Bah-weep-Graaaaagnahwheepnini bong, gamers, and welcome back to another article about Transformers TCG. Every card game has its own set of deck archetypes, but there are some archetypes that are fairly universal. Whether it's aggro, tempo, mid-range, etc., the concepts tend to pop up in just about every single competitive card game. This is definitely true for the Transformers TCG, and in past articles we've talked about a few of these archetypes, but one that we've not spoken about thus far is the Control archetype. Today I'd like to delve into this concept, since some recent spoilers for Wave 4: Siege of Cyberton II.

The meta of the Transformers TCG so far has been dominated by aggro decks and tempo decks, but we haven't seen much in the way of pure control being played so far. The real unfortunate truth is that up until we started seeing spoilers for the newest set, control just has not been a viable strategy. With very little in the way of interactions with your opponent's ability to resolve their effects, the only real 'control' we've been able to exert over the pace of the game is using Brave, Stealth, and strategic attacks to direct where our opponents can attack.

However, with a few new reveals from the upcoming set, we're starting to see far more in the way of being able to temper the pace of the game by getting in and disrupting our opponent's hand. Nearly every strategy in the game relies on the battle deck to play some actions or drop some upgrades onto the characters, so being able to take away those much-needed tools is paramount to our strategy.

Characters

In canon, Decepticons are the masters of disruption, being an organization full of spies, liars, and infiltration experts, and so we're going to be letting them play to their strengths in this deck. Coming from the new set, and crashing in with an impressive set of abilities, is the new Sergeant Thundercracker.

In alt-mode, Thundercracker has a fairly nice ability that allows you to pass damage from himself back to his opponents if you can top-deck a black pip, but the real reason we've come to him is for his bot-mode ability. When he's attacking, flipping black pips will give us not only insight into what our opponents have in their hand, but also lets us pick one of those cards and scrap them. Of course, we only get to scrap what our opponents choose to show us, but it gives us insight into potential next plays. This will be important when we start choosing our secret actions to play coming up. Regardless, if we know what we've seen our opponents flip, and we are paying attention to their strategies, what they choose not to show us can be just as informative as what they do show us.

The next character we're going to rely on to help our devious machine of disruption is Decepticon Shockwave.

The alt-mode card advantage is a nice addition if we find ourselves needing it, but again, we're here for that bot-mode ability. Our deck isn't sporting nearly any orange battle icons, but we are going to be scrapping a fair number of cards from our opponent's hands, which makes the ability to drop damage onto the opponent's bots when we do so is going to be invaluable to us. Our strategy is going to be dealing out as much direct damage via Shockwave's ability as we can, while using pierce effects and black battle icons to push damage through to our opponents, while simultaneously running enough defense to whether the majority of attacks that will be coming our way.

And speaking of defense, we're going to round out our team with Flamewar from wave 1, who we've seen appear in several meta decks over the course of the game. Her bot-mode blanket Tough 1 for the entire team is a rockstar ability for a 5-star cost bot, and we'll even have some use for her Bold 1 that she gives when flipped back to alt-mode.

Battle Cards

Now that we have all our bots on board for what our strategy will be, let's look at the battle cards that are going to help get us there. We have two main goals with this deck, disrupting our opponent's hand, and staying alive. Let's look at disruption first.

To whittle away at our opponent's options, we're going to be running Security Checkpoint, Disruptive Entrance, Espionage, Rapid Ascent, Security Checkpoint, Sonic Scramble, and System Reboot. Each of these cards is going to allow us to disrupt our opponent's hand in some way, so let's take a closer look at what each one brings to the table.

Disruptive Entrance, Espionage, and Sonic Scramble each allow us to scrap a single card from our opponent's hand. However, each of these cards has some limitation or drawback for playing them. Espionage relies on choosing a card with the correct colored battle icon, Disruptive Entrance only scraps actions, and Sonic Scramble lets the opponent choose which card is scrapped. However, Sonic Scramble can also be played more than once per turn if we have them in our hand, which will force our opponent to really have to make some hard choices on what to toss, and hopefully take damage for.

Rapid Ascent is our only orange pip card in the deck, and one of only two upgrades we're running. Thundercracker is our only ranged character, so unfortunately if he goes down, this becomes a dead card in our hand, but if we draw it early, it becomes another scrap play on a turn.

Security Checkpoint is an absolute monster versus upgrade-heavy builds, since we can eliminate heavy hitting equipment before it ever lands on a bot. It, along with System Reboot, also has major potential to scrap more than one card at a time from our opponent's hand, triggering Shockwave's ability for each card we hit. System Reboot can be quite devastating if played after a couple of Shockwave flips, building up both players' hand size before forcing our opponent to scrap all of those cards, and incur the damage from Shockwave's bot-mode at the same time.

In order to help our bots stay alive, we're going to be playing a very blue-heavy deck. As mentioned above, Rapid Ascent is the only orange pip that we're going to be playing, and we're going to be falling back on some old stand-byes to keep us in the fight. Cards like Smoke Cloak; which gives us Tough 1 and a black pip to help activate Thundercracker's ability; Battlefield Report to help stack our deck on defense, Vaporize to get rid of upgrade threats will help to get us through the day.

This deck also includes Infiltrate to disrupt any orange-pip action plays. There's going to be a section in this article about our possible sideboard, and we'll talk more about this there.

We're also going to be using another Wave 4 spoiled card, Hidden Fortification, which is a new secret action that gives a character Tough 3 when defending. I'm not sure I can adequately express how good this card really is, honestly, given the defensive landscape we currently find ourselves in.

Since our deck isn't going to win on scrapping cards and Shockwave-induced direct damage alone, we're going to need to get our damage across through the use of Pierce. Black battle icon cards help massively; with the bonus of also helping Thundercracker; as well as yet another new Wave 4 card, a double-black pipped card that also gives Pierce 2 when played from the hand, Designated Target.

Sideboard

Now, I don't usually talk about sideboarding in these articles, but I feel that there are enough alternate options for this deck that they deserve some attention.

For character sideboards, I'd keep the Super Rare Major Shockwave from Wave 3 on hand to help counter other heavy blue decks. His flip ability to force an opponent to scrap a card from their hand, as well as letting us play secret actions off the top of our deck instead of our hand is actually very beneficial. It not only gives us essentially a second pseudo-draw per turn, but it also lets us know what our next flip will start with if the card is not a secret action, and that helps our decisions on what to play and who to swing with.

In the battle card space, if we end up sideboarding Major Shockwave into our deck, we'll likely want to swap a couple of our battle cards as well. First on the chopping block is Rapid Ascent to be replaced with Unconventional Flying Object so that we can get the most out of our two Shockwaves. If we're making this change, it likely also means that we're going up against a fellow blue heavy deck, so we'll want to trade Infiltrate for Jam Signals, yet another new card from Wave 4, that does the same as Infiltrate, except cancelling out blue-pipped actions. It also adds more orange to our decks, just in case.

And there you have it! There is certainly room for improvement, but hopefully this article will get you started down the path of true Transformers Control! Decepticons, DISRUPT!

Battle Icons:

• 30 Blue
• 3 Orange
• 12 Black
• 5 Green
• 5 White

Disruptive Attitude | Transformers TCG | Royce Thigpen

• Characters (3)
• 1 Decepticon Shockwave - Cybertron Commander
• 1 Flamewar - Veteran Decepticon
• 1 Sergeant Thundercracker - Infantry, Seeker

• Actions (34)
• 3 Battlefield Report
• 3 Brainstorm
• 3 Designated Target
• 3 Disruptive Entrance
• 2 Espionage
• 3 Hidden Fortification
• 3 Infiltrate
• 3 Security Checkpoint
• 3 Sonic Scramble
• 2 Steady Shot
• 3 System Reboot
• 3 Vaporize

• Upgrades (6)
• 3 Rapid Ascent
• 3 Smoke Cloak