This was originally posted on the Transformers TCG Facebook Page.
The mercurial master himself, Ken Nagle, has dropped by once again to shower you with not only new spoiler cards (including a new blue one for everyone who’s been asking!), but also a fascinating insight into their background!
Take it away, Ken!
I’m Ken Nagle, Design Lead for Transformers TCG. Today I have 2 preview cards for you. They are clean implementations of two new mechanics in RISE OF THE COMBINERS.
Introducing Introducing Bravery and and Stealthiness:
While these cards introduce two new keywords, I like to think of them as two parts of one whole.
Let us rewind back to before Wave 1. In this earlier iteration of the game, a character could attack any character they wanted. There was no tapped/untapped rule. The game was a race to KO an enemy character as fast as possible. Much of the card design was trying to reward “spreading out” damage. Some characters had a “Attack me first” ability which became an important part of team-building. We soon added the tapped/untapped rule (you must attack a tapped character if able) and the game felt much better since both players had some (but not complete) control over when and how their characters attacked and defended.
Fast forward to Rise of the Combiners. There’s now many 5-wide teams of small characters in the game. The average game is going to have more characters and they all start on the battlefield. This has proven to be one of the major challenges of the system design – the most complex turns in the game are often the first and second turn – while all the characters are still on the battlefield. Who to attack? Who to attack with? Who to flip? These are all maxed out on turn 1 in a 5 vs 5 match.
In addition to this turn 1 complexity increase, we know that small characters are very vulnerable on the first turn. You haven’t had the chance to flip or play a defensive Armor. You are frequently going to lose a 5-star character on turn 1 without any response.
For these reasons, we added the Brave and Stealth keywords to Wave 2. They can add to flavor to characters – Brave for the charge-into-battle types and Stealth for the in-the-shadows types. I’m also happy there’s a fundamental disincentive – if all your characters have Brave then it’s doing nothing. Similarly there’s no help if all your characters have Stealth. I expect players to use Brave and Stealth in small amounts, carefully using up to 1 Brave and up to 1 Stealth at maximum, to exert control over their opponent’s attacks.
Even though these keywords fundamentally remove decisions from the game, the reality is that Transformers TCG is a fast-paced action battler where characters do not stick around on the battlefield forever. A Brave character quickly accrues damage while a Stealth character will quickly be alone and exposed.
These new utilities Bravery and Stealthiness allow you to “build a bot” by adding Brave or Stealth to any character you like. I hope you’ll have fun finding ways to create a high defense Brave character and/or a high attack Stealth character.