The Constructicons present some interesting deckbuilding challenges. On the one hand, combining into Devastator is very powerful with a strong repair and potentially very large attack. On the other hand, it takes six turns(!) to get all your characters into bot mode in order to combine, and all of your characters have low health and defense, meaning it’s easy for your opponent to one shot them. Sometimes though, the best defense is a strong offense. While the platitude is incredibly cliche, it’s actually quite astute when it comes to this deck. Every opposing bot you K.O. reduces the total number of attacks your opponent has available to them, reducing the amount of damage they can do in future turns. The other advantage of playing a high offense deck with a Combiner team is that you can win many games without ever combining. This allows Constructicons to have a primary game plan of aggression with a large number of characters like Insecticons, but with the ability to dominate the late game with Devastator.

TRANSFORMERS:

Bonecrusher, Demolitions

Hook, Surgical Engineer

Longhaul, Transport

Mixmaster, Materials Fabrication

Scavenger, Mining and Salvage

Scrapper, Constructicon Foreman

UPGRADES:

3x Grenade Launcher

3x Flamethrower

3x Power Punch

3x Improvised Shield

3x Erratic Lightning

2x Static Laser of Ironhide

2x Bashing Shield



ACTIONS:

3x Peace Through Tyranny

3x Supercharge

3x Reckless Charge

3x Treasure Hunt

3x Work Overtime

3x Backup Plan

3x Constructicon Enigma

This list is pure aggression with three actions that refill your hand: Treasure Hunt, Backup Plan and Work Overtime. Outside of the card drawing and Enigmas, I wanted to just maximize how much damage I was doing with my characters each turn, so we end up here. There’s nothing particularly elegant about it, but it is brutally efficient.

One of the most important things to keep in mind with the Constructicons is that you don’t need put a height counter on the tower on every single attack. Being at somewhere around six or seven height counters by the time you can actually combine into Devastator is often more than enough to finish the game with a strong repair and bold 2 on a base 6 attack. Generally you’ll scrap two or three cards to attacks with your Constructicons, depending on the context of your hand and the state of the game, then just allow Scrapper’s bot mode ability to get you the remaining height counters.

Once you know that you don’t need to hit ten height counters in a lot of games, then it becomes immediately apparent that Builder’s Tools is a trap. In essence, you are going down a card (the Builder’s Tools itself) to just add one height counter to your tower. Since every Constructicon outside of Scrapper lets us put height counters with any card in our hand, we don’t need a card that does only one thing that we always have ready access to during any attack step. My general recommendation is to scrap blank or weak cards (Peace Through Tyranny, Improvised Shield, any early Enigmas, Bashing Shield against other aggressive decks) and not your cards that boost a character’s attack (Reckless Charge, Supercharge, Grenade Launcher, etc.).

An advantage of the scrapping on attack mechanic is that we can flex both Work Overtime and Backup Plan to their fullest in this deck. The intrinsic problem with Backup Plan is that it does not play well when you draw them in pairs or triples, since playing one means that you will just discard any extras you’ve draw, mitigating any card advantage you would have normally gotten with the draw three action. With Constructicons, you can scrap any duplicate Backup Plans or Work Overtimes you’ve drawn to get your hand size small enough on the following turn to get a full blown refill.

At the moment I’m playing three Constructicon Enigmas. The reasoning behind this is twofold: first, as a card hungry aggressive deck, you want to maximize your chance of seeing an Enigma when you need it (and if you draw them in the early game, you can always scrap them to add height counters), and playing with three Enigmas will mitigate the damage Espionage will do. If your opponent picks up an early Espionage, you can even get up to two Enigmas in hand to “protect” your ability to combine since Espionage can only make you scrap one of them.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that you are an aggressive deck first, and combining into Devastator is a long term game plan you can flex into. As I said above, I generally will never scrap any of my cards that provide a sizable attack boost to my characters, as I want to keep up the pressure and make sure I am still K.O.ing enemy bots as much as possible.