I wrote:OVERVIEW
I decided to proxy three Transformers Trading Card Game decks recently: Initial D (Bumblebee / Cliffjumper / Mirage), InGen (Nemesis Prime / Snarl / Swoop) and Capri Sun (Sunstorm / Slipstream / Chop Shop). I playtested them over the past two days, marking down my thoughts about the archetypes and about the game in general.
I found out a lot about not only the decks, but the game as a whole. But before I get into that last bit, lemme tell you about the decks and what they do.
Initial D
(Starter Bumblebee / Cliffjumper / Mirage)
Okay, if you know anything about the title, you know that this is a Car deck that is full of "Gas, Gas, Gas" to leave your opponents with a sense of "Deja Vu" while you're "Running In The 90s". The general sense of the deck is you constantly untap your Transformers with Ready For Action and, more importantly, Turbo Boosters. When you untap constantly, your opponent is eventually going to reach a point where all of their team is either tapped or dead and you get to attack with impunity thanks to how natural untapping in this game works.
Cliffjumper allows you to draw an extra card when you Transform other Cars, allowing you to burn through your deck more than you already do. Bumblebee is there because he's a 6 Point Leader Car which is frankly silly value. Mirage is there because he allows you to play an extra Action in a turn, meaning you get to play more draw cards/more Ready For Action, but even better, he has a natural, easy to pull-off untapping ability.
The deck also benefits from being able to play Team Up Tactics, allowing you to draw two cards with no repercussions, unlike literally all other Action draw cards in the game. You draw so many cards with this deck -- it's a little stupid. But if you whiff your untapping cards, you've got a hard time coming.
Being so small in terms of defensive abilities, Initial D can fall victim to heavy bruiser decks and get punished. Your damage output isn't as large as theirs, and you can't win going toe-to-toe with the big guys without your tools to help. It'd be like using a flashlight against a howitzer.
All in all, this deck has a low damage output. But then again, who needs huge bruising attacks when your opponent can't fight back?
Well, this next deck might.
InGen
(Nemesis Prime / Snarl / Swoop)
Something... Has... Survived...
Well, that's something your opponent
would say if they hadn't just gotten one-shot by Nemesis Prime. Slow, lumbering and currently one of the most heavily damaging cards in the game, Nemesis Prime is frankly one of my favorite cards that I've seen out of this game thus far. He's also one of the game's two rarest cards to get your hands on; but man, is he worth it.
Getting him to work can be a bit trickier than it might seem, especially in a game where your opponents can just make dated anime references and untap themselves into the nth dimension, but you're a deck that can be startlingly hard to make headway into, especially with all the defensive cards you play.
Being defensive is a good thing, for certain, but it also means that you're more likely to eventually reshuffle your deck, putting Nemesis' offensive ability to a base 10(!!) or more(!?) damage, without modifiers like upgrades. For reference, a common mid-ranged HP value is around 10-13. I've one-hit 12 HP Transformers after getting this guy set up with a Grenade Launcher, and lemme tell you, there's seldom a better feeling.
The problem is getting there. But that's where you get a little help from some primal friends.
Snarl and Swoop are both Dinobots, which allow them to take advantage of "Dino-Chomp!" to give them Bold 5, flipping five extra cards from your deck for your attack. Keep in mind, you start out with two, and if you flip a white Battle Card (which you play plenty of) you flip two more, leaving you with 9 cards out of your deck and into the Scrap Pile.
The potentially heavy damage you just did aside (in my experience, you're only going to use the Dinobots to soften foes up for Nemesis to clean up), you milled almost ten cards out of your deck, a full quarter of it! Using these cards to your advantage, you can pull off the reshuffle and make Nemesis the powerhouse he deserves to be.
All in all, this deck is fantastically fun to play against Initial D, as the two are somewhat polar opposites. But the one that seems to not be getting any headway at all in my playtesting is one of the most unlikely of them all.
Capri Sun
(Sunstorm / Slipstream / Chop Shop)
On the surface, everything seems to have everything going for it. Sunstorm does more damage for every card in your hand, Slipstream keeps him alive, Chop Shop draws you cards... It even has Bombing Run to both supplement your survivability and damage output!
But here's the thing: This game revolves around playing cards. Your hand is almost never going to go above six cards, and even then you'll probably need to play something out of it. It's frustrating. I've never won with this deck, and whereas it might be a product of the deckbuilding, it might also be a problem with the contradiction of Sunstorm himself.
Sunstorm wants you to hold your hand and never play anything out of it unless it puts either more damage on the field or more cards in your hand. The problem being, you have to play cards to draw the cards that you need to stockpile more cards in your hand. Only Team Up Tactics (essentially Pot of Greed) gives you a +1 card in your hand. Everything else replaces itself, leaving your hand stagnant, hovering at about 4-6.
This is not enough.
But maybe I'm just playing the deck wrong, or perhaps my list is bad. It has potential, but until we see Skywarp, Thundercracker or Starscream to hopefully pad out the Plane support, this deck will probably not see too much success, at least against the decks I have listed above. I have literally never won with this deck. At least not yet.
It is, however, one of the most interesting of the archetypes I have built. There are also quite a few other interesting card comboes in this game -- and you should definitely take a peek when you have the time.
On The Game As A Whole
TFTCG is a blast to play. It's fun, addicting and can surprisingly make you think, desperately planning out what your opponent will do next. But there are a number of flaws that I really hope are addressed in the future.
But let me get a few things out of the way first. Keep in mind, this is without having the entire set revealed, which could potentially address a few of the issues I have listed here.
The card flipping for attacking and defending sounds annoying and adding in an unneccessary layer of randomness to the game, but surprisingly, very few times have I felt like I sacked my opponent out of a KO or I got sacked and the oddest thing is... I thought it was
fun. It was enough that I thought it played little into the grand scheme of things (Nemesis was going to kill that guy anyway, frankly, regardless of flips) and it only really comes into play when it comes to 2HKOs and and to put more power in the ever-prevalent healing cards. It also helps cycle decks.
Another thing that I didn't like about the flipping mechanic was that it simply dropped useful cards into the discar-- *COUGH* I mean, Scrap Pile. I can't tell you how many times I saw a Turbo Booster fall into the Scrap Pile. It could make a man weep! I don't know how much I would say that it's a
good mechanic; just that it was
fun, and had several underlying purposes.
But the thing is, you can mitigate or outright remedy this by adding more topdeck rigging and tutoring effects, which brings me to my second point. This game has no tutoring, which, if you didn't know, searches your deck for specific cards to either put them on top of your deck or into your hand. Powerful, yes, but I feel it is necessary to mitigate the luck factor.
But I have an issue with this game that will be tough to remedy: Counterbalance. In Dragon Ball Super, when you're at half life, your Leader card awakens to his "final form", netting you extra cards and more powerful abilities. This mechanic drives the entire game, and it helps games from being total runaways, where the person who attacks first wins.
This game sometimes wants to fall into those failings.
Let me explain: You and an opponent start the game. Each person has three Transformers. You and your opponent trade turns a few times, but it ends up with your opponent taking the first KO on your side, putting your opponent at three Transformers and you at two. This means that, if you can't KO one of them back, you have a distinct man disadvantage and attack disadvantage. It's really easy to snowball sometimes, and I can definitely see that becoming a problem if left unchecked.
But then again, Pokemon can sometimes have the same problem. Same with Magic. Perhaps Dragon Ball simply spoiled me! But perhaps -- just perhaps -- I'm on to something.
Conclusion
TFTCG is a blast. I love this game, despite its warts, and I look forward to spending an inordinate amount of money in an attempt to finally pull a Nemesis Prime. It may seem like a game with a low skill cap, but I keep finding more nuance to it every time I play. Will it overtake Magic, Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh? Ha... Hahahaha. Ha! Hahah!
No.
But maybe, just maybe, it could be a dark horse for other groups.
Dragon Ball might have to keep its Dragon Balls well-guarded: ROTF Devastator didn't, and look what happened to
him. Vanguard and Weiss/Schwarz might just have to sleep with one anime tiddie open: Legion is in town, and Kiss Players is still very canon.
Those are just my thoughts, though. What are yours?
I did the same when me and a group of friends were deep into magic and tried making our own set 
it was fun, a bit exhausting at times, but fun.
