Bah-weep-Graaaaagnahwheepnini bong, gamers, and welcome back to another article about Transformers: TCG. Now, I know those of you who have been reading these articles are saying to yourselves, "Yes, Transformers: TCG has some pretty epic characters printed on those oversized cards, but what if I wanted something, well, bigger?". Well, the answer lies with the Titans! Metroplex and Trypticon were both released in 1986 as part of the Scramble City set of combiner toys, and were meant to be bases of operation for the Autobots and Decepticon factions respectively. Because of this, their toys were both massive, and to represent this in the trading card game, the cards that represent their monstrous forms are also fantastically oversized. In fact, they may be the largest playable trading card game cards ever printed!

Aside from just being large physically, Metroplex and Trypticon are both incredibly imposing in the context of the game as well, boasting 25 and 24 star counts respectively. To live up to the value of those stars, both come with a high amount of health and attack, as well as the ability to deploy a squad of smaller bots to the battlefield to aid in their battles. They also each have 2 character-specific battle cards that you can utilize in your decks, as well as one shared battle card that can fit nicely into either character's build. This is where the similarities between these two mortal enemies ends, however.

Let's take a closer look at each of these Titans, their various deployable helpers, and what sorts of strategies the abilities of these characters lend themselves to. We'll start with Metroplex and then cover Trypticon.

Metroplex, Autobot City

As you can see, Metroplex is a towering powerhouse of a bot, with a whopping 35 health and a decent amount of attack. His defense may seem a bit on the low side, but keep in mind he's going to have help that you can use to spread your opponent's attacks around to. His alt-mode ability allows him to deploy said helpers when you flip to it, and we'll talk about that in a bit. His bot-mode ability seems fairly intimidating to pull off, but with a balanced deck and a little help from his friends, you'll find that it isn't nearly so impossible to fire off.

So, let's talk a bit about Metroplex's squad mates; Scamper, Six-Gun, and Slammer. Both Slammer and Scamper give your Metroplex some static Bold 1, and you can get two more Bold on turns where you flip Six-Gun to his bot-mode. All of this, combined with a balanced deck, will give your Metroplex ample opportunity to execute his bot-mode ability.

Because your deployed bots are so crucial to Metroplex's primary ability, keeping them alive should be your number one priority. To help facilitate this, Metroplex comes equipped with two excellent cards, Protected by Metroplex and Rally the City. The first is an upgrade that lets your Metroplex take the hits for his team, and the second allows you to gain card advantage over your opponents, which is just one more reason to keep your smaller bots alive.

So now that we understand Metroplex's strategy of deploying and protecting his helpers, we need to discuss how we do this most efficiently while also being able to trigger that bot-mode ability. First and foremost, we're going to want to be getting a fair number of flips out of all our bots, since each of them (except Slammer, of course) has some benefit to flipping. To that end, we want to for sure include three copies of Roll Out in our deck. On top of being just a great card to enable multiple flips per turn, it is also both an orange and a blue pipped card, which gets us a little closer to those Metroplex activations we want. Rapid Conversion is not only another good flip card, but also is a white pip, which we're going to want at least six of in our build.

Diagnosis, Brainstorm, and Press The Advantage are also solid cards for this build. It may be tempting to bring in Medic! for even more healing, but with no pips on the card at all, it is a hard sell when you're looking to maximize your pip spread. Handheld Blaster and Improvised Shield are staples here as well, since they are both double-pipped in their respective colors. Another good inclusion is Squish Them Like Bugs, which when played on Metroplex is going to be a guaranteed trigger, since not even the mighty Trypticon is higher in stars than Metroplex!

From there we want to just balance out our deck with equipment and actions for as much value and utility as we can manage. We'll want to keep our pip count as balanced as possible as well, because that will give us the best chance of activating Metroplex as possible, especially given our Bold that we're going to be getting from his little friends.

Trpyticon, Assault Base

If Metroplex's plan is to protect his squad from damage to benefit from their support, Trypticon is all about sacrificing his minions for personal gain.

In bot-mode, Trypticon doesn't seem all that menacing, just giving his squad Bold 1, but when he flips to alt-mode, he simply sacrifices one of his own allies to either heal himself or add to his attack power. We also notice that he does not have a built-in mechanic for deploying his comrades to the battlefield like Metroplex does. We'll explore this more in detail a little further on but let us examine first why we might want to simply eat our own bots for healing and damage.

Well, the answer to this lies with the new Wave 4 mechanic of Revenge. A character's Revenge ability triggers when that character is KO'd by any means, even at the hands of their own allies. Each of Trypticon's minions; Brunt, Full-Tilt, and Wipe Out; have their own Revenge ability.

With these Revenge abilities, we can easily see why we would want to have our Trypticon munch on them, since what he gains is not insignificant. So we're starting to see the basic shape of Trypticon's strategy, but we still don't seem to have a way to get the helpers out onto the battlefield. Thankfully, Wave 4 contains 2 cards exclusively for use with Trypticon, Battlefield Incursion, and Relentless Invasion.

Battlefield Incursion is a straight-forward affair that allows us to deploy our smaller bots out from under Trypticon and is going to be crucial to our strategy. The real exciting piece here is Relentless Invasion, as that brings our bots back from the KO zone to the battlefield, and then lets them end up back underneath Trypticon after attacking, ready to start the cycle all over again. Unfortunately, since this powerful card has a single Star on it, and our Trypticon is 24 stars himself, this means that we're only going to be able to run a single copy of this card in our deck normally.

Now, considering that Trypticon and his cronies are part of Wave 4, and we haven't seen many spoilers from that set just yet, I'm not going to get overly speculative on theory-crafting a deck for cards that don't quite exist. However, if I were to build this deck today, I would probably lean heavily on a more blue-heavy defensive build that focuses on boosting Trypticon's base attack instead of worrying about making him bold. Sprinkling in some black pips and cards that add pierce to his attacks to make sure his damage gets through.

I would also run both Ancient Widsom and Unleash Potential to attempt to pull extra copies of Relentless Invasion into my deck from outside the game. To make sure that I got both cards in hand when I needed them, I'd also run Pep Talk and other draw effects. Again, much like Metroplex, we're going to want to have some sort of healing engine in our deck, and this time I'd be more inclined to bring out Medic! since the combat symbols on our flips won't matter quite as much. The same goes for I Still Function! which we will want to use on our previously KO'd minions to trigger their Revenge abilities again. With all these actions, Brainstorm is going to be helpful as well.

And remember back up at the top of the article when I mentioned that there was one card that would be beneficial for both titans? Well, that would be Height Advantage, which gives your Titan Bold 4. We will want to play this in our Metroplex deck, and it is a very likely candidate for Trypticon as well, since it has a blue pip and would allow us to cycle through our deck faster, and possibly flip more black pips for more Pierce.

So those are our Titans! Currently, Metroplex is available as part of the Metroplex Deck standalone starter set and Trypticon will be the buy-a-box promo for Wave 4, which will get you Trypticon and his 3 minions. However, the other cards that enable Trypticon will be available in the individual booster packs from Wave 4. Below you'll find the start of a possible Metroplex deck, which currently clocks in at 45 cards, so there's some room for play with it, for sure.

Thanks again for reading, and tune in next week when we go wild with Runamuck and Runabout!

Battle Icons:

• 24 Blue
• 24 Orange
• 9 White

Metroplex Deck

• Characters (4)
• 1 Metroplex, Autobot City
• 1 Scamper, City Patrol
• 1 Six-Gun, Heavy Weapons Expert
• 1 Slammer, Combat Drone

• Upgrades (15)
• 3 Backup Beam
• 3 Bashing Shield
• 3 Enforcement Batons
• 3 Handheld Blaster
• 3 Improvised Shield

• Actions (30)
• 3 Brainstorm
• 3 Diagnosis
• 3 Height Advantage
• 3 Press the Advantage
• 3 Protected by Metroplex
• 3 Rally the City
• 3 Rapid Conversion
• 3 Roll Out!
• 3 Security Checkpoint
• 3 Squish Them Like Bugs