The Mercs

There's a lot of cool news coming around about the next Transformers TCG set: Siege 2, but by my reckoning, the biggest surprise so far is the introduction of a new faction: The Mercenaries.

There is a lot to get into here, so let's start talking.

First: the keyword for these characters in this set is Bounty, a triggered ability that goes off when one of the Mercenaries KOs another character. That means this group wants to be aggressive. The star counts are still fair but it's pretty easy to see this faction pairing up with Weaponizers and orange pips to really get the most out of their abilities.

Second: there's the shakeup to the metagame. There are three new battle cards (so far) that specifically mention the Bounty keyword, so it looks like WotC really wants to give this faction some legs to stand on against their Autobot and Decepticon counterparts. That's a good thing: players need a reason to engage in the mechanics they are given and support for that helps give us that reason.

However, the new faction means that there's one more deckbuilding consideration to take, because cards like Soldier's Blaster could be huge...or they could be meaningless, depending on that meta. The Mercenaries are strong enough to earn a place in a deck, and so far they appear to be more helpful to the Decepticon faction than the Autobot one, based on the comparison between Opportune Offense and Opportune Repairs alone. Can they be their own faction? I don't think so, yet but they've gotten more support than the Firecons did so the groundwork is there.

The flipside of this is that there seems to be a push for blue/black decks: tanky, defense oriented decks that want to chip away at their opponent's team. I've already seen a rise in build that do this, pushing cards with double black pips especially. The aggressive quality of the Mercs suggests there's a counterweight to this, which, again, keeps things interesting.

Third: none of the revealed battle cards here have any star cost to them, even Wedge Formation, which is a 3 color pip card, and none relating to the Mercenary faction specifically. The message I take from this is: WotC wants to push this group. The opportunity cost of adding in strong Merc cards is zero, so they can get the benefit of some very strong cards. This all suggests to me that they will be able to hold their own without support from the original factions very, very soon.

It's a strong showing of characters and cards, so I'm hopeful that this will provide more depth to the game without overcomplicating things. I like what I'm seeing so far, so bring on the Siege!