'm a fan of drawing when things are slow so you'll have the cards when you need them.

I've seen people claim that they have close to a 100% win ratio for the humans when they ignore the quorum deck, and much lower when they don't. We're closer to the opposite in our group.

Here's the thread you mentioned:

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp?efid=24&efcid=1&efidt=426627&efpag=0

Here's my take on this subject, from that thread:

While your reasoning is totally sound, it's not applicable in this case, because quorum cards have a much stronger effect than "nothing." Auto-scouting the destination deck (uber-auto-scouting the destination deck, really, since you see all the options at once rather than one at a time), auto-destroying a centurion, gaining food and morale, looking at loyalty cards, auto-brigging cylons, auto-freeing humans from the brig, getting an action-less Press Room card draw - those are all effects as or more powerful than analogous effects generated by skillcards and locations, so it's nonsensical to say that they have no positive value for humans ,unless you don't take skillcard or location actions either. I suppose if the presidents in your group only ever played Arbitrator or Vice President that you might get the impression that the quorum cards are weak (though even those cards are better than Press Room, which is itself a pretty good action to take), but that's a case of bad play rather than weakness on the part of the cards.

I have to strongly agree. My understanding was that whoever made that comment probably didn't understand the potency of the Quorum deck (or the Presidency, for that matter) and therefore argued the way he did.

And yes, the Quorum deck is weak if you start fishing for cards when you need them rather than before you need them. The Quorum deck and the Presidency are not designed to bail you out when the sh*t hits the fan... unless you have the necessary cards already. And of course there needs to be a healthy amount of XO's to go around. But strictly choosing one over the other seems rather limited.

Thank you for your input.

I'm going to go ahead and defend Xaos' position even though I don't agree with it 100%. The Quorum deck does allow a Cylon President to hide behind cards "that don't help us right now" and there are some games where you just don't get anything useful out of the Quorum deck. I think Exodus changed this somewhat, with the constant threat of the Cylon Fleet option, I don't feel like there is as much down time as there was previously. I remember several games with Pegasus where dumb luck from the Crisis deck just didn't result in any attacks, which leaves the humans free to just collect cards for skill checks. No Cylon attacks means no damage and no centurions and lots of free turns to XO the President; with Exodus, there isn't any down time, and I feel like we spend more time XOing pilots to escort civies to safety. With less access to the Quorum deck it makes the President even less likely to draw useful cards, and in our last two games the Quorum cards barely got played at all.

Right, but unless you play with 3 players, not much more than one round is needed to escort all ships to safety...less if you have enough XO's or more than one pilot. Because you should start escorting civies to safety after a jump...you should have begun to do this before the jump while you're still out there. If the Cylon Fleet option did anything for pilots, it makes them scramble immediately after a jump. And they tend to engage Cylon ships less often because the humans can't afford to lose ships or piltos...instead they escort.

Now, Xao's statement sounded to me like there is never a good time to draw Quorum cards, ever. Which i strongly disagree with. Yes, there are certainly times when a president is frowned upon for drawing Quorum cards instead of XO'ing someone (e.g. a pilot in Exodus). But to make this a general statement is just wrong in my opinion.

At the same time, XO'ing the president to draw Quorum cards is't really all that dangerous. If you feel like the president is "hiding behind cards", elect a new president. We did this and the former president was fuming because the new president immediately used a Quorum card to send him to the brig and them started playing all the cards we needed...and which the former president claimed not to have. So you see, making the president draw Quorum cards is never generally useless. You just need to cut your losses at some point and elect a replacement.

Electing a replacement costs actions and cards, and if the current President has cards in hand and is in a good position to fight it, it may cost a lot of cards and multiple actions. And what happens when a new President comes into office, gets the hand of Quorum cards and says "Gee, the former President was telling the truth, these don't help us at all right now!" or when you put a Cylon into office by mistake, replacing the former human Pres? I think you'd be better off just executing the current President, at least then you know someone's loyalty for sure, and there is a good chance they can come back as another Political character and retain their title. If I'm human, unless I am playing Cain and haven't used the blind jump yet, I'll usually volunteer to be executed so it proves my loyalty to the other humans.

I find this discussion interesting. On the one hand, I've always been a big believer in the quorum deck; cards like Authorization of Brutal Force, Release Cylon Mugshots, Arrest Order, Presidential Pardon, Resources for Galactica, and Assign Mission Specialist are awesome. On the other hand, it's true that with Exodus there's no such thing as true downtime and there are often many worthy XO candidates. That doesn't make the quorum deck any weaker per se, but it does raise the risk of overdoing things, if the fleet winds up quoruming at the expense of other meaningful actions. So it's probably true that players need to sort of raise the threshold for when it's a good idea to XO the president (certainly I'd say 1 quorum action is generally weaker than 2 other actions via an XO). But on the other hand, if I have to decide between XO on the president vs XO on a viper so they can escort a couple civvies, to me that's a decision that'd have to take a variety of conditions into account. I agree with ronsen_04 that it seems misguided to make a categorical statement either way on that one.

Skowza said:

Again, a very general statement. I'm sure you wouldn't volunteer to be executed if Morale was too low...unless you're a Cylon. But I do get the idea.

One of the most important aspects of BSG is that there are very few general statements that hold up over time. I usually say: "Anything you say or do can and will be used against you in an airlock." Meaning, of course, that there is not one statement that would definitely prove you're a human or a Cylon. Any one statement could mean you're a human or it could mean you're a Cylon...depending on whether you're lying about it or not. And while executing a character may prove, for the time being, whether this character was a Cylon or not...it doesn't necesarily tell you anything about what the new character's affiliation will be...especially if it's before the Sleeper phase. And all that at the fairly high risk of losing Morale? I don't know...

I agree with Holy Outlaw. This discussion is interesting and I'm happy I started the thread. The thoughts that are brought up here do generally go in the direction(s) I expected. Yes, some statements are too general for my liking, but that's about it. Thanks guys!

The loss of morale is the real downside to executing a human, but it can be recovered with a Eulogy or by playing Preventative Policy before the execution. The real question is how valuable it is to the human team to absolutely and positively nail down someone's loyalty. In a 6 player game, if we reach the sleeper phase and no one has revealed after a few turns, it may be better to just take a hit on morale to make sure the Admiral or President is human. Especially if the character in question is Roslin, gods only know what Crisis cards she's been burying if she's spent the first half of the game undetected as a Cylon...

Before Exodus we instituted a pretty stringent house rule to discourage execution--we felt it was zapping a lot of intrigue out of the game. The cost for the human fleet just seemed too low, and it got to where we were almost airlocking first and asking questions later. But I find that Exodus' conflicted loyalty option has largely fixed that and brigging is experiencing a little renaissance, which to me is more fun and more thematically appropriate.