Wave 5: Titan Masters

Finally, the next Transformers set has been announced. Explanations of what the new cards types gets a deeper dive here.

The first thing I notice is that of the 46 characters, 43 will be new to the game. That is exciting to me, because it means that we aren't condemned to set after set of Megatron and Optimus Prime. The stable of characters in the Transformers universe is deep and I'm glad they're taking advantage of that.

They're also repeating what they did with Trypticon, adding a Fortress Maximus character to every box. So long as there are no Maximus-only battle cards to deal with, I can get behind this, since it won't mess with the sealed or draft games.

Along those lines, I hope that since one can mix and match head/body types, this means there should be less feel bad moments in Titan Masters than there were in Siege II with the Sixgun / Brunt cards. I hope so, anyway, as they forced things in draft or left players in sealed high & dry.

There's a lot of moving parts involved, though and that I'm a little less enamored with. Still, I'm willing to see those cards in action before dismissing it.

Stratagems are an interesting twist: I've never seen a game that allows you to effectively overwrite characters like this. The star cost is cheap, at least in the preview card, but is the value provided enough? I don't know that people were dropping Cosmos out of their decks because it couldn't hit 21 star characters. Still, the possibilities that open up are interesting.

Plus they start on the battlefield, which means you don't have to get lucky to give your character an upgrade, or dilute your battle deck. That's a big persuasion to use them.

It does seem odd to have them debut in a set with mostly new characters but I do appreciate the boost that those cards might give to older or previously unloved characters, and the acquisition of those sets. It's clever and provides some nice connective tissue, and at rare it shouldn't muck up limited environments much. But I won't know more until...well, everyone does!