SIEGE II -- THE SIEGENING
Well, I did it. I awoke from a few months in cryo-sleep just a few minutes ago and the right side of my face has never looked or felt better! The left side is probably still asleep.
Probably.
Anyway, I haven't been
completely dormant for the past few months -- in fact, I've never been busier testing, grinding games and theoryforming my way into a few great ideas and a whole
legion of bad ones. I'll get into it in later articles, but first, let's go over the newest reveals instead:
CHARACTERS
7.8/10 Doesn't inadvertently kill an allied Optimus Prime.
Hot Rod is -- for the lack of a better term -- super freaking hot. Hot Rod is not only a Car, which means he can take advantage of all of the busted Car support, but he can also take advantage of multiple Action combos as well as having a surprisingly moderate offensive capabilities as well as potent defensive ones as well.
Okay, I'm getting ahead of myself. So, what exactly does Hot Rod do? Well, that's simple enough to explain. You see, we are getting a new keyword alongside Revenge, which is Safeguard. Safeguard is effectively the same thing as Skrapnel's effect, except it only takes effect when they're undamaged (and with a name like "Safeguard 3" on the card, one can only assume that we'll see different numbers like "Safeguard 5", "Safeguard 1", etc.).
Safeguard allows Hot Rod to excel at getting his deck to reshuffle since he lives for so long. But, not just that, since he's a car, you can effectively attack with impunity with him. In other words, you can attack with his car, and then untap him to then attack with another character. But, to make matters even better, you can combo him with W1 Prowl to not only do extra Bold damage, but to use Prowl to heal Hot Rod back to zero when your opponent KOs one of your other, and less important, cars.
This will allow you to take another hit and use his Safeguard effect, and it will also allow you to effectively force your opponent to either side in damaging Actions from their sideboard, but to potentially waste attacks on him. Remember, you can use Prowl's healing more than once, and "I STILL FUNCTION!" can trigger it, too, making Hot Rod effectively invincible so long as you can heal him.
Of course, his Safeguard mode isn't the best part about him. In fact, his robot mode is where you're likely to get most of his value given the fact that you can play multiple Actions during a single turn for effectively free. You can use this to your advantage in many ways. For example, you can use a Supercharge as well as a Reckless Charge at the same time to give him a frankly disgusting amount of damage, or you can use multiple ISF to bring back your entire team -- and heal off Hot Rod afterward. Perhaps, too, you could use him to draw a sinful amount of cards from your deck by using multiple Equipment Enthusiast during the same turn. Perhaps a mixture of both! Multiple Actions means multiple options, and I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of combos people will come up with using him.
As for the downsides, though, he is only 12 HP, and his defense goes down to 1 in robot mode. His damage isn't great to start with, and he's rather expensive for a Car. He's got the same stats as Barrage, but two stars more for not the fastest of value. In fact, it takes quite a bit of time to start getting value out of him, kind of in the same vein as Nemesis Prime or Cosmos, and he doesn't have the draw power of Cosmos or the defense of Prime to get himself there, either.
That said, though, Hot Rod might actually work well with either of the other Reshufflers, so there's that thought, at least. Regardless, Hot Rod has a massive amount of potential and you can get a lot of value out of him if the deck is right. I'm looking forward to seeing where he goes from here.
"Black and yellow, black and yellow, black and yellow... Yellow and black! Let's mix it up a little!"
Nova Storm is here, and she's a she! This shouldn't come as too much of a shock, but I adore female transformers, and I have been kind of sad that the only female Seeker, it seemed, was Slipstream. That said, though, I wish that they had given Nova Storm more visual signifiers to signify the contrast, given the fact that she looks effectively identical to Sunstorm.
Regardless, she's a bit of a wonky character, sadly. She has a lot of synergy with black pips, which aside from making me hope that this signifies a bit of a boost to black pipped cards, also effectively makes her usability a bit... Limited. Sure, at 7 stars, you can use her with Acid Storm and Ion Storm to put the three Rainmakers at 25, but why? Ion Storm and Acid Storm love the inclusion of Flamewar to make their defensive trifecta as bulky as possible, and there's little room for the inclusion of someone who is more of a DPS than a wall, and someone who uses pips that probably won't even be included in the list to be perfectly frank.
So, where does she go, then, if her teammates don't need her? Well, I'd wager that the best place for her is -- aside from a bulk bin -- a plane deck that focuses on Action and Upgrade-based damage, not outright damage. You see, since she can move a damage from herself to one of your opponents, she can combo rather well with Bombing Run. Her moderate to high damage can make her potent in an aggro list that runs Air Commander Starscream from Wave 1, and her damage movement ability pairs well with his. You would need a six star character to pair with them, still, and it would likely be a Micromaster plane like Storm Cloud or a Bravery plane like Fireflight, but the long and short of it is that there is a potential home for her.
Nova Storm's Pierce 3 is nothing to shake a stick at, of course, and orange/black cards are most certainly a thing, but I do wonder if she'll struggle to make her way out of the bulk binder to show it off. Either way, I like yellow, planes and female Transformers so I guess this makes her the best card that has ever been printed. Aside from that, though, I doubt her usefulness.
"It's simple. We, uh, kill the Rat Man."
Ratbat is actually kind of insane. He's not the best in monochrome decks, of course, but in blue/black decks or balanced decks, he's rather invaluable. You see, in defensively-geared decks, healing is kinda busted, and whereas he's going to be Priority Numero Uno on your opponent's hit list when they realize how powerful he is at keeping his friends alive, you're still going to get at least one or two heals out of the guy when you pair him with Major Soundwave.
Major Soundwave in general is full of untapped potential, mostly thanks to Ravage being about as useful as an umbrella made out of toilet paper. But, when you create a colorful deck that caters to the defensive capabilities of Soundwave's massive HP and moderate defense alongside Ratbat's healing and Laserbeak's consistency, you start to realize how potent that they could be as a team.
Soundwave not only boosts Ratbat's "meh" survivability in his starting mode, but untaps Ratbat so that you may use his healing ability a
second time before the untap phase and that's without even considering the use of Micro Capacitor. If you build your deck with enough Blue/Green, Blue/Black and Orange/Blue cards, Ratbat will be incredibly consistent in his healing, allowing you to survive far longer than you would have initially thought.
Of course, this is not infallible. You still need to do damage, and on a team with Laserbeak, Ratbat and Soundwave, you're looking at one (
maybe two if you consider Laserbeak's Pierce) attacker that you're going to be riding on. You still need to kill stuff, you know! You are also sitting at a cringe-inducing 22 stars, which of course opens up the use of three Fuel Cache to potentially use on Ratbat, but it also means you're lacking the ever-important Flamewar that you should be playing as a defensive deck.
Is it worth it? Probably. Does it have potential? Of course. Is it
good?
I have no idea.
How'd he get so strong? "Train"ing.
Powertrain is actually kinda busted when you think about it. Okay, let's be clear, here. Tote and Mudslinger have already been released and they're four and five star Micromasters, respectively, and High Jump hasn't been revealed yet (but they said that he was in the set on Twitter!), but we can make a few assumptions.
Given the fact that every Micromaster Team seems to be made up of one five star Micromaster and one four star Micromaster, we can assume that this release will be no different, with High Jump being a four star Micromaster. With that in mind, we can make some assumptions about Powertrain as well as how you can run him.
So, since Powertrain gives all of your Off-Road Patrol characters Bold 1 (which is insane), we would obviously want to put as many Off-Road Patrols on the same team as him, and assuming that High Jump is four stars, we can fit all four of them on the same team with seven stars left over. This means that you have four characters with room for a seven-star fifth, and in an aggro deck, I could think of no other character that I'd rather have than Lionizer.
Since Lionizer has Bold 4 to be shared with one of your characters, we can stack that alongside Powertrain, or use it on him. You see, that's the best part about Powertrain -- you get to stock him up with some powerful tools because, after everything is said and done and all of your other Off-Roaders are in the KO pile, Powertrain becomes something of a beast. With all three KO'd, he has a base 5 Attack and 5 Defense, making him one of the highest defense characters in the game, tying with Darkmount.
But that's not all that Powertrain brings to the table. Since Powertrain, along with all other Micromasters, has Stealth, you effectively force your opponent to attack Lionizer on the first turn of the game, which is always a good thing in my book.
Unfortunately, that's where his usefulness ends. You see, since he only boosts Off-Road Patrol, you can't effectively use him in... Well,
anything. He's an Autobot Leader, yes, but so is Top Shot. You're not going to get the same value out of Powertrain as you're going to get out of Top Shot in anything other than Off-Road Patrol decks. But, in those Off-Road Patrol decks, no character is better.
As a side note, I can definitely see Off-Road becoming something of this game's Night March, which is a deck from Pokemon that was known for being extremely cheap to build and noticeably powerful in the right format. Whether that comes to fruition remains to be seen, but I don't think that this is the last time we've seen Powertrain.
BATTLE CARDS
"Previously on AMC's The Walking Dead..."
Relentless Invasion seems actually busted. Well, at least it seems that way. I'm not going to pretend like I think that this one card that you get to play once in five games is going to change the meta, but, you have to admit that it's kind of insane value.
But more than that I cannot say. Since they're clearly including Trypticon-influencing cards in the main set, I can't make a proper judgement call on how potent Trypticon will be. I'm not super in love with the whole idea, and I rather figured that Trypticon would be more damaging when you considered what kind of character he is. Although, the concept of deploying based on an Action instead of flips
does put a smile on my face.
I simply refuse to give any more thought to the matter until we've seen more of the set. As it stands, though, I think Trypticon is unique enough that people will play him regardless of what they actually think of his potency. He just seems incredibly inconsistent, and frail, to me -- but I could be wrong.
CONCLUSION
Siege II reveals are well underway, and the introduction of offensive Micromasters as well as powerful battle cards like Relentless Invasion make me swoon for the reveals yet to come. I'm looking forward to seeing whether Trypticon shapes up, or if he flops like I'm tentatively thinking he might, but I do know one thing: If he can make headway in this aggro metagame, I'll be impressed.
Since Hot Rod revealed Safeguard, however, I cannot help but to be a bit more excited about the pace of the game potentially slowing down with no doubt more characters and potentially Upgrades with Safeguard on them. I'm ecstatic to learn whether or not we'll be getting effectively Force Field 2.0, and I'm cautiously optimistic that we'll get one.
What about you? Are you looking forward to playing Hot Rod? Are you looking forward to figuring out where Nova Storm will fit in to a Rainmaker composition? Let me know in the comments below, and I'll see you next time!
Check out my YouTube for my Transformers Trading Card Game lists, gameplay and general thoughts on the game!
I just love the art the foil it’s just all so cool. I’ve got to learn how to play.
