Devastation

The designers of the Transformers TCG had a post on the design of the new Devastator pack that came out last Friday. There's some interesting detail that goes into how they approached making this pack and the challenges that it represented. It's a short post, so I don't feel the need to repeat anything said about that.

What I found really interesting though, was this tidbit:

We generally shoot for a game to conclude in 5-8 turns. Fast decks can make that more like 4, slower decks can push to 9 or 10.

Five to eight turns? That is not a lot of time! Having played just enough of the game, I think it's wise to conclude that this means in 5-8 turns per player. Still; that doesn't seem like much, does it? One of the things that the Transformers TCG does well is keep players involved even when it isn't their turn, so that engagement sticks around, so it feels like a longer game than maybe it is.

My takeaway from the Devastator article is that the Combiners themselves, at least for now, mine the 'glory of cool things' vein, more than they do winning strategies. I think that's why I've shied away from them so far.

Is it worth it to build the dedicated Predaking deck? It certainly doesn't look like it, so far. I think I should maybe spend some time trying to figure that out, mostly for the fun of it, but I haven't seen a large combiner team that will really be a force to reckon with. And I say that after having been beat down by an Aerialbots deck a couple weeks ago: I think that once I learn the matchup, it becomes one that is far more difficult for the combiner team than for me.

To that end, on Sunday I had a chance to play the Devastator deck, straight from the box, three times. It felt...clunky. Part of that was about my inexperience playing the deck but part of it had to do with the build.

The deck is action heavy (20 cards! That's half the deck.) and does not have a Brainstorm, which meant that my hand was clogged with cards I couldn't to anything with.

It also wants to reward slower play: Building your tower is a critical element of successful play and you want to hit 3 counters on it ASAP, so you can use Reclaim to get important upgrades and Heavy Landing to do extra damage. Builder's Tools is vital to the deck, in much the same way that Height Advantage helps the Metroplex deck. It's also important to transform Scrapper first so KO'd characters add to your tower and this puts an automatic limit on your first turn; there is zero point in transforming any other character. That isn't a killer but it does restrict my options.

That might have been a deliberate choice in order to make the deck more accessible to new and younger players: Devastator does have bunch of stuff going on. It was certainly a deliberate choice-Wizards of the Coast has been doing this for far too long to make thoughtless choices. And since it's a small drawback, along with the one where five of the six Constructicons have the same alt mode ability, they probably decided that the cool factor outweighed anything else. More play will tell me if that cool factor works.

Finally, while a Pretty Big Deal was made out of the card Work Overtime, it seemed underwhelming. While a card like that is vital to the Constructicons' game plan, so they can build their tower and second, usually I was casting it as a Pep Talk. And while that isn't terrible, it isn't bonkers either.

You know what might change that? Brainstorm.

Rise of the Combiners Thoughts

Link to the RotC spoiler list, for reference.

My friend Jason came down last weekend and we opened up four boxes of Rise of the Combiners. We played a whole lot of sealed, most of it incorrectly, so hopefully you can not only learn from our mistakes but glean something from the other thoughts.

First; it's more expensive.

In Wave 1, you could open two or three boosters per player and just play the game. This is particularly helpful when wanting to teach someone, because the threshold of complexity wasn't that high.

Since the Transformers game has players go through their deck rapidly, they get to see the cards over and over. Familiarity is a good thing when teaching a game.

To play sealed in RotC, you need to open five booster packs, and then build a deck of twenty five battle cards.

This is because there are so many 'dead' cards. The enigmas, for example; not a single one of them is playable in sealed and since it only has green icons on it, that card needs to be eliminated from the deck. In every game, it was easy to immediately cut anywhere from 3 to 5 cards, right off the bat-there isn't a situation where they can or should even be considered. This isn't a great look for Sealed.

On top of that, players now have to build decks. That increases the difficulty when trying to teach people how to play. It isn't insurmountable and almost all CCGs have this quality but it's different than Wave 1 and that isn't a good thing.

Unfortunately, it took Jason and I a box and a half to figure out how we should be building decks. This is likely our fault but I'm glad we figured it out. Our games of sealed became much, much more entertaining after that.

Second; the gameplay has become more deliberate. Green icons are extremely useful, and the new keywords of Brave and Stealth mean that there's a little bit of a pushback from the Wave 1 gameplay of 'smash those robots together!'.

That's not a bad thing: it's easy to understand what the new keywords do and the green icons encourage players to pause and evaluate what's in their scrap pile. This slows down the game, nudging players into thinking out lines of play.

So far, though, Rise of the Combiners hasn't amped the complexity up so high that the "smash robots together" feel is lost altogether, and that's also a good thing. When a turn based game takes about thirty minutes, it's important that players don't get bored waiting for their opponents to do something and Rise of the Combiners still felt brisk enough that I was analyzing things and engaged, not waiting around.

Finally, a word about the art. The battle cards can vary: drawing from decades worth of comic lore might save money on art assets but it can also mean a wild swing in quality, style, or tone between cards. That's not a dealbreaker for me but it is worth pointing out.

The quality of the character card artwork, however, is worth a special mention: These characters look amazing both in robot and alt mode. They are super cool and are great modernizations of classic characters.

Predaking!

OK, so...how cool is THIS?

Don't know? Let me tell you:

It is incredibly cool.

I want to talk about the downsides, first; let's just get them out of the way, alright?

1) Who is Torox? I mean..is Tantrum that difficult? The name scheme breaks up the pattern of the other Predacons...

2) Tapping this character will be a challenge. I don't care that they made a video about it; the game is for people 8 and up and not everyone has big hands. While it's all well and good to say; "so long as your opponent knows" c'mon, people. Just admit it's a challenge but the important thing is that the character is clearly in a "tapped" (or used or something) state for all players to recognize.

Other than that, this is a very, very cool thing. The fact that you can create Predaking even if your characters have been KO'd is a great ruling. The stats are on par with Metroplex, and the themes for this set look awesome to explore.

One question I have is: Does Predaking only have five weapons slots, or does it have five weapon slots plus an upgrade and armor slot? I asked them on Twitter but didn't get an answer.

Windblade, the other preview card, is also savage. While one side has an ability only good against combiners, the stats are very good and the bot mode has a lot of potential, especially with the new keyword ability coming, Plan, which you can see on...ugh...Torox.

The other previewed keyword, Brave (seen on Headstrong), allows for some tactics for defensive play and I dig it. A great opportunity to dictate tempo to your opponent in a way we haven't seen yet.

The spoiler list so far can be seen here, and it helps resolve one other mystery: what's with the green pips?

For those not wanting to go there; cards with green pips in the graveyard can be retrieved in the post-combat step by discarding a card.

I think this is a cool idea with the upside of allowing players to utilize their graveyards, a resource that fills pretty quickly in this game.

I just hope they're careful about how this gets used, because utilizing the graveyard as your deck removes the variance that makes a card game intriguing. The explanation for the mechanic was good, though and I agree that this helps cement over some other difficulties in the game.

There have been near daily updates, so I can't get to them all right now...but holy crap isn't Predaking cooooool!?