Bah-weep-Graaaaagnahwheepnini bong, gamers, and welcome back to another article about Transformers: TCG. I spoke briefly in my introductory article about all the cool features and ideas in this new card game from Wizards of the Coast. Today I'd like to delve a bit deeper into some of the unique challenges a game of this style presents for deck-building.

On every turn of the Transformers card game you'll be flipping at least two cards off the top of your deck for the purposes of combat, and those cards are destined for the discard pile as soon as they're flipped. Because you're only guaranteed a single draw each turn, a major portion of the strategy in Transformers is being able to balance your deck's effectiveness not just in what cards you have in hand, but how strategic you can make your combat flips. Making sure that all cards coming out of your deck, either through draws to your hand or flipping them for combat, are being maximized for effectiveness is a key component to total victory in the war for the future of Cybertron!

To illustrate this paradigm, let's talk about my all-time favorite character, Starscream and his iteration from the Rise of the Combiners set, Starscream, Decepticon King.

Battle Cards

As you can see, Starscream gets a major bump from flipping over a very specific card, Decepticon Crown while in combat. Let's look at this card in a bit more detail.

So, the crown itself isn't terrible, as it allows you to Plan every time one of your other Decepticons attacks, which alone is a decent effect, but there are other cards that allow for better planning. Clearly this card was meant to be most effective when flipped in combat with Starscream, so now we must figure out how to make that happen as reliably and as often as possible. Thankfully we're already part of the way there with the Crown having a big green pip on it, which means after combat we can swap a card out of our hand to bring the Crown back to us. Again, we just have to make sure we get it back on top of our deck to be used again when appropriate.

So now that we know we're building for synergy, let's look at some of the other tools in this deck that will help us achieve our goals.

One of our best tools is going to be Mining Pick.

Being able to Plan 2 cards back to the top of your deck when attacking makes this a key piece of the Starscream/Crown puzzle. If we have more than one Crown in our hand, which is the goal for nearly every combat, then swinging with our pick is going to net us a good +8 to our attack (+3 for each Crown and +2 for the bonus from Mining Pick's ability). The downside here is that Mining Pick does us no good if it ends up getting flipped in combat, so we'll want some tools to fish through our deck to help find it. Cards like Treasure Hunt, Security Console, and Reclaim to be precise.

Starscream's flip ability on his alt-mode side is also great for digging Crowns and Picks out of your discard pile, so we'll want to get the maximum amount of use out of that as well. To facilitate, we're going to also look at cards like Roll Out and Escape Route to give us an extra flip on those turns where we really need it. Escape Route is especially nice in this deck for both its green icon to let us pull it to our hand if it shows up in combat, and the white icon which enables us to flip more cards during fights.

The unfortunate truth is that sometimes randomness and shuffling end up putting the cards you need further down in our deck than we'd really like. If our draws aren't great and we don't have anything in hand to let us search out what we need, we'll need to get what we need by maximizing the number of cards we flip in combat to hit those green pips that are essential for our strategy. In this deck we'll be using Backup Beam and Sparring Gear for those purposes. Sparring Gear has Tough 2, letting us flip two extra cards on defense, and Backup Beam has Bold 2, doing the same work but when we're on offense. They also both sport green pips, meaning that we have another avenue of getting them into our hand if normal draws and our Treasure Hunt plays aren't working out so well.

We'll also be playing Supercharge, with its Bold 3 effect, as an action to really get our combat flip engine going.

We'll round out our deck with some other solid cards like Energon Axe for extra damage and Pierce, and Marksmanship and Armed Hovercraft for a bit of direct damage. Vaporize and Bashing Shield help keep our opponent's upgrades in check while Espionage gives us visibility into possible upcoming plays while at the same time disrupting our opponent's hand. These effects are nice adds, and with a wide variety of combat icons among them, we've got a decently balanced deck that's going to add something on both offense and defense. However, our focus is on recurring Decepticon Crown as many times as we can.

Characters

Starscream can't do this alone, so we need to look at who we're going to team up with him in order ensure he's operating at maximum effectiveness. Our options here are diverse given the wide range of characters that have been released for the game so far, but my personal favorites are Drag Strip and Aimless.

Neither of these two are monsters on their own, but their value lies more in enabling us to loop our Deception Crowns faster in the early game. Aimless has Tough 3, making him a tough little cookie and very hard to crack in the first few turns. It also means that we'll be flipping a good number of cards on defense, bringing those green pips in our deck into play quickly. Mid-game he'll probably end up going down due to his relatively low health, but he simply turns into an effective weapon for one of our other bots if needed. Given the sheer number of cards we're going to flip in combat if things go well means that you'll very likely get to trigger his weapon-mode ability at least once for some nice extra punch. Strategically, unless you've got a killer opening hand, it will usually be best to open our first combat with Aimless.

Drag Strip's ability to draw a card when both a blue and orange icon are flipped during combat gets us out of the gate quickly as well. Our deck has a nice balance of White, Blue, And Orange pips to enable his ability, and for his 5-star cost, his 7 health and 2 defense are decent enough. Again, the purpose of Drag Strip isn't to be a heavy hitter; though with the right upgrades he still can be; it is to enable us to get the engine going early and taking hits while Starscream gets set up.

Final Deck

So, let's break down what we've got in the deck. As you can see, our Orange/Blue ratio is balanced, and our white is maybe a little high but not overly so. Green is represented well, meaning that we'll often have a card in our combat flips with the option of pulling to our hand. There isn't any black, but this deck isn't focused on Pierce, it is focused on having Starscream swinging big and swinging often.

Some considerations for modifications include playing around with different characters since we're 1 star short of a full 25, but that could also be used to add a powerful 1-star battle card to our deck as well. Some of our battle cards could also be optimized based on matchup, putting more emphasis on defense or offense depending on what's coming across the table, but that can easily be handled with some side boarding. Overall this deck is a solid, diverse build that showcases how one can optimize the flip mechanic for combat into a powerful strategy to maximize plays from cards in hand.

Starscream, Decepticon King

• Characters (3)
• 1 Starscream, Decepticon King
• 1 Decepticon Drag Strip, Cutthroat Warrior
• 1 Raider Aimless, Airforce - Weapons

• Actions (20)
• 2 Supercharge
• 2 Escape Route
• 2 Espionage
• 1 Vaporize
• 2 Marksmanship
• 3 Roll Out!
• 3 Incoming Transmission
• 2 Treasure Hunt
• 3 Reclaim

• Upgrades (20)
• 3 Armed Hovercraft
• 3 Mining Pick
• 1 Backup Beam
• 2 Sparring Gear
• 2 Bashing Shield
• 3 Security Console
• 3 Decepticon Crown
• 3 Energy Axe

Total Pip Counts:

White : 10

Blue : 16

Orange : 17

Green : 12

Black : 0