Greetings, fellow humans! I’m Ken Nagle, design lead for TransformersTCG. It’s a new year and you know what that means – new cards! Our next release is Titan Masters Attack, which is Wave 5 of our releases.

That’s quite a milestone – it’s already Wave 5 when just a short while ago it felt like we were just figuring out how to make flipping robots battle. Today is a big day in another way - there’s an entire 3 new card types to show you from this new expansion.

Titan Master

There’s an entire new character class in Wave 5 called a Titan Master. This kind of character is composed of 2 parts: a Head Mode character and a Body mode character. Let’s see an example:

Flameout is a small character with a Head and Bot Mode.

Twin Twist is a large-sized character with an Alt and Body mode.

Rules

By playing both together, they mimic how the physical toys work:

This means this Titan Master character has Bold 2 in both Bot mode and Alt mode. The Head is always giving its bonus.

This combines their “stats” together. Twin Twist’s 9 stars and Flameout’s 3 stars means this Titan Master is a 10-star character (for cards that care about stars like Ready For Action).

Some additional rules:

A Titan Master on your starting team requires a Body and a Head. So, every Body needs a Head and every Head needs a Body. You can’t just play a Head alone or a Body alone.

A Titan Master starts in Alt mode, with its Head giving its bonus to both Alt mode and Body mode.

A Titan Master can flip from Alt mode to Body mode and back like a normal character. The Head stays on and gives its bonus to both sides. The Head does NOT flip over to Bot mode until…

A Titan Master that gets KO’d with its Body and Head will KO just the Body! The Head is not KO’d. The Head instead is deployed to the battlefield in Bot mode untapped. The Head will ensure you don’t lose the game if you just have a Titan Master out. Because the Head’s Bot mode is now untapped, you will often get a turn by interrupting your opponent “attacking out”.

The Body loses all its upgrade upon KO. The Head doesn’t get to keep any upgrades. (Maybe if there was some kind of REDACTED [Too many spoilers in one article – Drew] involved…)

[Too many spoilers in one article – Drew] involved…) The Body is now in KO and the Head is in Bot mode and can act as a normal character, except it can’t flip at all since its Head mode isn’t valid to flip into while alone. There’s no way to put a Head back onto a Body.

This Head-in-Bot-mode character is somewhere between 1 and 4 stars. It is very fragile and probably only gets 1 attack before being taken out by an opponent’s attack. So make that attack count!

Those are the basic rules for Titan Masters. Two new character card types – Body mode and Head mode that go together. That’s a lot of info and believe me it was quite amazing during the design process getting all this work (thank you, Brittanie Campos – Digital Technical Artist, for all the new frame designs)! All that said, there’s even more:

You can’t bring back a Body mode character from KO because it won’t have a Head. Effects like I Still Function! and Involuntary Promotion will not work at all to bring back a Body. You can, however, bring back a Head from KO because it will be in Bot mode (and only in Bot mode).

There is a way, if you have two Titan Masters, to switch their heads.

HUH?! A ‘Stratagem’? That’s crazy!

Stratagems

Stratagems are a new card type in Titan Masters Attack! For a while now, the team has wanted a way to modify the game from turn 1 at a level smaller than a full character. Stratagems is the card type for this:

Stratagems cost 1 or more stars and begin the game on the battlefield.

You can only have at most 1 of each Stratagem. They are ‘unique’. You can play multiple different

Stratagems can change the deckbuilding rules of the game, add traits to characters, or trigger a on a difficult condition during gameplay.

Many Stratagems have a bonus that can only be use ‘once’ – they usually say to flip the card over signaling that it’s not active anymore.

Stratagems are NOT ‘battle cards’ – they don’t go in your battle deck and they don’t have a battle card back. You can’t find them with effects like Valuable Contract that finds “a battle card you own with 1 star”.

There’s 10 common, 10 uncommon, and 10 rare Stratagems in Titan Masters Attack! Each common Stratagem helps a named character card in Titan Masters Attack. They are the easiest to use because they just need one character from this booster set to function. An uncommon Stratagem is likely to help specific team. They are a little harder to use. A rare Stratagem is likely to help a character that is NOT in Titan Masters Attack! It will take much effort to play with these cards because they don’t work at all unless you have the specific character card from a previous expansion. If you have a favorite character in the game that you’ve always hoped would get their own signature card, these cards are meant to please you by breathing life back into these potentially forgotten characters from previous expansions.



Case in point, my favorite character card in Transformers TCG is the beneficiary of his very own rare Stratagem that loudly demonstrates this new card type’s design philosophy:

Back in Wave 1, I was often scared of Autobot Cosmo’s potential to KO a character with one attack. Over time, that fear turned out unfounded due to fast decks being too fast and slow decks being too big. Autobot Cosmos has figured out what’s wrong – that “12” was a typo and should’ve been a “21”. At least, that’s the story I like to believe.

Conclusion

That’s it for today’s previews. It’s totally crazy to think we put a new character type Titan Master Head and Body and a new Stratagem card type in the same expansion but here we are. Onward and upward!

Thanks for reading my article. Titan Masters Attack! goes on sale April 17th, 2020. I can’t wait!

Until next time, may your patch notes come in the form of new content.