There weren't many character tweaks; character tweaks to a deck generally mean revolutionizing an entire deck, in my experience.
But we did get to play with some new cards: Jason was particularly enamored with Erratic Energy Grenade. I am a fan of it as well but I didn't see it as being as helpful in his Constructicon deck, yet he felt it worked. I'm thinking that it should be in a deck playing against a combiner team-more damage dealt overall.
More testing, as always, will bear one of us out.
And more testing is something I wish we'd been able to do. There were cards I tried in two different decks that didn't appear in the game, (specifically EM24 IR Laser Launcher) so establishing how good or useful they are is still in question.
Plus, neither one of us opened an RR Energy Blade. How does that happen?
The most difficult match that evening for me, hands down, was against Volcanicus.
I've been a defender of I Still Function for a long time: I think the card makes for some epic stories and those moments are what makes a game addictive and great.
But against Volcanicus paired with Sludge, Mighty Stomper...this matchup just became miserable. I was playing a blue/pipless deck and still managed to deal out well over seventy damage. We think I might've come close to 100 points of damage. For a deck that isn't focused on aggro, that's remarkable.
And it didn't matter, because Sludge took it away, three times, and it was I Still Function that let him abuse that card.
It was hard to tell Jason that the match was miserable for me, the least fun Transformers game I have ever played. Especially since he was testing running Mighty Stomper maindeck, thinking that the reason people weren't playing Volcanicus was because they were getting it wrong. It certainly seemed like he was right.
But I think people aren't playing Volcanicus because it's miserable instead of epic or amazing when you lose, and once you know the weak point, easy to dismantle. The next game I played a 4-wide Insecticon deck (aggressive and heavier orange) and I was able to remove Grimlock, Powerful Commander early: after that, he couldn't get his deck going and winning felt like a matter of course.
So against the top aggressive decks in the format, it suffers, and against any other deck, you suffer. I was torn between: hey, maybe this is a thing and with refinement, your Volcanicus deck could really be amazing! and oh but this is miserable...
However, in the end I'd rather chalk it up to two things: 1) It could be a bad matchup. Bad matchups happen, and that's why sideboards are great. 2) It could mean that I need to improve my own deck. New sets are a great time to improve on concepts that aren't fleshed out and my pipless Skywarp deck definitely needs some work!
Finally, it puts the emphasis for me to get better, not on him and his concept.
It's also worth mentioning that Coolstuffinc.com has a weekly Transformers article!
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