Rise of the Combiners Booster Packs
Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast have been kind enough to send Ozformers as well as myself: BigAngryTrev.com and Bladestorm: Life with Sprogs full boxes of the new Booster Packs for Rise of the Combiners. These cards are available in Australia as of today!
Griffin has kindly asked if Bladestorm and I could start a news thread about it, since he himself is off covering a toyfair :)
I'll be inserting some of the pictures I have taken of the new cards. For the full card descriptions and possible impacts on gameplay please check out my blog HERE.
It should be noted that none of us have been paid for our reviews and neither Hasbro nor Wizards of the Coast have tried to dictate the contents of our posts. We are all grateful to both companies for this opportunity :)
Rise of the Combiners Booster Packs Review
First and foremost thanks Wizards of the Coast (WOTC) for the Rise of the Combiners boosters. WOTC were kind enough to send 14 booster packs for me to review. My household situation is not conducive to stellar photography so I also have to credit pojo.com for the images I shamelessly ripped from their database for use in this review.
Secondly I would like to state for the record that I am not a big card gamer and have not played maybe three games overall across Wave 1 & 2. Therefore my insights and opinions are only cursory in nature not evolved through many rounds of experience and probably come with a massive strategic blindspot that only a novice gamer could possess.
Thirdly I have not been asked to nor recieved any input from WOTC regarding the content of this review. As such all content of this review is purely my owm creation (except aforementioned images of course)
With those three points aside let us commence with the review!
For those whose time is precious here is the skinny version of the review:
Skinny Review
PROS
-New game mechanics (and I'm not just talking about Combiners)
-Gorgeous Artwork
-Combiner card folds are visually concerning but mechanically robust
-Some funtastic new characters are a joy to play
-Improved deck control
-Game encourages trading, though distribution will be a horror for completionists
CONS
-Good luck collecting a full set of Combiner cards
-Many characters abilities feel thematically generic or off
-Game is still too much at the mercy of lady luck
-Pierce mechanic is still overpowered
-Combiner folds test sturdy but still concerning
-Rare, Uncommon, Common no longer an indicator of card 'quality'. Just literally the distribution.
Though it appears that I have a lot of CONS listed, qualitatively they are just minor quibbles compared to the weight of awesomeness that are the PROS
Long Review
Card distribution from my 14 booster packs.
Rare
Bombshell
Grimlock
+14 Battle Cards
Uncommon
Thrust
Ironhide
Torox
Rampage
+28 Battle Cards
Common
Silverbolt x2
Skydive
Alpha Bravo
Motormaster
Offroad
Novastar
Bumblebee
+56 Battle Cards
So with my sample set you have about a 14/28/58% chance to pull a rare/uncommon/common character card and about a 14/28/58% chance to pull a rare/uncommon/common battle card. Nice and even!
From the 14 boosters, 10 were Combiner Characters which equates to about a 70% chance of finding a combiner character.
Battle Cards
While the Combiner Character Cards that are the main-event of this wave of cards, I found it was the battle cards that added more exciting dimensions to the game.
https://i.imgur.com/mTI0Yxdl.jpg
The green pipped cards like this Stunticon Enigma allow you to retain said card after it's been played by sacrificing another battle card from your hand. This gives a measure of control over your deck instead of relying on luck which was one of my criticisms of the wave 1 game. All of the combiner enigma cards are green pipped so you have more than just luck to pull of the combination.
https://i.imgur.com/6hBpri3l.jpg
Cards that have effects depending on the faction, although very situational it CAN encourage players to build mixed faction teams or go pure depending on what battle cards they own. I look forward to more of these in future waves.
https://i.imgur.com/nbd9he6l.jpg
Plan cards: Plan allows you to take cards from your hand and stack them on top of your deck. While Wave 1 did have cards that allowed you to do this, it's now a named mechanic and there appears to be a LOT more of these.
https://i.imgur.com/6ODGkJdl.jpg
Tech Research: A rather benign action card that's only purpose is to prequisite to playing some powerful upgrade cards. Which leads to....
https://i.imgur.com/SB3Zvqml.jpg
Starred Battle Cards: Battle cards that possess a star value. The result is that teams that are understarred have the opportunity to use some powerful abilities that would be inaccessible to teams that are milking every star of the 25 limit.
Some of my favourites which I recieved are:
https://i.imgur.com/Quo1fApl.jpg
Focus Fire: A card which allows you to keep playing more of itself to stack the Bold1 effect. Pretty much the Transformers TCG equivalent of armybuilding :p
https://i.imgur.com/CedGedsl.jpg
Bolt of Lighting: Does 3 damage. A deck of these cards would be devastating. Thankfully they have a 1 star cost meaning you can only have up to 20 of these :eek:
https://i.imgur.com/clGUUVJ.jpg
Inverted: Transform a high defense battle deck into attack mode for one of your characters without sacrifice the defense of the rest of your team.
While it was disappointing to see a lot of battle cards as rebranded versions of previous wave 1 cards and some, outright copies of wave 1 cards it fully makes sense from a marketing perspective as someone getting into the game in wave 2 would still need these basic battle cards to play the game. It should be stated that the cards that are not outright copies ARE distinctly new cards, for example Wave 1's Ramming Speed 'Scrap an enemy Upgrade' has an orange 'attack' pip while Wave 2's Vaporise has the same scrapping ability but has a blue 'defense' pip. Also some cards like Primary Laser and Rapid Conversion which were COMMON cards in Wave 1 are now RARE cares in Wave 2 which kind of breaks the correlation we saw in Wave 1 where the rarer the card, the better it's abilities. I would say most would have used this as an easy way to conduct 'equal' trades but I guess we are now in a free market. I can understand why this was done, because existing players might be annoyed to own even more Rapid Conversions.
Select Character Reviews
Before I begin some reviews of my favourite character cards I have to say, the artwork in this wave is awesome. I would have preferred if the character-side artwork of the combiner cards were foiled but hey, you can't have everything. Also some of the abilities matched to characters just felt thematically off to me. Silverbolt doesn't marry well with Bold, and Air Raid's Warfare Specialist doesn't really match up with Tough or Healing. Also Snarl+ Planning = what?!? For the sake of game balance it is understandable that not all abilities can marry well with popular characterisations. That said, this phenomenon is more the exception than the norm in this wave (refer Dirge - Doombringer.... nailed it!)
BOMBSHELL
https://i.imgur.com/xOvUfdE.jpg
I just love the premise of this card. Every time he transforms to alt mode you get a 1 card, collect enough cards and you can instant KO an opponent. At 15 health he is likely to tank enough damage to KO at least one enemy right? This makes Bombshell a fun character to play with.
THRUST
https://i.imgur.com/o5VREzh.jpg
A not too costly but awesome support character. The ability to stack his attack with another character is an incredibly mighty buff and at 11 health and 3 def in alt mode he's not exactly a cakewalk to take down as I will painfully learn in my first playthrough.
TOROX
https://i.imgur.com/nM0vyLj.jpg
His alt mode passive ability alone is worth the star cost and at 9 health he's guaranteed to last a couple of turns. Torox's enemies basically have to decide whether to take him down first because of this passive ability or focus on more dangerous targets and risk Torox getting upgraded into a A level threat. I'd really loathe to enounter this beast in an enemy's team.
MOTORMASTER
https://i.imgur.com/jjW59pV.jpg
Both his alt mode and bot mode abilities are quite useful. The ability to basically ignore instant-damage cards AND control where your damage goes seems too good for the star cost. I'll be sure to pick this guy up if I manage to gather enough Stunticons for a team.
NOVASTAR
https://i.imgur.com/qjxTeDY.jpg
Awesome stats and the ability to utilise both truck, car AND melee actions/upgrades makes her an absolute beast of a character. I really enjoyed playing this character in my first playthrough, even if I didn't get to reap every potential advantage. She has an appropriately hefty star cost.
TEST PLAY
Team Mrs Lint = Silverbolt, Skydive, Swoop(wave1) and Thrust (25 stars)
https://i.imgur.com/T5tPRIim.jpghttps://i.imgur.com/bZGHkyTm.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/QLPgHafm.jpghttps://i.imgur.com/o5VREzhm.jpg
vs
Team Lint = Bombshell and Autobot Novastar (23 stars)
https://i.imgur.com/xOvUfdEm.jpghttps://i.imgur.com/qjxTeDYm.jpg
This is the game where I attempt to prove quality trumps quantity. We both prepared a battle deck of 40 to suit our teams flavour and strategy. My battle deck was focused on two things, getting cards for Bombshell to use his ability and keeping my tank Novastar alive via high defense and heals. My opponents deck was focused on plane abilities with some key pierce, damage and opponent hand trashing cards.
Ultimately four versus two was too much. Thrust's ability was extremely powerful and was a formidable match against Novastar's high defense. Silverbolt's ability also had guaranteed damage against her and the canny use of pierce attacks meant I spent all my free Bombshell cards healing up Novastar. The investment in Bombshell never really paid off and his mediocre attack and defense ratings meant that he could not carry the game at all once Novastar fell. Novastar was a total beast though, being both a car and truck meant that I could stack trailers on her for extra offense and turbo boosters to untap for an extra turn. I got the trailers but lady luck never gave me turbo boosters into my hand. Still she single handedly took down both Silverbolt and Swoop. The game also demonstrated that although the combiners had individually lacklustre base stats, their abilities are quite potent (in this particular case resulting in guaranteed damage and extra longevity) which means they are generally great value for the star cost and you may not necessarily NEED to shoot for the combiner mode in order to win with them. This is great for the game as nothing would be worse than having the Combiner character's only value be the Combiner gimmick.
CONCLUSION
Overall I really like what Wave 2 has done for the Transformers TCG. Although I did not have enough cards to form a combiner I feel there is more than enough new content to make dabbling in Rise of the Combiners worthwhile. Despite all this I feel like the game is yet to reach it's full maturity but given the amount of thought WOTC have put into this wave of cards I really look forward to seeing what is next in store for the Transformers TCG!
P.S if anyone in Melbourne actually wants to play this game hmu ;)
