Fundamentals. If you’ve watched any sports at all, you’ve likely heard the commentators talk about fundamentals. The definition of fundamental is “forming a necessary base or core; of central importance” or “a central or primary rule or principle on which something is based.” Trading Card Games have strategic fundamentals that inform players about how to approach not just their deckbuilding, but their gameplay as well. These fundamentals are derived from three core strategic concepts from the very early days of Magic: the Gathering: Card Advantage, Tempo and the Philosophy of Fire. These three central ideas have stood the test of time as the key components for a strategic understanding of not just Magic, but most other TCGs as well. After playing Transformers for the last few months, I believe that these three fundamental ideas apply to the game as well.

Before I actually break down what exactly each of these three ideas are and how they apply to Transformers, I want to provide a disclaimer that while I believe it is incredibly useful to always keep these fundamental ideas in mind, they are not hard and fast rules. You will often find situations that arise in any given game where you have to make a play that contradicts one or more of these concepts from a theoretical perspective but is the right play to make within the given context of the game. What separates the good players from the great ones is those that can truly recognize these scenarios and still make the play to win. I have also included a link to a key Magic article for each particular theory. With that out of the way, let’s dive into the first theory: card advantage.

Card Advantage (Brian Weissman-Taking Card Advantage)

Card advantage is the first and oldest strategic theory for TCGs. It is the simplest to understand and while TCG theory has matured in many other ways over the years, card advantage as theory has changed very little. If you have card advantage over your opponent, than you simply have more cards than they do. Any time you make a play that increases the total number of cards you have, than you have gained card advantage. The easiest way to understand card advantage is with a card drawing spell. The classic example from Magic is Ancestral Recall: when you play Recall you draw three cards, meaning your total net card advantage is two. Remember that you spent a card (the Ancestral Recall) to draw three cards: 3-1=2. In Transformers, there are not many cards that net you cards as cleanly as Ancestral Recall does. One that does so the easiest is Team Up Tactics if you have a car, drawing you two cards and netting you one card in total. Keep in mind that neither Incoming Transmission or Inspiring Leadership give you any card advantage. Rather they break even on cards in the strictest sense of the theory. Also keep in mind that card advantage generally only cares about cards in two zones: those in hand and those in play. Cards in decks or removed from game don’t matter, even in Magic where you can lose the game if you run out of cards in your deck.



The nature of Transformers means that card advantage matters a bit less than it does in Magic. This is because the most important resource in the game are not the battle cards in your deck, but rather the Transformers you have available to you for the entire course of the game. Even if you have no cards in hand or in play, you can still flip and attack with a Transformer every turn. However, if you have no battle cards available to you, odds are you will still lose because your opponent’s attacks and defense will be much stronger than yours every turn. It’s still important in every game to make sure you are not simply throwing battle cards away to ineffective plays, but rather consider the impact of making any given play. For example, I often see players upgrade a character with a Handheld Blaster in a deck full of blue pips when they could simply hold the Blaster to discard to an Inspiring Leadership later in the game. Even if you don’t have a Leadership in your hand, I still wouldn’t play the Blaster as the card does virtually nothing in play. By holding the Blaster and discarding it to a Leadership, you are able to keep an extra card you draw from Leadership that is going to be far more valuable than a Blaster in play.

Tempo (Eric Taylor – Tempo and Card Advantage)

The next important concept to understand in any TCG is that of tempo. Tempo means “the rate or speed of motion or activity; pace.” On a very basic level, tempo means time. The actions a player can take in the turn of a game are restricted, and thus dictate the tempo of the game. Often these actions are restricted by some sort of resource such as land or mana in Magic. Transformers still has tempo, but is not dictated by any resource system; rather your tempo every turn is determined by play restrictions: you can play one action, one upgrade, flip one character and attack. I believe that tempo is of utmost importance in Transformers, much more so than card advantage. One problem with card advantage in Transformers is that the play restrictions means that even if you have ten or twenty cards in your hand, you still can only do four things every turn: action, upgrade, flip, attack.

The one area in which you can truly cheat on tempo is attacking since every character must be tapped before they can untap and attack again. What this means is two things: teams with more Transformers than the opposing team will inherently have more attacks initially, and untapping a character also effectively nets you an attack later. Insecticons are the best deck for taking advantage of the former while Cars try to abuse the latter. An interesting observation to make is that Optimus Prime as the premier control character aims to cut off an opponent’s tempo of attacking with a character by straight up KOing that particular character on turn one. While the Double Primes vs Insecticons matchup features two bots against four, if Optimus attacks first and KOs Kickback, then the game has immediately become two against three and removed an entire attack from the Insecticons player. This maxim continues throughout every single game, as every time you KO a bot, you have removed an attack from your opponent for every future turn cycle. This is why Optimus Prime is the best controlling character in the game because he helps to restrict your opponent’s tempo and options by KOing characters very quickly, sometimes as early as turn one. The big problem with other defensive decks in Transformers such as Tanks or Shockwave is that you simply allow your opponent to have maximum tempo for far too long, and that much time for a deck like Insecticons, Cars or Dinobots means that they will hit your best character with a 15+ power attacker in the game. It’s simply a matter of when, not if.

The Philosophy of Fire (Mike Flores – The Philosophy of Fire)

Mike Flores penned a few of Magic’s most important strategic articles of all time, one of those detailing the Philosophy of Fire. Boiled down, the Philosophy of Fire is simply that many decks are interested in trading their life for cards or trading their cards for their opponent’s life. When we look at Transformers, the entire game boils down to damage (life). Thus we are supremely concerned with the Philosophy of Fire, as every turn is focused on maximizing the damage to our opponent and minimizing the damage they do to us. There are quite a few cards that can be played to deal direct damage in the game: One Shall Stand, One Shall Fall and Plasma Burst are the most heavily played. Cards like Leap into Battle and Supercharge also serve as virtual damage. These cards that pump your Transformers are generally more effective than Giant Growth (+3/+3 to one creature) was in Magic, and not just because of Transformers’ much smaller card pool. One problem with a card like Giant Growth is that in Magic your opponent can interact with cards you play on your turn with instant cards. There are also cards that can destroy creatures directly, some of them like Wrath of God that destroy every creature in play. This makes Giant Growth a much worse card than Leap into Battle. With Leap, you will always have a Transformer to target and your opponent can’t do anything about it either.



But what’s more important to take away from the Philosophy of Fire than trading cards for life is that resources in a game can be traded for each other: trading cards for tempo, tempo for cards, life for cards and so on. Brainstorm is a great example of this kind of trade: you are losing a card (the Brainstorm) to play one additional action in the turn; thus you trade a card for a piece of tempo (an action play). Once you begin to think about it in that framework, then resource trading becomes readily apparent since it’s something players do with essentially every play they make. The key is ensuring that you are maximizing your resource trades along different axes in every game.

There have been countless words written about Magic, and for those looking for even more in depth strategy about the twenty five year old game, I highly recommend Mike Flores’ Shoulders of Giants. This is a list of twenty seminal strategic Magic articles, including all time greats such as “Who’s the Beatdown?” and “Clear the Land and the Fundamental Turn.” Reid Duke’s Thoughtseize You is another fantastic strategy piece as well. While a lot of the ideas are obviously directly related to Magic and older formats for the game, I believe that the underlying core concepts are invaluable for players in any TCG including Transformers.