I made a mistake earlier this week. I assumed that when I provided information and insight, that people would generally trust that information. I wrote an article for an online community thinking that because I was honest and forthright in my conclusions, that people in the community would trust those conclusions. The problem isn’t that people doubt my sincerity, but rather that they doubt they my ability. That’s certainly a fair criticism of any person writing about any topic, and especially of someone unknown.

I’ve surrounded myself with an exceptional group of friends that I met throughout my many years of playing card games. They are all incredibly smart and talented individuals, and while none of us can make the commitment necessary to reach the very upper echelons of competitive play in Magic: the Gathering, we still have a solid string of finishes in our amateur group including a Pro Tour Top 8 and Top 16, four Grand Prix Top 8s and dozens of Pro Tour qualifications throughout the years. I trust them as players, and they trust my judgement and insight often, even when we sometimes disagree on particular things. I can’t state enough how humbling it is to have players of these pedigree ask me for advice on a wide range of topics including deck selection and tuning.

I know that many players want to try to win with their creations, while others will play whatever the perceived best deck is any given metagame. All I care about is finding what wins. I’m no stranger to playing and refining the best deck and performing well with it, but I’ve also come up with a few rogue strategies that have won Pro Tour invites in Magic or helped multiple players make Day Two at the WoW TCG World Championships.

None of this justifies an immediate trust in what I write on this site about Transformers. Instead, I need to be better about articulating my positions, especially when it comes to currently unconventional card and deck choices. And certainly, the most unconventional card choice one can be making in the Transformers TCG at the moment is having Sergeant Kup in the lineup for your deck. Why Kup? In terms of raw stats, Kup is incredibly weak. While he has a strong three defense, his eight hit points and three attack in alt mode are quite low. No one, including myself, is actively looking to play Kup because of anything in particular he brings to the table. Rather I’ve found that Kup is the perfect roleplayer for the deck I’ve felt to be one of the strongest currently in the game.

We need to take a step back though before I can provide an adequate defense for Sergeant Kup. I need to establish what fundamentally led me to play with Kup, and the reason clearly isn’t Kup himself. The reason is none other than Optimus Prime, Battlefield Legend. It quickly became evident to my group that hands down the most powerful character in the game is Optimus. Optimus has a very high base attack, a solid health pool and good defense. He also cheats on both tempo and card advantage whenever he attacks by giving you free actions. His flip to alt mode isn’t talked about as much as his bot mode ability, but the ability to select a particular action that you need in any given turn is incredibly potent, allowing you to sculpt a game plan with card selection that most other decks don’t have.

If Optimus Prime is the most powerful character, then how can we push this character to the limit to truly abuse his abilities? By attacking with him more. If you untap Optimus before every character untaps from a sequence of turns attacking, you will get additional attacks with him throughout the game. At the moment, there’s only way to untap Optimus after he’s already tapped: Swap Missions. Swap Missions is an interesting card since it doesn’t net you any extra attacks unlike Ready for Action, Start Your Engines or Turbo Boosters. By requiring an untapped character to be tapped, Swap Missions wants a particular lineup: namely one that has more than two characters.

It would seem easy to simply throw Swap Missions into a standard Double Prime deck and call it a day. There are two problems with this: Double Primes is restricted to only two attacks before every untap, meaning that you can never chain Swap Missions in a single attack cycle and your Optimus is always exposed to enemy attacks if you ever want to use Swap Missions at all. At first, these two options seem to create a contradiction: do you want to attack with Optimus multiple times or do you want to protect him from as many attacks as possible? The answer to the question is entirely dependent on the matchup. However, you have neither option in a Double Prime setup using Swap Missions.

So now we want to look at a three character setup. With a thirteen star character, options become limited for the other two characters. Since we are focusing on abusing Swap Missions to allow Optimus to attack multiple times, we don’t care as much about those characters’ attack values. In fact, it would be ideal to play characters that provide a passive benefit just for being in play. One immediately obvious character choice is Flamewar. Optimus is at his best in a blue based strategy rather than an orange one, so Flamewar’s passive Tough 1 is perfect in this deck.

By pairing Optimus up with Flamewar, we are now at 18 stars out of 25. You can only add a character with seven stars or less to your lineup. Here’s a list of every character in the game with seven or fewer stars:

Arcee, Skilled Fighter

Autobot Jazz, Special Ops

Barrage, Merciless Insecticon

Bumblebee, Brave Warrior

Chop Shop, Sneaky Insecticon

Demolisher, Devoted Decepticon

Dinobot Snarl, Desert Warrior

Dinobot Swoop, Fearsome Flyer

Insecticon Skrapnel, Insecticon Leader

Ironhide, Veteran Autobot

Kickback, Cunning Insecticon

Optimus Prime, Autobot Leader

Prowl, Military Strategist

Ransack, Insecticon Commando

Scamper, City Patrol

Sergeant Kup, Veteran Sergeant

Six-Gun, Heavy Weapons Expert

Skywarp, Sneaky Prankster

Slammer, Combat Drone

Before I jump into character choices for the deck, I need to explain a particular strategic restriction that arises in every Transformers game: a concept I like to think of as “flip intensity.” Flip Intensity refers to how often a deck wants to flip its characters in any given game. I would consider a deck like Insecticons to have a low flip intensity, since you are perfectly happy to just flip each character into bot mode when you want to attack with them, and you rarely ever want to flip them from bot mode to alt mode outside of some corner cases with Skrapnel. Conventional Dinobot decks have a higher flip intensity than Insecticons, since not only do you want each character in bot mode when they attack because of their higher stats, you also often want to flip them back over into their alt modes throughout the game to trigger their various effects (Grimlock’s Bold 3, Slug’s heal and Snarl’s draw two when your hand is empty).

Optimus Prime, Battlefield Legend by himself is a flip intensive character, since you almost always want to attack with him in bot mode, and then often you want to flip him back into alt mode on the following turn to get the best action available to you from your scrap pile. And of course, you now want to flip him back into bot mode the next time he attacks. Many games with Optimus often involve using your flip every turn, meaning that you likely won’t ever be flipping any of your other characters once you’ve started this chain. Fortunately Flamewar is a very low flip intensive character, asking only to be flipped once and then is perfectly content to sit the rest of the game in bot mode. Where this leaves us with is the need for a character that has very low flip intensity. In fact, we would prefer a character we can simply leave in alt mode while we maximize Optimus Prime and his flips every turn.

Just how good is defense exactly? If your opponent can KO your bot in one attack by doing damage equal to your character’s defense+health, then defense is as valuable as health. What if it takes three attacks to KO your bot? Now each point of defense is worth three points of health. It should become immediately apparent that the more attacks it takes to KO a bot, the more valuable defense becomes. There is of course a theoretical point where defense becomes infinitely valuable since your opponents’ would never be able to KO your character. Unlike video games like League of Legends or World of Warcraft where your defenses have diminishing returns and are percentage based, the defense stat in Transformers is far more similar to the Damage Reduction stat in Dungeons and Dragons. Why it’s important to keep this in mind is that Damage Reduction can be infinitely valuable or virtually worthless depending on your total Damage Reduction in relation to the amount of damage you are preventing. For example, let’s say I am playing a character with ten hit points and five damage reduction. Now let’s say I’m attacked by two different enemies. One of them has an attack that does five damage. My damage reduction reduces their entire attack to zero. Assuming no other changes from this enemy’s attack and given infinite time, they can never kill my character. Now the second enemy steps in and attacks. This enemy’s attack is fifteen. In one attack, my character is reduced to zero hit points. Now let’s take these two attacks, but this time my character will have a percentage based defense instead of Damage Reduction. We’ll say I reduce every attack by 60%. The first enemy with their five damage attack will now deal two damage to my character, meaning that they will kill me in five attacks. The second enemy with their fifteen damage will deal nine damage to your character and kill me in two attacks.

Why all this matters in the context of Transformers is that it means that the more defense you have, the more valuable defense becomes until you have reduced all damage to zero, and then the value of every point of defense after becomes zero. In the Wave 1 set for the game, attack values are generally higher than defense values, and actions provide additional ways to increase your attack above your opponent’s defense. This means that you can never practically achieve true invulnerability with defense, which means that defense is always more valuable the more of it you have. This is why Flamewar is particularly powerful in blue based decks.

If defense is such a valuable stat, then why aren’t blue based Tank decks more successful? The problem with these decks is that you still can’t finish the game in time. The point of high defense isn’t to completely lock your opponent out of the game, rather it’s to stop enough attacks to allow Optimus to finish off the game. Remember how I said that actions and higher attacks means that at some point you can still break through a high defense setup? Optimus immediately puts your pressure on your opponent to do that right away. It is very easy for Optimus to finish off a game in less than two attack cycles, while a blue based Tank deck often requires three if not four attack cycles to win. Optimus Prime is a proactive defensive character, difficult to KO but also KOing enemy bots very quickly.

Remember that our focus in this particular deck is maximizing our attacks with Optimus. Sure, we could play a character with slightly higher attack, but we know that this character is not what’s going to be winning the game for us. Dealing one or two extra damage on random chip shots is not what we’re concerned with. Rather, we want to be soaking attacks from our opponent, effectively negating their turns when we need a more defensive setup. If our opponent decides to commit vital resources such as Grenade Launcher or Supercharge in an attempt to KO our non-Optimus bots, then our Optimus is far more likely to get through your opponent’s subsequent attacks relatively unscathed.

Considering how important defense is and how by having Flamewar in our lineup, we want a high defense third character. At the seven star and less cost, there are a total of five characters with three defense: Demolisher, Skrapnel, Kup, Ironhide and Scamper. We can immediately discard Scamper for simply having such a low hp. Ironhide is another easy character to discard for just having one less hit point than Kup. It’s also fairly easy to discard Demolisher as well for having less hit points, the lack of any other tanks in the lineup, and the fact that he will never have more than three attack in either mode. While Demolisher does have four defense in his bot mode, you still need to keep flip intensity in mind, and you don’t really have the time to flip Demolisher in this deck early in the game.

This leaves us with two real options: Skrapnel and Kup. The two are close in terms of raw stats in their alt mode, with Skrapnel having one more attack and Kup having one more hit point. Skrapnel does have a unique ability when he is in bot mode that allows him to soak very large attacks. Again though, you have to consider your flip intensity, and as I said before we started analyzing characters at the specified cost, what we want is the best character in alt mode. When we look at Skrapnel vs Kup, then the two are very close in terms of their alt mode stat lines. I do think when we want a high defense character to soak early game attacks in alt mode, then you want the extra health more than the extra attack.

There is one other reason Kup gets the nod over Skrapnel: he is a Truck. Remember how I said that defense gets more valuable the more you have of it? Healing characters with high defense is far more valuable than healing low defense characters. This is because your hit points are more valuable the more defense you have. If one of your characters is attacked by an opponent’s that has seven attack after battle icons and you have five defense, than you take two damage. A single Team-Up Tactics will completely undo that attack. You also can’t play Team-Up Tactics if it’s flipped off Optimus Prime’s attack targeting Optimus when he’s in bot mode.

As I said at the beginning of this article, Kup is not an objectively strong character. But when the right context arises, namely a three bot deck that wants to maximize the power of Swap Missions with Optimus Prime, then sometimes a bad card can rise up to challenge preconceived notions. One thing I’ve learned over the years is to avoid being locked into a paradigm that doesn’t allow you to flex your thinking outside of the box when needed.