Team Bayformers

Part of: About transformerstcg.org

Team Bayformers was a competitive play and design group formed in December 2019 by Transformers TCG players from the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Between 2020 and 2023 it produced two of the largest community releases in the game’s history, ran the online tournament scene that carried Allied Crossplay’s regular seasons and world championship, and funded much of the community’s early convention presence. In December 2023 it reorganized as transformerstcg.org, which continues its releases, organized play, and projects today.

Team Bayformers members carried the [BF] tag; the Credits page lists the roster of that era.

Origins (2019–2020)

Team Bayformers formed in December 2019 among Bay Area players who had competed together in local tournaments since at least 2018. Returning from the Energon Invitational, Wizards of the Coast’s official championship, its founders worked out the idea on the rideshare home from the airport after their flight back. The group played the official game’s final Wave, Titan Masters Attack, as a team in June 2020, recording a run of sealed-deck matches and booster openings over webcam as the pandemic closed in-person play.

Those founders were [BF] billmoo, [BF] Dzinny, [BF] Champion, and [BF] The Flash. When Wizards announced on July 20, 2020 that Wave 5 would be the game’s final release, Team Bayformers turned from a play group into a design and organizing group, and billmoo became its game director, serving as the central designer, production manager, and financier behind its releases.

Earlier that year billmoo had created the Team Bayformers Discord as the group’s home. He soon opened it to other players and fan groups, and it became the shared server on which the post-cancellation partnerships of the next three years were built.

The name was a deliberate provocation as much as a Bay Area pun. Its founders knew that “Bayformers,” the fandom’s shorthand for Michael Bay’s polarizing Transformers films, would draw strong reactions, and embraced that during the group’s early competitive-play days. The reputation followed the group into card design: as World|Strike took shape, some players dismissed Team Bayformers’ work on the strength of the name alone, before looking at the cards, even as the group invested increasingly in production, testing, and commissioned artwork. billmoo discussed those early reactions in his interview with the One Shall Stand, One Shall Fall podcast.

World|Strike and the Eye of the Matrix Vote (2020)

Team Bayformers’ first project was World|Strike, at the time the largest community release yet attempted, supported by extensive public testing and a substantial body of original commissioned artwork. The group announced it with a slow reveal on Instagram from October 14 through 17, 2020, and launched bayformers.net, its first dedicated web presence, on November 13. The site’s writing, including the Bay Diving column series and card reveals, is being archived on this site.

The Eye of the Matrix Discord’s vote of November 22 through 24, 2020 decided which fan-created cards its upcoming online tournaments would support. Most observers expected a contest between The Ark and Alpha Trion Protocols, both established groups with strong followings. Team Bayformers entered as an underdog and won by two votes, with the other two tied behind it. The result established Team Bayformers as a major force in the post-cancellation community; the story of that vote is told in Five Years Ago: The Vote That Changed the Community Game.

Days later, The Ark offered Team Bayformers membership within The Ark. Team Bayformers declined and proposed an equal partnership instead, which the two groups announced on November 28, 2020.

Releases

Team Bayformers named its releases internally by letter: Wave BFA, Wave BFB, and Wave BFC, for “Team Bayformers Wave A” and so on. The community later gave the finished releases numbers in the shared card pool.

• Wave BFA: World|Strike went gold on December 31, 2020 and released on January 11, 2021, with a 1.1 update on March 22. It introduced the Quintesson faction and was eventually numbered Wave 6.
• Wave BFB: Waste|Lands entered Public Beta on July 16, 2021 and released around July 22, 2022, after roughly six months of Pre-Alpha and Alpha development and twelve months of Public Beta. It introduced the Junkion faction, Rolling Actions, and other substantial new mechanics, and was numbered Wave 8. At release it was the largest Transformers TCG release, official or community.
• Wave BFC was shelved during Allied Crossplay, restarted by Team Bayformers on November 23, 2023, and revealed a year later as Org Wave 9: War|Void, the first new numbered Wave developed under transformerstcg.org.

Organized Play

Team Bayformers built one of the most successful community-run online tournament scenes of the post-cancellation era, started and led by billmoo.

World|Strike Tournament Season One launched on February 8, 2021, created to support World|Strike as a community wave. It ran through mid-2022 across five numbered Encounters and several additional formats, and culminated in the first Omega Invitational, Allied Crossplay’s world championship, which began on March 28, 2022. Conceived in the spirit of Wizards’ Energon Invitational, the event invited players through regular-season performance and notable presence in the wider community, and was backed by physical prize support, giveaways, and daily coverage. The event page and its daily roundups are preserved here.

Before Season One closed, Team Bayformers created the Harmony format for its Harmony: Waste|Lands tournaments, which previewed the Waste|Lands Public Beta inside the meta environment of the first Omega Invitational; several of those matches were streamed with Vangelus. transformerstcg.org still uses Harmony as its modifier for Public Beta play. Waste|Lands Tournament Season Two followed on August 16, 2022.

Although Team Bayformers had not been represented on the community’s Aequitas rules committee, it honored Aequitas rulings within its events, and after the committee became inactive in 2022, former Aequitas members and Allied Crossplay organizers, Team Bayformers among them, assumed responsibility for maintaining consistent rulings.

Allied Crossplay

The partnership with The Ark grew into a coordinated release schedule and a shared play environment, and on June 21, 2021 it rebranded as Allied Crossplay in response to public criticism of crossplay between fan releases. Team Bayformers’ tournament scene was the environment the partnership’s other releases were made compatible with, and the partnership came to include Turbo Revving Old Punks and teletraan1.net.

Team Bayformers largely funded Allied Crossplay’s first convention partnership, with TFcon at TFcon Los Angeles 2022 (March 11–13). Its members also carried the group’s public presence: Wreck ‘n Rule covered Team Bayformers from 2020 to 2022 and interviewed billmoo ahead of the Omega Invitational, and One Shall Stand, One Shall Fall podcast hosts Lee McAlpin of BLEEPEDUPPRODUCTIONS and Dave “EnergonHustler” Cook of Energon Hustlers ran a four-part World|Strike series in early 2021.

After the rebrand the shared Discord was renamed the “Transformers TCG Community” Discord, giving up the Team Bayformers name.

Subteams

As the group grew it organized into subteams. One subteam was Team Pro-Pain, whose members included Hawkhammer and Tankhunter48. It is now defunct.

As Turbo Revving Old Punks became inactive, most of their remaining members joined Team Bayformers subteams or stepped back from active design work.

Leadership Transition and the End of Allied Crossplay (2023)

In the fall of 2022, billmoo announced his intent to eventually step back from leading Allied Crossplay. Sudden life events in February 2023 moved that transition forward, and he handed leadership to Z-R0E, developer of teletraan1.net. When he returned to active leadership of Team Bayformers in the summer of 2023, he found a partnership whose governance and development standards had changed, and whose stalled “Ark Exodus” release had become a point of disagreement.

Team Bayformers restarted Wave BFC outside the Allied Crossplay process on November 23, 2023, moving development to a new private Team Bayformers Discord created that month. In December, after a private vote among Allied Crossplay designers, billmoo was removed from the Transformers TCG Community Discord without prior notice. He then withdrew Team Bayformers from the partnership, ending Allied Crossplay. The full account is in The End of Allied Crossplay.

From Team Bayformers to transformerstcg.org

That same month, the Team Bayformers lineage reorganized as transformerstcg.org, carrying forward its releases, organized-play history, designers, and community projects. The private Team Bayformers Discord became the transformerstcg.org Discord, which opened publicly on July 1, 2024.

transformerstcg.org maintains World|Strike and Waste|Lands, remastered Turbo Revving Old Punks’ releases as Org Wave 7, completed Wave BFC as Org Wave 9, and continues the tournament, convention, and physical-card work Team Bayformers began. billmoo has served as its game director and lead since its founding. The original [BF] tag remains in use among the group’s founders. Team Bayformers’ own writing, streams, and reveals remain on this site under its author page.