The Stratagem Lesson

I always enjoy these looks into how games are designed and this window into Stratagems for Transformers is no different. It's an interesting solution to a problem, even if I think they missed the mark on execution, especially with power level. Better put: The idea is good, but the cards don't do anything interesting enough for me to want them.

However, what I want to talk about is this section:

In this case, we asked ourselves how players would feel if they opened a pack that had a body but no head, or a head with no body. We have all different types of players and we need to make sure that they all have a positive experience (or as many of them as possible). ... many players just buy a pack or two looking for something new and different to add to one of their decks. To them, half of a Titan Master is an unplayable card, and that’s a negative experience we want to avoid, so we decided to do our best to make sure that every pack that has a body also has a head, and vice-versa. ...Packs that don’t have a Titan Master now have an unfilled slot that needs a card. What can we put in there?...We considered “nothing” as an answer. You get six battle cards and then either large regular character card or a large Titan Master body and a small Titan Master head. We chose not to do that because we felt that that could be a letdown where people felt disappointed that they got fewer cards than another pack from the same set.

Then I'd like to contrast that with this card:

Reasonably, one might be asking: What does this card have to do with Stratagems? 

To answer that, I need to tell you that the way that WotC is pushing the Transformers game is as "Turbo Sealed" where players open two packs of cards and play with what they open. Setting aside my opinion that it should actually be three packs-because the problem I'm about to discuss remains no matter how many packs you open. 

This is a dead card. This is a moment where a player will feel bad about having this card in their sealed match.

There are three colors on this card, and yet there is a near zero chance that this card will ever produce a color for you during battle, because to produce Blue you need to flip it on defense and flip it for a melee character, or flip it on offense and flip it for a specialist for orange, or a ranged character for black. 

This card is useless in Sealed unless you draw it. 

Now, I'm not saying that every card should be good in every format. That isn't reasonable, nor it is how CCGs work. 

What I'm saying is that in a format WotC wants to push, it is producing cards that are terrible for that format. Sure, it's a rare so it won't appear often but when it does, jeeze is it disappointing. 

I don't like this for Constructed, either, to be honest, in part because it's got no unifying theme. This card wants you to min/max and be run in a deck that cares about colors and has at least 2 of the 3 types of character classes. It's incredibly narrow and becomes less helpful as the game goes on and your characters get KO'd. 

That said, if you play the card as an action and subsequently flip a copy of the card, it's a +3. Which is The Glory of Cool Things if every I saw it, but I do have to acknowledge Master of Metallikato's use. But it doesn't feel very good to open. It feels like a blank.

So what I'm wondering is; why did they catch the letdown in packs that lead them to create Stratagems, and not catch this? Perhaps there's a deck for this card that hasn't been discovered yet? I suppose it's worth considering.