Bah-weep-Graaaaagnahwheepnini bong, gamers, and welcome back to another article about Transformers: TCG. When I started writing these articles, I spoke to one of the more interesting mechanics in the game to date: Combiners. Wave 2 of the Transformers TCG brought us some of the franchise's most iconic gestalt warrior teams; including the Constructicons who make up the powerful Devastator, the Predacons who combine to form the massively brutal Predaking, and the team I'd like talk about today, the Aerialbots, who join into Superion.

The Combiner mechanic itself is an interesting enough one, if straight-forward. Once all your team is in their robot modes, you can play their specific "Enigma" card to flip them and 'combine' them (quite literally) into a new character. This new character keeps all the damage from the individual characters, as well as at least one upgrade of each type that had been equipped among the members of the team. This new character that these individuals form into is massively powerful, but also becomes a giant target for your opponent's team.

Because your combined character transfers all damage from the individual members of the team to itself when it combines, and shrinks your team down to a single character, it may feel like too much of a liability. However, today I'm going to talk about a few key strategies to be mindful of when playing your combiners to help harness their capabilities to the fullest.

A Superior Example

Before we jump right into talking about the Aerialbots specifically, we need to understand a few basics about what makes an effective combiner strategy. First, we need to be mindful of all our characters' abilities and how they're going to play off each other. This is true of any effective Transformers TCG deck, but since most combiner teams are at least 5 characters, there is an added level of complexity when deciding which character to flip, and which to attack with, etc. on any given turn.

We also need to focus on the pace of the game and think ahead to when the cards we have in hand are going to be the most effective, instead of concentrating on just doing big attacks every turn. We'll get into more of this when we start talking about the specific characters in our Superion example, but it is an almost universal fact that the combiner teams are playing the strategic long game. Your team must survive with as little damage as possible on them in order to maximize their combined form and getting there is going take you a fair number of turns. Being in control of every action you take, and using your actions to help force the decisions of your opponents, is exceptionally key in these sorts of decks.

So, with the concepts of team synergy and pacing in mind, let's jump into looking at our Aerialbots and how these ideas apply when building our deck.

The Characters

First, I'm just going to show all the characters who make up the Aerialbot team, then we'll talk about game strategy and how each of these pieces fit into our overall puzzle.

The Strategy

At the start of the game, the ideal situation is that your opponent goes first. We can't really control how this pans out every game, but if we get to decide, we should always choose to act second. Fireflight has the Brave keyword, and a solid two defense to start with, which forces our opponent to choose him as their target if they act first. Since the deck we're building today is going to be primarily a blue-pip based deck, it is highly unlikely that without any upgrades, our opponent will be able to KO Fireflight in a single attack, but he will likely end up damaged, and that sets up his flip-mode ability for later.

Right now, though, it is our first turn. If we're acting second, then we can play a card from our hand, which is nice, but not necessary for our tactic here. We need to get our characters into bot mode and keep them alive, so our first turn strategy is going to likely always be the same. Since Air Raid doesn't have an alt-mode ability, flipping him to bot mode is a decent first choice. It may be tempting to flip Fireflight, since his 'Brave' ability won't do us much good once we attack, we need to keep our eye on the long game. We are likely going to outnumber our opponent's team, which means that our opponent will likely be on the play after all characters untap. In this case, Fireflight is once again in a position to protect our other Aerialbots under this renewed assault.

Since our overall strategy is to minimize the damage being done to our characters; since it will affect our combined form later; we're going to want to force our opponents to attack into our most heavily defensive character. Skydive is an ideal choice for our first attacker, since his Tough 2 in our blue heavy deck is going to give him a good chance of avoiding a fair amount of damage. Dropping an upgrade on him to increase his tough (via Reinforced Plating or Sparring Gear) is ideal, to help soak even more damage on our opponent's next turn.

If we don't have a defensive upgrade in our hand, then putting a weapon onto one of our other characters, such as Silverbolt or Air Raid to setup future turns is likely our next best strategy. Barring that, any of our actions that would could have potentially drawn are good choices, except for Inferno Breath. We'll save that for later, once we're assured that we can direct our opponent's attacks where we want.

On our second turn, things get a little tricky. We're going to want to flip one of our characters to keep up the pace toward combining, while also making sure that our second attacker isn't going to be a defensive liability. Ideally, we've gotten some armor upgrades into our hand that we can play onto whomever we choose to help their survival odds, but let's not plan on that just yet. With just our characters in front of us, the best choice for a second flip and second attacker is likely to be Alpha Bravo. His Pierce 3 guarantees that we're going to get some damage through to our opponent, and he maintains his 1 defense stat.

However, if one of our opponent's tapped characters has a particularly troublesome upgrade attached to them, it may be beneficial to go ahead and attack with Air Raid to get rid of it. Again, that's only if the upgrade is something we don't think we'll be able to Vaporize later, since Air Raid's 0 defense makes him a juicy target for a quick kill.

Here's where our strategy gets a little looser. Up until this point we've had a very clear goal in mind when selecting who to flip and who to attack with, but with two of our characters now tapped, directing our opponent's offense becomes a bit more difficult. By this point we probably have Air Raid and Alpha Bravo in alt-mode, and our opponents have likely caught on that we're running a defensive deck and will be avoiding going after Skydive in favor of easier targets. It's probably now safe to flip him to his Bot mode.

If our opponent's characters are all tapped out on our third turn, now would be a great time to let loose with our Inferno Breath, tapping either Air Raid or Fireflight for its effect. Otherwise, attacking with Air Raid is going to be our best course of action, if we haven't already (in which case, we'll probably still have Alpha Bravo ready to attack, and should use him). We want to hold off on tapping Fireflight until our opponent is fully tapped as well, since we want him to be ready to be Brave for us again once both sides untap.

If we can give Silverbolt any more Bold with a Handheld Blaster, then we should. Otherwise just pump him with an Armed Hovercraft or Noble's Blaster and swing away. With any luck we'll trigger his combat ability and get a second flip in a single turn, plus do a damage to an enemy. Given the combat icon ratio in our deck, however, we shouldn't be strategizing around this being a given, just a bonus if we can get it to happen. Our goal going forward is to get Silverbolt into his bot mode and direct all attacks at Fireflight if we can. Even if you must flip him in the KO area, Fireflight should always be our last flip, at which point we should have an Aerialbot Enigma in our hand, either from drawing into it or flipping and pulling it to our hand via its green battle icon.

The result: a fully formed Superion with a minimal amount of damage transferred to him, and a deck designed to keep him alive over a few turns to dish out a whopping amount of damage to our opponent.

The Deck

We've talked a lot about how to strategize with just our characters in this build, so let's take a moment to talk about the deck itself. As discussed in my second article (link to it) we have to find that right mixture of cards we want in our hand versus cards we want flipped in combat. Fortunately, what we want is a lot of blue defense icons to be flipped, so our deck balance isn't nearly as big of a problem. We're going to be playing a lot of blue-icon cards that are also good in hand, though we're not going to be relying on being able to draw them.

We also are going to be playing a good number of cards that deal direct damage, since our bots themselves are not offensive powerhouses. Armed Hovercraft, Marksmanship, and Inferno Breath all meet the criteria of being blue-icon cards while also being playable as direct-damage actions. We'll also throw in Security Checkpoint for the double-blue icons, as well as Handheld Blaster, though the Blaster will help us with Silverbolt's attack ability if we can pull it off.

Noble's Blaster, Field Communicator, Sparring Gear, and Reinforced Plating are our key upgrades, though, and with the green pips on Noble's Blaster and Sparring Gear, we should be able to get them reliably.

We'll round things out with Pep Talk for card advantage, Vaporize for dealing with our opponent's troublesome upgrades, and Press The Advantage and Bigger They Are to ensure that we get some damage through. Bigger They Are's pierce ability is going to go a long way for us before we combine, since all of our bots are only 5 stars.

Sideboard Options

The only card I'd say is a "must have" in our sideboard is Inverted. When going up against another heavily defensive deck, our focus can easily shift from protecting ourselves to overcoming their defenses without putting ourselves at too much risk. Also, having Inverted on our combined Superion makes all those blue icons we've invested in suddenly pay off in spades as he begins to simply crush with raw damage output. It is situational, but a good option to have around when going up against other blue-heavy builds.

Otherwise, pick your sideboard to deal with specific threats. Add in more cards that deal with opponent's upgrades, like Dismantling Claw. Laser Cutlass is also a good option to have at your disposal, since the Pierce 3 will benefit our smaller bots pre-combining.

And that's it! Hopefully you've found this strategy break-down helpful for getting you thinking about character synergy in any deck-build, not just with combiners. Having a solid plan going into a game is always great, but keep in mind that you'll still need to be flexible and able to change when the battlefield situation shifts.

Until next time, keep your cogs clean and your transistors firing!

Superion, Sky Protector

• Characters (5)
• 1 Air Raid, Airborne Special Ops
• 1 Alpha Bravo, Airborne Special Ops
• 1 Fireflight, Sky High Recon
• 1 Silverbolt, Aerialbot Leader
• 1 Skydive, Air Warfare Specialist

• Actions (22)
• 3 Aerialbot Enigma
• 3 Inferno Breath
• 3 Marksmanship
• 3 Pep Talk
• 2 Press The Advantage
• 3 Security Checkpoint
• 3 The Bigger They Are
• 2 Vaporize

• Upgrades (19)
• 3 Armed Hovercraft
• 2 Field Communicator
• 3 Handheld Blaster
• 3 Noble's Blaster
• 3 Reinforced Plating
• 3 Security Console
• 2 Sparring Gear