Arcee and Demolisher revealed for the Official Transformers Trading Card Game

Deadput wrote:A tad disappointed that there dosn't seem to be any original art so far, just reused from the legends card game.

Iron Prime wrote:

Deadput wrote:A tad disappointed that there dosn't seem to be any original art so far, just reused from the legends card game.

Probably waiting to see how well it does before commissioning more art...

Deadput wrote:A tad disappointed that there dosn't seem to be any original art so far, just reused from the legends card game.

ScottyP wrote:Must have used ebay as a reference to misspell Demolishor like that.

ScottyP wrote:Must have used ebay as a reference to misspell Demolishor like that.

Lunatic Prime wrote:I still want a Generations toy of this design

unicron1200 wrote:

Lunatic Prime wrote:I still want a Generations toy of this design

Dude, I'd be all over that.

ZeroWolf wrote:Sadly I think the time has come and gone for that, at least through official channels.

Emerje wrote:

ScottyP wrote:Must have used ebay as a reference to misspell Demolishor like that.

The original Legends card also called him Demolisher and it appears to have been retconed that the UT character is Demolishor and the G1 character is Demolisher since the Kreon that came out at the same time used the Demolishor name. It's always interesting fans come up with excuses for errors and turn them into canon. (Or is that fanon?)

Emerje

unicron1200 wrote:

Lunatic Prime wrote:I still want a Generations toy of this design

Dude, I'd be all over that.

ExciKaiser wrote:Seriously ?
It looks very plain/uninspired to me.
Looks like something I could have drawn.

The original mode is way better and really more distinctive..

ZeroWolf wrote:This helps to further cement Shockwave as having abilities to strengthen hand control.

ender7477 wrote:Anybody else notice it says 2019 for release year.

#Sideways# wrote:Energy Sword makes Nemesis a lot better by allowing him to mill more of his deck, and Peace Through Tyranny is insane for Swarm strategies to both go fast early and self-destruct a dying Insecticon.

But the best of all is System Reboot. Holy crap, this thing is insane. Not only do you have access to a great draw card, disruption for your opponent, but this makes Shockwave insane.

Shockwave forces your opponent to damage their team for each card that they discard. If they have seven cards in hand (especially doable if you transformed Shockwave last turn) you can force them to discard all seven, indirectly dealing massive damage to their field.

And? You get to draw a bunch of cards while you do so.

Really quite insane.

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?

#Sideways# 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?

Leaked from Cybertron wrote:Smash the competition with Optimus Prime // Battlefield Legend, a Rare card found exclusively in booster packs! Check back next week for the reveal of another Rare card!

ZeroWolf wrote:Thanks #Sideways# and thanks again for your playtest diaries and thoughts. What method are you using to play test these?

#Sideways# wrote:

ZeroWolf wrote:Thanks #Sideways# and thanks again for your playtest diaries and thoughts. What method are you using to play test these?

Proxying. I print out their pictures and sleeve up decks of them, trying out the mechanics. Paper with a worthless Pokemon card behind them, yes, but still very effective at getting the general idea of the game.

ZeroWolf wrote:I thought it was something like that 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.

#Sideways# wrote:This guy is a tank. He hits so hard, and he defends so much, that this guy is frankly idiotic to try to take down. You'd think that the best thing about him is his ability -- and you would be wrong. It's about every other little detail about this guy added up to make a formidable tank. With three base defense, this guy blocks most damage that he is dealt. Being Ranged, he can also make use of the Rapid Assault Armor Battle Card, giving him four defense and disrupting your opponent. He also has a base eight attack, which is one of the highest in the game along with the newly revealed Optimus Prime. But even more than that, with such a high defense, you can heal off the majority of damage you take with Team Up Tactics thanks to the fact that he is a Truck.

In fact, I built Shockwave / Inferno just last night and playtested it against Cars, which I thought would be an autowin. But I was wrong. The problem is this: His ability to return cards to your opponent's hand sounds great in theory, but when your opponent plays Turbo Boosters to untap their characters to attack you ad infinitum, you really don't want to put those cards back into your opponent's hand.

It's also a tall build, meaning you only have to characters to attack with, putting you at an even bigger disadvantage to Cars. You just end up losing because you attack a total of three times in a game. You can't even take advantage of Ready For Action. Shockwave as a partner is just not cutting it.

But on his own? Inferno can really bring the pain. Just imagine him with someone to supplement his healing, using their smaller attacks to set up knockouts before finishing them off with a huge attack from Inferno. The only problem is finding someone to fit that bill. Great potential, bad partners for the moment.

#Sideways# wrote:This card is really, really good. Forget about the card being scrapped from your opponent's hand -- if they've been playing the game at all, they can afford it -- but the upgrade being scrapped and a card being drawn for you? That's fantastic.

But here's the thing. The reason why I'm so excited about this isn't that your opponent is punished for knocking out a bug on your side -- why I'm so excited is that you can use this on your turn. You can pop this thing with Skrapnel's insect mode, which knocks out one of your Insecticons to forcefully tap one of your opponent's characters. Meaning, you can choose a target and lock your opponent out of an attack with that character at the same time. But with this, though, you even get to disrupt your opponent and draw a card while you're at it.

Kyleor wrote:Oh man, I just want posters of some of that sweet card art.