One of the major themes of System Lords is fleshing out some of the "minor factions" players only got to sample in the SG-1 set. With this expansion, players will now have several options for building a starting team made exclusively of Tok'ra characters, or Russians, Jaffa... or the shadowy group featured on today's preview card, the NID:

On the television series, the NID (and their later incarnation, The Trust) are all about acquiring technology at any costs. This carries through into the game, manifesting itself (among other ways) in a general disregard for support characters. Shawn Grieves is a "shining" example of this, showing one of the ways that NID cards use support characters in unconventional ways. With the right glyph in place, Shawn Grieves turns each of your support characters into a sort of "half-price Sense of Adventure" for any of your NID characters.

You can try to really maximize this ability by playing the cheapest characters possible -- people like Merrin and Alec Colson, or to really push it, 1-cost people like Aris Boch and (sometimes) Drey'auc. But Shawn Grieves is really just as useful if you stock more expensive characters, and rely on destroying them as a backup option when the right opportunity presents itself.

Because one of Grieves' glyphs is Scorpius, he's a pretty natural fit in a deck with Harold Maybourne. His Orion glyph does not specifically match any other NID team characters (not yet, anyway), but just because he probably works best in an all-NID team doesn't necessarily mean that's the only option. For one, you could use Grieves to ready any NID support characters you happen to "splash" in your deck. And you could always just use the text to ready Grieves himself, even if you have no other NID options -- an interesting new option for a deck focused on Combat and Ingenuity missions (perhaps using Cameron Mitchell, Eager Adventurer, and a couple other high point value characters).