The most interesting strategic decision in the Transformers TCG comes in the deckbuilding stage because of the games unique mechanic: battle icons. While any deck can play any battle card they want with no restrictions, there is still a deckbuilding cost to putting any given card in your deck: namely, the battle icons that you will flip throughout any given game. I’ve found that the elegance of the battle icon system coupled with the tough and bold keywords pushes your deckbuilding in certain directions and forces you to decide on putting a particular card in your deck not just for its effect when played, but also for its effect in combat if it is flipped from the top of your deck.

Consider two cards that operate similarly to each other: Ramming Speed and Disarm. Both aim to accomplish a similar goal: remove an opponent’s upgrades from play. However, I generally consider the stronger card to be Ramming Speed. Disarm usually only buys you one turn, and is fairly abysmal against weapons. Ramming Speed is clean and simple: it scraps whatever upgrade is the best on your opponent’s side, whether that is a weapon or utility on their best attacker to mitigate an upcoming attack, or scrapping a crucial armor to allow you punch through their defenses. I find that when I am playing Ramming Speed in a deck, I usually play three. When I play Disarm, I generally only play one. There are some deckbuilding reasons why this happens: namely that Ramming Speed ends up in aggressive decks that usually only has the cards in hand from draw steps, while Disarm pops up in Optimus Prime decks where you can often effectively “tutor” for it when it’s in your scrap pile (tutor is a piece of Magic jargon that means to search a given zone for a specific card to put it in your hand). But there is one either key reason I still play Disarm over Ramming Speed in certain decks: it’s blue battle icon.

As I said previously, Ramming Speed is a stronger card than Disarm. So why don’t I just play Ramming Speed in Optimus Prime decks? Certainly there is some merit to playing even one Ramming Speed in a deck with Optimus Prime as a silver bullet target (another Magic term; a silver bullet is a card that you want to find that specifically answers a given problem. Silver Bullets are usually one ofs that you have some way to search for). The problem is that everytime you add a card with a battle icon that doesn’t help with your gameplan of either high offense or high defense, you lose a lot of value every combat step with overall less attack or defense.

It’s easy to see just how important battle icons are from a cursory examination of decks that are performing well. Every deck plays a full playset of both double battle icon cards, whether it’s six double orange icons or six double blue icons. When one begins to consider that two of those cards, namely Handheld Blaster and Improvised Shield, might as well have blank text boxes, it should become immediately evident that battle icons are important enough to warrant playing cards that do virtually nothing when they are in your hand!

So if battle icons are important enough to warrant playing Improvised Shield, why then do players ignore the importance of battle icons in the rest of their deck? I’m often surprised to see decklists that have 10 or more cards with battle icons that don’t fit the focus of the deck: orange icons+blanks in defensive decks and blue icons+blanks in offensive decks. This isn’t to say that I think that every deck should have only all blues or all oranges with a few white icons sprinkled in. Certain cards are powerful enough to warrant their inclusion in particular decks: One Shall Stand One Shall Fall, I Still Function, Dino-Chomp and Start your Engines are powerful cards that should see play. But the question is what is the limit for adding battle icons that don’t help with your particular strategy, whether attacking or defending?

My intuition after playing several games with various different decks is that numbers for good deck construction are 3-6 cards with battle icons that don’t contribute at all to your strategy and 3-5 white battle icons (white battle icons have immediate diminishing returns, as each one after the first is effectively a blank). This was indeed where my deckbuilding took me after my initial introduction to the game and when I tuned our Cars and Insecticon lists to match this paradigm. And games began to shorten significantly indicating that we were on the right track for our deckbuilding. This criteria also informed the Mission Prime deck I threw together, a deck that beats most of the top decks in the metagame. I’ve even thrown our builds against popular builds that players from the community have provided, and most of our tuned decks feel quite favorable against those various lists as well. There are other factors in deckbuilding that I believe have helped me arrive at stronger lists, but the foundation for my decks is maximizing either orange or blue battle icons on my cards.

I decided to take a look at some simple percentages to see how often you will hit a blank card in a certain attack. The upper limit for flipping cards involves Kickback in Insecticons. If we play a Supercharge on Kickback as well as a Flamethrower and flip a white battle icon on the attack (which is extremely likely), we end up flipping a total of 15 battle cards on the attack. I then compared two different Insecticon decklists to see how many blank cards you will flip on that attack. One deck has 12 non-orange cards and the other has 6. Remember that white pips still provide no damage or defense when they are flipped, so once you’ve triggered the once per attack white pip, then the white pips are the same as a blank card.

The chance you hit at least three blank icons with that attack in the 12 non-orange list is over 92%. The chance you hit at least three blank icons in the six non-orange deck is 40%. Of course, a huge Kickback attack like that is going to have significantly more battle cards flipped than most combat flips. We can look at a normal attack from most characters with only two battle icons flipped. Looking at only blank cards in each deck, six for one and three for the other, than the odds of flipping at least one blank card in the six blank card deck is 28% and the odds of flipping at least one blank in the three blank card deck is less than 15%.

From a practical perspective, you are going to be losing out on your total damage in every game when you have less battle icons in your deck. Considering that one of the most important things in this game is damage, whether you are dealing it or preventing it, losing out on damage or defense simply because of your deck construction is setting you back. If you deal or prevent at least two more damage every game than your opponent because of your deck construction than this is no different than playing a Plasma Burst or a Medic every single game. And that’s without actually having to use a card, it just happens throughout the course of the game because of the battle icons in your deck. Imagine how good it would be if you could play either Plasma Burst or a Medic every game without having to draw it or have it take your Action play for the turn while your opponent couldn’t. Now granted, I know that you are not actually playing Plasma Burst or Medic, and in fact one of the reasons Plasma Burst is a good card is because you can KO a low health bot hiding behind other characters.

The point is that you are simply leaving value at the table everytime you sit down to play a deck that doesn’t play a very high number of colored battle icons, whether orange or blue. As I said earlier, the decks that have performed the best consistently for me are those that focus heavily on the battle icons that support their particular strategy. If you are looking to try and improve the decks you are currently playing, take a look at your battle icons before anything else.