Hi all and welcome back to another episode of Robots in Design.

Today I have a new Combiner to share with you. It’s not a full team Combiner, it’s a duo-Combiner, and in fact the lowest star-cost one printed yet, so you have a ton of room for buddies.

Let’s put our hands together for the terror of the skies and the rumble in the jungle

It’s a tank…

It’s a plane…

It’s Two-Pronged Attack’s best friend…

It’s the flying gun with a built in Bombing Run…

Say hello to SKYTREEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAD!!!!!!!!!

One thing we’re always looking for in the Transformers TCG is new ways to introduce progression into the game. Games in general tend to be more fun when you progress from a lower power state in the beginning of the game to a higher power state later on. We were very happy with the play patterns of combiners in Rise of the Combiners, as well as Battlemasters in War for Cybertron: Siege I. Putting them together seemed a natural choice, since both led to a mid-game spike in power—exactly what we’re looking for. It also dovetailed nicely with the debut of the Revenge keyword mechanic, letting us wrap everything up in a nice little package.

The other aspect of Skytread I wanted to highlight was his ability which temporarily tucks away the cards in your hand as ammunition for his Bombing Run-style damage moving mechanic. You might ask why we built in a limit to the number of uses and why we used your hand of cards to track it, in stead of just having it work on every attack.

Go ahead, ask…

I’m waiting…

Oh, great question. Well, it turns out that high armor values and repeatable repair both scale very well with high hit-point characters, disproportionately so when your opponent is running a blue deck and/or low-attack value characters. Because of this, we wanted to limit the damage moving ability in a way that didn’t affect Orange and high-attack value matchups while not being backbreakingly powerful against defensive compositions that only expect to get through for a few damage in each attack.

As for the shenanigans with your cards in hand, we wanted something that was self-limiting, but you had some agency over. We like the idea that you were loading up Skytread with ordinance and we liked rewarding building up a large hand in the early game. This also conveniently gave us an easy tracking device, since multiple types of counters with different meanings on a single card can easily lead to confusion (“no, no, no, the dice are damage, the pennies are energy, the peanuts are shackles, and the chocolates are exhaustion counters).

Since we’re tucking away your cards temporarily, there are few symmetry breakers that you can play to exploit your artificially low hand size. I would seriously consider running System Reboot, Work Overtime, and even Fog of War in your deck.

Alternately, if you want to invest in even more consistency, you could run Private Fixit in a heavy White deck and still have 9 stars to work with.

There are a lot of possibilities and I can’t wait to see what you come up with for Raider Skytread and the rest of War for Cybertron: Siege II, releasing in less than three weeks on November 8th. Look around for local release events and pick up our release day promo Nightbird.