Preventative Ritual

By now, everyone is familiar with Getting Under Your Skin and Prejudice and Politics being used together in order to gain five points... which can then fuel anything from At What Cost? to Power Shift, to Far-Seeing Eyes, or any number of point-draining cards.  However, what if you could guarantee scoring ten points each time you simply played an interrupt?

That's where Preventative Ritual comes in.  Assuming that you have three Romulan-affiliation personnel under your command, this interrupt will not only let you place one of the top four cards of your opponent's deck on the bottom, but it allows you to rearrange the remaining cards on the top of their deck in any order you want.  So, if they had a personnel on top of their deck when you used Getting Under Your Skin's text, you could play this during your order phase before you use Prejudice and Politics to ensure that you're getting an additional five points... not to mention putting a second card underneath their deck.

Even if you're not running that kind of deck, you can still use this card to mess with people arranging the top of their decks. Also, it allows you to know what skills Diplomatic Masquerade would add to your Romulan-affiliation Diplomacy personnel and even allows you to use Pickpocket more reliably if you're adding some Thieves to the mix.  You could even potentially get ten extra points with Security Sweep if they have three personnel in the top four cards of their draw deck.

This is just another of the Romulans' collection of cards which manipulate the opponent's draw deck and could easily become a cornerstone of a deck manipulation archetype.  Between Peacemaker or Predator?, Romulan Intelligence Network, and others, your opponent had better hope that his or her starting hand contains needed key cards, be they ships, personnel, or events.  Otherwise, they could be waiting for some time while you're going about your business completing missions.