This is the fourth and final part of our look at Black pips and Seekers (specifically Thundercracker and Nova Storm) in Wave 4 of the Transformers TCG. I’ve been playing around with this deck since launch, tried it out on multiple opponents and in various configurations. I’ve tested it locally at home with a variety of decks now – both Blue and Orange – and feel ready to call time on this project and move on to the next.

Before we do that though, I’d like to give a summary of the two focal characters, and give some general observations about playing a pure Black deck these last few weeks.

Want to read the whole thing from the beginning? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Done? Cool.

Summary – Characters
Whilst both seekers are Black-centric Decepticon planes, I feel like they play differently and will have different roles in the game going forward.

Let’s briefly talk about how these two fit in.

Thundercracker
Ultimately this project has been centred around Thundercracker; it was the article that revealed him that informed the direction of this project and the resulting deck, after all. I’d like to bring us back to this quote from Ken Nagle:

“Sergeant Thundercracker is a new archetype all by himself.”

… and he ain’t kidding, for one painfully clear reason: Thundercracker punishes you for every non-Black card you play.

During the course of this project I’ve seen a lot of my friends play around with Black pips in other decks. In many of these decks, when they talk about Black decks they are actually talking about Blue/Black decks, rather than near total Black. That’s mostly because they are playing decks that benefit from having particular Black cards – usually mercenary-enabled cards in decks that feature Octane, Lockdown, Nightbird, etc. Characters like Soundblaster are also finding themselves running Black cards, because there are Black pips required for Soundblaster‘s abilities. These decks tend to treat Black the same way most other Blue decks treat Orange or blank cards – they are just off-colour cards that feel necessary for their decks.

However, Thundercracker is different from these setups. He doesn’t require just one or two Black pips in order to work; his bot mode ability is only worthwhile if he is flipping a substantial amount of Black pips, and if you flip to his alt mode and the revealed card is not Black, it might be considered a wasted flip. You can certainly bypass that restriction by using Plan or Plan-like effects like that of Incoming Transmission; but then you’re having to spend an action to do that, and you could be using that action to do something else. The reveal is still nice – revealing a Sturdy Javelin kind of sucks, but at least you know you’re getting three further cards and can plan for it still. Never forget the worth of just knowing what you’re about to flip.

Thundercracker‘s stats are very good – probably the best around for his star cost. If you’re not running a Black deck though, taking him is basically on par with taking Wave 1 Slug but with the Ranged trait; not entirely a poor pick, but I think most decks could find a better choice in the 9-star category. Take Triggerhappy, a Wheeljack or Ironhide instead.

Thundercracker wants Black more than aggro bugs want Orange; he punishes you even for having plain White cards in your deck. I fear Thundercracker will only be seen in this very restricted, pure Black setup; but within that setup he is the star player. An appropriate spot for a Rare character card.

Nova Storm
At the start of this project I was relatively dismissive of Nova Storm; sitting next to Thundercracker she felt a bit wanting and whilst she could arm herself with a Black upgrade for some tasty Pierce 3 and damage moving when she flips to alt mode, she looks like the weaker one in the party. Who needs Pierce 3 when you could potentially hit 5 Black pips on the attack anyhow?

Except… Nova Storm is pretty good. I ran her in a release day sealed alongside Sights and Sandstorm and that worked out rather well; and I’ve seen her partnered with a lot of other bots in other lists since. She’s appeared in lists that have done well in actual competitive tournaments, which is rather exciting.

She’s got just the right stat line for her star cost. Whilst Pierce 3 is a little redundant if you’re flipping 5 Black, she can still arm herself with a weapon so that ceiling is a bit higher. A Nova Storm with a Crowbar only needs 4 Black to hit 7 Pierce 7 after all, and that gets higher when you start playing Calculated Strike or Opportune Offensive on her.

Plus, unlike Thundercracker, you don’t need to be running an entirely Black deck; you just need a few Black upgrades, and there’s plenty of those to pick from depending on what type of deck you’re running. Pierce 3 is much nicer when you’re running mostly Blue; I hope and expect to see more of her as the wave continues.

Black
An entirely Black deck is something that felt completely barmy in Wave 3 – the cards were so utterly lacking and there was such a sparse selection that the very idea of running just Black was a bit of a non-starter. I don’t think I knew anyone who gave it a go, except perhaps at the end with Devastator (and even then, it didn’t go so well).

Wave 4 changed things significantly, with Black being the most common pip colour amongst the new cards. The cards introduced in this set have started to inform us how Black might be intended to be played, and some of the cards that were included sync with a pure-Black strategy in interesting ways. I’d like to highlight some cards that I have found particularly interesting whilst playing this deck:

Increased Durability and Minor Medic Kit
I think a lot of strategies can be boiled down to an offensive plan and a defensive plan, even if the defensive plan is ‘kill them faster than they kill us’. For Black, part of the defensive plan appears to be just keep adding health.

This tracks with a character like Thundercracker having such a high health stat, but Wave 4 also introduces two new upgrades: Minor Medic Kit and Increased Durability.

The cards fit different upgrade slots so can be happily played on the same character. Thundercracker with both makes for a terrifying 20 health. Even a lowly micromaster becomes less than trivial with one or two of these upgrades.

It makes sense for Black to have its own defensive plan; Black lacks the ability to lower incoming damage like Blue, and lacks the outgoing damage output of an Orange deck, so having something like +Health offsets Black’s shortcomings.

Increased Durability and Minor Medic Kit have been very important in most of my games and have often been deciding cards in winning games.

Crowbar
I find this card fascinating because on paper… it’s absolutely rubbish. A Primary Laser that scraps after use? Why would anyone want that?

Except… I kind of see how it works in a Black deck. Obviously you get the advantage of the double-Black pips, but in a deck that is wanting to maximize its Pierce value, only adding +2 to your attack is kind of what you want. Earlier I gave an example with Nova Storm where you could add this to her and then expect to get 4 Black pips on the flip, but there’s other uses for it too, for example…

… coupling Crowbar with Fight for Position on Thundercracker can result in flipping dramatically high amounts of Black pips (especially if we hit multiple double-Black cards), on top of a slightly improved attack value. Every character starts feeling like Arcee.

You’re likely to take Crowbar just for the pips, but unlike Improvised Shield and Handheld Blaster that rarely feel good in your hand, Crowbar can actually work out. Plus the fact that it scraps immediately afterwards means it will find it’s way back in to your flips, increasing the number of Black pips you flip next time.

Swerve
All hail Swerve. All hail this beautiful, beautiful card.

I definitely hit a lot of Sturdy Javelins when Thundercracker flips to alt mode, so having a card that has both White and Black is very appealing on its own. Swerve also synergises well with Thundercracker and Nova Storm, letting them both fling damage at an attacker. Attacking either with only one health whilst a secret action is in play becomes a dangerous proposition. Even just adding the extra point of defense feels worthwhile. I’d definitely be on the look out for other teams I could use this card with; using it to ping damage to an opponent is fun, imagine what else it could do.

RR Disruptor Blade
Finally, a deck that makes good use of this card. +3 damage, and in this deck, no drawbacks or limitations. Nuff said.

General Observations
How could a Black deck possibly fit into an existing meta? I definitely don’t feel comfortable in thinking that such a deck would have a guaranteed place in a competitive environment – for starters, I can’t imagine how a Black deck could take on an Orange deck and survive. Black simply doesn’t have the tools to deal with a pure Aggro deck yet; it can’t reduce the incoming attack by enough not to be squashed. Whilst it does have the advantage of higher health pools, those aren’t guaranteed and the upgrades can be knocked off just as easily as Tough upgrades can for a Blue player.

I’m not even sure if it has a place in a meta dominated by successful Blue decks; I’ve certainly seen some success against well built Blue decks with Thundercracker, but it’s still resulted in some very close games when my opponents are using anti-Pierce tech like Stable Cover and Point-Defense System, or have high health values themselves, abilities like Safeguard or simply being able to bring a lot of raw damage to the table.

However, there are two really big reasons why I think you should have a deck like this built:

1. A Black deck makes for an excellent stress test for any Blue deck you are intending on building. For a Blue deck to be successful, it will need to be able to defeat an opponent in a timely manner even without Tough or flipping Blue cards; otherwise you’ll be vulnerable to a rival Blue deck that simply hits harder than you (or indeed any Blue deck with easy access to Pierce or non-attack damage).
   
2. This deck is incredibly cheap, and uses very few Rare cards. The original build I made in Part 2 of this project had exactly 3 Rare cards – all of them copies of RR Disruptor Blade. Every other card was either Common or Uncommon.
   
   I did bring in Rare cards during testing in Part 3; Opportune Offensive of course is a Rare card and one that worked very well. The other two – Bombing Run and Roll-Out – actually worked against the deck.
   
   The monetary value of this deck is FAR lower than almost any equivalent Blue or Orange deck. Those decks would need to bring in expensive cards like Peace Through Tyranny, Security Checkpoint, Energon Axe, Marksmanship, Roll-Out, Matrix of Leadership, I Still Function, etc. in order to make them work. This deck neither needs nor wants those cards.

There’s other considerations with the deck that I didn’t get into; the conversation in the community right now is very focused on decks that want to win using Daring Escape, and I never explored how this deck would deal with that card (I’d imagine in the same ways every other deck would). There are negative consequences of this deck too – a player who enjoys creating interesting decks with Blue might find it demoralising playing against a deck that effectively ignores every pip they flip and makes Tough more or less worthless.

Finally, my personal view is that Black isn’t competitive right now… but I’m not a competitive player, I’m a player who just enjoys playing with the mechanics of the game. What the hell would I know anyways? It might just not be Black’s time yet; just like Wave 4 gave Black more options than during it’s introduction in Wave 3, future waves may do the same to push Black as a competitive archetype.

Final Thoughts
In the end, I definitely feel like I understood what the original official article was getting at with Thundercracker, Planes and Black pips. What at the time felt like a weird mix of various undesirable traits and abilities bundled together, actually ended up making a deck I had a lot of fun playing.

I certainly haven’t finishing playing with the deck; I’ll definitely keep it around – because, again, really cheap – and tweak it from time to time. The deck I have right now is optimised ‘for fun’, not mathematically optimised to get the very best numbers possible, nor have I even considered trying to optimise it to take on an Orange deck (if that is even possible). I have lots of questions about running all Black too, like what are the probabilities of hitting just Pierce 2 or hitting Pierce 7 when you flip? Those types of probability calculations are way out of my skill set and better handled by another creator.

It’s time to move on though, so whilst this might not be the end of Black pips on this blog, it is the last of Thundercracker and Nova Storm. They can now enjoy their time by the sea in peace.

Until next time.

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In this series so far we’ve talked about theory and gone through cards. We now have a base mono-Black deck in which to play with – the question is, what cards will work in practice, what kind of pip colour ratios do we want, who do we want in our team, and do we want to have mercenaries*?

In this article, we’ll be trying out variations of our base deck with a variety of different teams, and switching out cards in our base deck. We want to learn what works well in a Black Decepticon Planes deck, and what doesn’t.

(Didn’t read the previous parts? Here is Part 1, here is Part 2)

*this wasn’t a question, this was four.

Disclaimer
So I figured I’d mention this before we start – I have been playing with variations of this deck already, as I was very eager to jump in and just start playing. For the first week of Wave 4, I was playing a version of this deck with Nightbird, utilizing the mercenary cards Dual Wield and Opportune Offensive. Chances are if you caught the second part of this article on social media, you’ll have already seen the deck I used. For those who are coming in late, it looked like this:

I bring this up because I already know a little bit about what will work and what won’t, because I already did some limited testing two weeks ago. It’s informed my choice of test opponent, and given me an idea of how I should expect decks to perform against it.

Test Opponent
Given that a Black deck is a new archetype, I want to initially test this against a deck it should theoretically do well against. Thus I don’t want to test it against an aggro deck like Bugs (I don’t see that going very well at all), but rather a moderately strong Blue deck. I have four already made and ready from Wave 3 – Ironhide, Megatron Living Weapon, General Megatron, and a Wave 2 Optimus Prime Battlefield Legend deck.

I’ve decided to use the Optimus Prime deck – it’s rather old, but relatively simple to pilot, with a proven track record in its time (The one I had built was based on Vector Sigma’s, as piloted by Daniel Arnold to second place at Origins 2019 – Deck List, Article). It’s also a ‘mainstream’ deck, unlike the decks I’ve made or Mondo Spanner’s General Megatron deck. Plus, it gives a Wave 1+2 vs Wave 3+4 type vibe!

A Black deck should be able to predictably and dependably take down this deck in a test environment, so long as it’s me piloting the Optimus Prime deck (I’m sure more skilled Optimus Prime players would do better). In all these tests, Decepticon Planes have gone second – results could quite possibly be different if they were to go first. Finally, Flame War never flips in these tests, since the Tough 1 is redundant and it allows Optimus Prime to get more direct damage cards.

Basic Seekers
To start off with I figured I’d try the basic deck with a typical, singular Decepticon in the third slot. I went with Blackwing – he hits well, doesn’t need flipping, and has reasonable defensive stats. He doesn’t get in the way of what we’re trying to do.

Team: Sergeant Thundercracker, Nova Storm, Blackwing
Deck changes: -1 Decipher, +1 Plunder*

*based off the base deck I presented in Part 2.

Result:
After several test matches, this version of the Black deck can not break through Optimus Prime. It often feels like it doesn’t have enough Black, and I was able to pilot the Optimus Prime deck to victory every time I tested this team out.

We can definitely do better than this.

Verdict: Failure.

4-Wide Black Seekers
Next on the list to try out is the Air Strike Patrol. The two I picked were Nightflight and Tailwind. Both of these guys should stay in plane mode, there’s no real need to flip them into bot mode. The intention is for each of them to soak up all but the initial attack, letting Thundercracker and Nova Storm blast into Optimus Prime once he is exposed. The deck is the same; I’ve just changed this from 3-wide to 4-wide.

Team: Sergeant Thundercracker, Nova Storm, Night Flight, Tailwind
Deck changes: None

Result:
Despite having less Black pips… this setup performed much better than the three wide set up. Optimus Prime is forced to either go first, or he’ll be hitting into one of the smaller Air Strike patrol planes. Neither Hot Rod nor Flamewar have enough attack to take out a plane too, so by the time his team are tapped out, the larger planes are in a position to push a lot of damage into Optimus Prime, and still have three planes left when they become untapped. It’s entirely possible to take out Optimus Prime before the wheel turn too, if enough damage has been moved on to him.

It doesn’t seem worthwhile bringing in New Orders, btw. I don’t think untapping the Air Strike patrol is necessary.

Verdict: Success!

Bombing Run
Before we move on to Mercenaries, I wanted to make a slight change to the list. Whilst we’re running a lot of Black, my original intention of running damage moving cards has slipped a bit. Let’s try the 4-wide list, but this time with three copies of Bombing Run in the mix.

Team: Sergeant Thundercracker, Nova Storm, Night Flight, Tailwind
Deck changes: -3 Decipher, +3 Bombing Run

Result:
So in only a few tests, I’ve gotten to see the best and worst possible situations with Bombing Run:

• On the plus side, I’ve seen Bombing Run show up in hand twice and been able to shift 5 damage total from my team back on to Optimus Prime during a single game. It also showed up on defense.
• On the negative, it’s also showing up on attacks, and it once showed up when Thundercracker flipped to alt mode, thus denying the moving of damage.

Results otherwise were pretty much the same – easy win for four-wide Black planes.

Verdict: Success, but new card has mixed results.

Nightbird
Let’s move on to the Mercenaries; we’ll start with Nightbird. As I’ve already said, I’ve been running this build for a while so this one can be quite brief: it works pretty well, possibly not quite as good as the four-wide Planes, though. I do find that Nightbird‘s lack of defense makes her a prime target, and her alt-mode ability is very easily forgotten. It’s usually inconvenient to switch her to bot mode to get her bounty, if she’s alive enough to make it to a second attack.

The mercenary battle cards are nice, though.

Team: Sergeant Thundercracker, Nova Storm, Nightbird
Deck changes: -3 Decipher, -3 Special Delivery, -1 Hiding Spot, -1 Stable Cover, +3 Dual Wield, +3 Opportune Offensive, +2 Plunder

Result:
Previously tested, positive.

Verdict: Success

Mudflap
For Mudflap, I wanted to try something in particular – I wanted to test the build with Roll Out, and see if I can’t get all three characters to flip into alt mode, thus triggering a mass shift of damage from Thundercracker‘s team to Optimus Prime. Mudflap has slightly better defensive stats than Nightbird.

Team: Sergeant Thundercracker, Nova Storm, Mudflap
Deck changes: -3 Decipher, -3 Special Delivery, -2 Point-Defense System, -1 Hiding Spot, -1 Stable Cover, +3 Dual Wield, +3 Opportune Offensive, +1 Plunder +3 Roll Out (Note: This has now shifted from our original build by a significant amount.)

Result:
Well, the Roll Out trick didn’t really work out; it requires having the Roll Out in hand within the first few turns, because chances were one of Thundercracker or Mudflap would be dead by the time everyone was in bot mode. Being in bot mode meant being vulnerable to Marksmanship, and Optimus Prime sure loves his Marksmanship. I could not get it to happen at all; it’s a fun idea, but not practical at all.

Otherwise, Mudflap seemed pretty good. He lacks Nightbird‘s soft action-denial, but he makes up for it with better stats. I think I prefer him.

Verdict: Success, but Roll-Out is a failure.

Blue
So far we’ve tried cards without Black pips, and quite often they don’t feel great; they go against our game plan. Even if Bombing Run and Roll Out are useful cards in their own right, they stop us from just Piercing our opponents into the KO pile or triggering Thundercracker‘s ability.

However, what if we try inserting more Blue/Black cards? We already went through these cards last article – let’s put in all but the one we can’t play into our deck. Some of these won’t be very playable, of course. We’re also having to drop a few decent cards to make this happen – dropping Calculated Strike is a particularly bad move on my part.

Oh well, For science!

(We’ll continue with Mudflap.)

Team: Sergeant Thundercracker, Nova Storm, Mudflap
Deck changes: -3 Decipher, -3 Special Delivery, -3 Point-Defense System, -2 Hiding Spot, -2 Stable Cover, -3 Calculated Strike, +3 Dual Wield, +3 Opportune Offensive, +1 Plunder, +3 Steady Shot, +3 Smoke Cloak, +3 Point Position

Result:
scratches head a bit

Well, it continues to be successful, and the occasional Blue flip has kept several characters alive when they probably wouldn’t have before. It definitely feels less potent though, I had to work a bit more to get a Planes victory.

I’d probably not bother with the Point Position (which never felt useful), and keep the Calculated Strike.

Because the Blue flips kept Mudflap alive a little longer, I finally got to use his bounty… it let me Dual Wield a weapon on to him (which wasn’t useful, since he died the next turn).

Verdict: Success, but not convincing enough to go in this direction.

Orange
Finally, let’s see what happens when we steer things in the other direction – let’s bring into play all the Orange/Black cards. We’ll ditch Mudflap for this one and bring back the Air Strike patrol.

Team: Sergeant Thundercracker, Nova Storm, Night Flight, Tailwind
Deck changes: -3 Decipher, -3 Special Delivery, -3 Point-Defense System, -2 Hiding Spot, -2 Stable Cover, -2 Calculated Strike, +3 Combat Dagger, +3 Rock Toss, +3 Fight for Position, +3 Immersed in Shadow, +3 Wedge Formation

Result:
I’m not going to lie: this version of the deck is super flakey, but super fun.

Ditching fairly dependable cards like Calculated Strike and Hiding Spot in favour of Orange/Black pips and Bold seemed a bit odd. It certainly isn’t dependable – in the tests I ran, this setup actually lost a game (none of the others with this line-up did so).

However… it’s super fun, and low levels of Bold will inevitably hit maybe one or two Orange. In a traditional aggro deck that’s not much at all, but when each one comes with a Black and you’re very likely to hit double-Blacks as well, you end up hitting suped-up Arcee levels of Pierce damage.

Here’s a photo of a play from testing…

… this is Nova Storm with a Crowbar and Bold 2 from Fight for Position, and Thundercracker with a Combat Dagger for Bold 1. Nova Storm is managing to hit for Attack 9 Pierce 9, where as Thundercracker is managing Attack 6 Pierce 6, killing an undamaged Optimus Prime outright in one turn (everyone was tapped out at this point).

This is certainly not the most dependable version of the deck… but when it works it REALLY works.

Verdict: Mixed, but definitely the most fun version of the deck.

Conclusions
I tested 7 different setups with a wide mix of cards, deviating from the original deck by as many as 16 different cards. Whilst I could do more tests to try and really hammer down what the best cards are for this deck, that could be very tiring, and there’s only so many hours in the day.

A summary of my own thoughts though:

• Tailwind/Nightflight worked out quite well, better than the three wide versions.
• Mudflap is probably the most suitable companion for three wide.
• … but my Roll Out idea for him wasn’t practical at all.
• Blue/Black was fine but not particular fun and felt a little flat.
• Orange/Black was great fun but far less dependable.
• Bombing Run is probably not worth taking, even in a four wide Planes deck.

So what next?

Well, I had originally planned to attend a tournament yesterday… but after a very stressful week of work, realised my mind isn’t really in the right place and a quiet weekend at home was what I needed. Things happen, games are for fun – kind of a nuisance, but we’ll manage. Next week I’d like to write up some conclusions I’ve made about Thundercracker, Nova Storm, and the whole concept of Black Decepticon planes, and then after that we’ll move on to the next thing.

We’re nearly done.

Until next time.

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Both of the Seeker characters included in Wave 4 are strongly associated with Black pips; both their alt mode and bot mode abilities require cards with Black pips in order to work correctly. That kind of suggests we build a deck with mostly or entirely Black pips, but how do we do that? What does a Black deck look like? What Black cards are actually worth taking, and what are just weaker versions of other cards we see in mainstream Transformers TCG?

In this article, I want to take a look at the Black pip cards in full; the goal is to determine what cards would be suitable for a Black Seeker deck focusing on Sergeant Thundercracker and Raider Nova Storm. However, for those not interested in Thundercracker and Nova Storm, this will be a general opportunity to just go over the black cards in full and see where we currently stand. It will no doubt be useful for those building for Soundblaster or Detritus, for example.

This is the second article on the subject of Planes and Black pips. You can read Part 1 here, if you want to catch up.

Shall we?

Sorting Black Cards
There are 27 cards in Wave 4 with Black pips (nearly half of them!), and 17 in Wave 3. That’s 44 cards in total – if we’re to evaluate them all, we’re going to need to sort them into groups:

• Cards with 1 Black + 1 Orange pip.
• Cards with 1 Black + 1 Blue pip.
• Cards with 1 Black pip, possibly White or Green pips.
• Cards with multiple Black pips.

Generally speaking our expectation is that cards with just 1 Black pip will be better than those with other helpful pips, as that’s how Orange and Blue work. At the same time though, we might find powerful cards amongst those with more than a single Black pip; these are likely to be key cards for Black, the same way Peace Through Tyranny is for Orange and Security Checkpoint is for Blue.

Black / Orange
A card that has both Black + Orange, when flipped on attack, is a guaranteed 1 point of damage no matter what. Naturally such cards can’t be particularly valuable to play or otherwise they would require a star cost, or have some other critical limitation (e.g. being alt-mode or faction specific).

The current Black / Orange cards are:

Wave 3
Combat Dagger (Weaker version of Flamethrower)
Rock Toss (Limited version of Zap)

Wave 4
Composite Armour (new Tank armour)
Fight for Position (Weaker version of Supercharge)
Immersed in Shadow (Limited version of Stealthiness)
Opportune Repairs (Merc / Autobot card)
Terrifying Resilience (Tough 2)
Wedge Formation (Draw a card; extra effects for Melee + Specialist)

(I’ve limited these descriptions from the perspective of a Planes deck; Wedge Formation, Opportune Repairs and Composite Armour have further uses, but not for this particular project. Let’s keep them in mind for the future!)

With the notable exception of Terrifying Resilience (itself restricted to Decepticons), it would seem these cards are either not accessible to a Decepticon planes deck (Composite Armour, Opportune Repairs), weak for a Ranged only deck (Wedge Formation), or are indeed 2/3 weaker versions of regular Orange cards (Combat Dagger, Rock Toss, Fight for Position, Immersed in Shadow).

If we’re running plenty of Blue in our deck, at least 30 pips+, I’d actually consider Terrifying Resilience – it’s exchanging a Blue pip from Reinforced Plating for both an Orange and a Black pip, which seems a fair trade. In order to consider the Bold cards I’d have to feel like we’d need to see more Black pips in our attacks; that would have to wait for testing results. Wedge Formation would be interesting if we slotted a Specialist in to the line-up. Otherwise there’s not much of interest here, beyond the powerful pip combination.

Black / Blue
The Black and Blue combination is particularly desirable because Blue decks often will utilize Pierce anyhow. A deck that flips both Blue and Black flips well, both when it attacks and defends.

The current Black / Blue cards are:

Wave 3
Smoke Cloak (Weaker version of Reinforced Playing)
Steady Shot (Weaker version of Leap into Battle)

Wave 4
Opportune Offensive (requires Mercs, otherwise +3 Attack +3 Pierce)
Point Position (limited Bravery)
Unflinching Courage (Autobots only)

Clearly the value of Black/Blue has been identified by the developers, and thus the cards available to us are very limited.

Opportune Offensive is an excellent card; +3 attack and +3 Pierce to a Decepticon is an amazing effect; it’s nearly Press the Advantage levels of strong. Alas, it requires a Mercenary on our team to play. There’s a few characters that could actually take the slot – Deadlock, Mudflap and Nightbird are all in the 7-9 star range. Let’s put a pin in this card for now and come back to the idea of using a Mercenery as our third character later.

The other three cards that are available to us are all 2/3 power cards; we’d only consider taking them for the pips. It’d be like taking Handheld Blaster or Improvised Shield in a Blue or Orange deck.

Single Black Cards
There’s an awful lot of cards here, so I’ve filterd out clear 2/3 power cards, or cards that a Decepticon Plane can’t use:

Compact Shield, Dismantle, HV Electron Breacher, Repurpose (all Wave 3)

That leaves us with about 20 cards to consider. Let’s assess these by type:

Regular Actions
Battlefield Scan, Calculated Strike, Device Virus, Decipher, Involuntary Promotion, New Orders, Special Delivery.

Of these I think we can safely rule out New Orders unless we go with tiny planes. Device Virus is really hard to trigger and very niche as well, so that can be ruled out too. Battlefield Scan is a sideboard card at best; whilst Brave and Stealth are indeed annoying, I don’t think we’re at the point where this card needs to be in our deck.

I feel obligated to take Special Delivery, AKA Fling Mk II, since we’re focusing on moving damage. We’ll see how long into deck development it takes before I get rid of it.

That leaves us with some interesting cards to consider:

Calculated Strike: A good all-rounder, not used often but +2 ATK / +2 Pierce is a solid effect.

Decipher: This is essentially a Strafing Run against teams using secret actions, that has both a Green and Black pip. Might be more a sideboard card, but I must admit I like it a lot and would definitely take at least one, though it’s obviously useless in match-ups where secret actions aren’t used. Given that Stable Cover is a hard counter to a Black deck, Decipher let’s us punish an opponent for playing it against us.

Involuntary Promotion: I think this one needs to wait until it’s clear who is doing the most work in our team. I find it unlikely that Nova Storm is going to be our key player, but if she was then she might indeed get promoted back into play after a KO, just like the art in this card suggests.

I think Calculated Strike is a guaranteed addition, with maybe one or two copies of Decipher, whilst Involuntary Promotion is a maybe. I will also be taking Special Delivery, for my sins.

Secret Actions
Hiding Spot, Coup, Hijack, Stable Cover, Swerve

Secret actions got a boost in Wave 4 alongside Black cards, and there’s a good selection of them with some good meaningful effects.

Swerve is basically an auto-include here – Thundercracker and Nova Storm being able to fling damage whilst being attacked has a lot of potential, plus it’s a White pip card too. Even just going to alt mode to benefit from +1 defense is worth while.

Both Hijack and Stable Cover depend more on match up and will fall into sideboard consideration. Unless we’re convinced to take Mercs I don’t see Coup being included, and even then I’m not sure. Hiding Spot is always handy for diverting damage so you don’t lose a character (giving you a turn to move damage or add health)

We can partner Swerve with other secret actions, so it’s not always clear which one we’re using.

Weapons
RR Disruptor Blade, Smokethrower

Both of these have value for different reasons; though I don’t think you’d want to run both. Smokethrower would be good for a bot with a high attack value but little Pierce – the Bold 2 would help the bot hit the higher Pierce value. RR Disruptor Blade is good for a bot with some existing Pierce, but requires a boost in damage. I think we’re more in the latter category; I don’t think we need Smokethrower, but RR Disruptor Blade looks perfect. If we’re at a loss for Black on flips, we can reconsider Smokethrower; though we might prefer the Orange/Black cards Combat Dagger or Fight for Position instead.

Armour
Hazardous Shield, Point-Defense Sytem, Increased Durability

There is some logic to Hazardous Shield; it’s in the maybe pile. Point-Defense Sytem is likely in the sideboard – truthfully I don’t think our defense is good enough to warrant it.

Increased Durability though is an auto-include; Energy Pack was already a card that I’ve enjoyed using, so I’m quite happy to use a Black pip card with the same effect, but in a different upgrade slot. Being an armour does mean that it is vulnerable to Bashing Shield, but that’s still an action our opponent has to play instead of something more punishing. Thundercracker on 18 health sounds quite intimidating… especially for a 9 star character.

Cards that give +Health seem to be Black-aligned, as Increased Durability is one of two cards that give that effect. That makes some sense; Black decks need some sort of defense in lieu of Blue, so it seems the developers have given Black the +Health cards. At least, that’s been the case in Wave 4.

Utility
Erratic Energy Grenade, Metal Detector, Valuable Contract

There’s some weirdness in this lot. Erratic Energy Grenade is really fun but I think it’s best suited for groups of tiny bots; if we go with the Air Strike Patrol as our third (and fourth) then that upgrade sounds like a good choice. Metal Detector is just a bit on the unpredictable side, unless we combine it with Reclaim or some sort of Plan effect. Valuable Contract is another weird one; I think bringing star cards into hand is potentially powerful… but honestly I think this is an effect that I’d rather look at another time than in this particular project, so I’ll put that to one side.

Multi-Black Cards
Wave 4 didn’t just bring us a couple of Multi-Black cards, it brought us many, including our first ever triple-mono colour card.

Wave 4 brought us:
Contract Contingency, Crowbar, Designated Target, Dual Wield, Indestructible Sword (star card), Minor Medic Kit, Plunder (star card, triple-Black)

Indestructible Sword can be ignored; if we’re taking a star card it’ll be the triple-black Plunder. Dual Wield is mostly for if we want to take mercenaries; but the ability to pull weapons from the scrap and then place them on our mercs, potentially as a second weapon, makes mercenaries very attractive as our third character.

That leaves us with Crowbar (a half power Grenade Launcher, but the double-pip makes up for this), Designated Target (+2 Pierce could be overkill, but would pair well with +2/+3 attack weapons), Minor Medic Kit (another +2 health is okay), Contract Contingency (a weaker Leap into Battle, but also triggers a mercenary bounty where appropriate) and finally Plunder which fits our general concept by being a hand removal card. We should take all of these, even if only for the double pips.

Base Deck
Now that we’ve run through all the Black cards, and highlighted cards that look like they would be good for a deck like ours, it’s time to make a base deck. This will be what we base further decks on – we don’t expect it to be initially optimal, but we can start testing this deck and work out where to go afterwards:

Actions:
Special Delivery x 3
Contract Contingency x 3 (double Black)
Calculated Strike x 3
Decipher x 3
Designated Target x 3 (double Black)

Secret Actions:
Swerve x 3
Stable Cover x 2
Hiding Spot x 2

Weapons:
RR Disruptor Blade x 3
Crowbar x 3 (double Black)
Sturdy Javelin x 3

Armour:
Increased Durability x 3
Point-Defense System x 3

Utilities:
Minor Medic Kit x 3 (double Black)

Pips:
Blue = 0
Orange = 0
White = 6
Green = 3
Black = 49
Blank = 0

If we want to add star cards, that card should be Plunder (and can replace Deciphers). If we want to include a mercenary as our third, then we definitely should add Opportune Offensive and Dual Wield, trading out Special Delivery, and copies of Stable Cover and Hiding Spot. This base deck has no upgrade removal at present; we’d probably want to consider putting something in if we think upgrades will be a problem.

Speaking of which…

Mercenaries
I said near the start that we’d take a look at mercenaries at the end of this article. Having now gone through all the Black cards, it’s very clear that any Black deck would benefit massively from having a mercenary in the team. A mercenary would mean getting full access to Dual Wield – a very powerful card that let’s us play cards from the scrap onto a mercenary in addition to giving us a second weapon slot for a turn – good for Sturdy Javelins or even Crowbars. It would mean that Contract Contingency can potentially trigger a Bounty even if we don’t cause a KO on top of the +2 attack. But most importantly, it also means we will have access to Opportune Offense, arguably one of the most powerful Black pip cards we’ve looked at in this article.

We still want to try decks with just planes, but it would be worth looking at Deadlock, Mudflap and Nightbird as third members as well.

Of these, Nightbird is by far the most interesting. She’s the lowest in star cost, so we can take two Plunder cards, and her alt mode effect does not require her to flip in order to work. Plus her Bounty ability is novel and has no equivalent in the rest of the game.

If I have time I’d also try out Mudflap – his Bounty ability is pretty cool, and if we put Roll Outs in our deck, we could have Mudflap Plan a double or triple-pip card for Thundercracker to use to move damage away from himself or Nova Storm, and then Nova Storm can move a further damage. It’s an idea at least.

Summary
Black has definitely come a long way from the measely offerings in Wave 3, to the bumper pack of goodies that we have in Wave 4. The question now becomes, does this result in a constructed deck that actually works?

In the next part of this project, I’m going to try out various configurations of this deck against various Blue decks, to see if such a deck performs well against it’s intended positive match up. Should it work out, the next step will be to see how such a deck performs in a bad match up – pitting a Black deck against an Orange aggro deck!

Until next time!

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Top of my list of wants for Wave 4 was to see more plane support battle cards. There’s a handful of cards that reference the Planes trait in Transformers TCG so far, but very few of them have proven to be particularly useful, even in a casual gaming setting.

Wave 4 didn’t see any much in the way of further support for the Planes trait. The ‘plight of Planes’, though, did get a mention in an article from Ken Nagle that revealed a new Thundercracker character card: Nagle’s Notes: Sergeant Thundercracker

Suddenly planes – especially Decepticon planes – were being quietly aligned with the also maligned and unwanted Black pip cards.

Can I get a shrug of confusion?

This kind of weird and previously unheard of pairing is too curious not to focus on. Thus, the opening project of Flip Flip Bang Bang in Wave 4 will be focused on Seekers and Black pips. Not just one character this time – since this wave introduces two seekers and both require Black pips for their abilities, we’ll be focusing on both.

For those new to the blog, the goal here is to try and see how these things work and behave, not necessarily to construct something guaranteed to be competitive. It’s about discovery and exploration; we always hope to find something that could be good in more-than-casual play, but we’re not going to limit what we look at to what will win games.

In this opening segment, I want to look over aspects of Planes and Black pips, both what we know so far, and what has been discussed in the reveal for Thundercracker.

The Seekers Themselves
Before we talk about the ‘Plane tech’ that we’re expecting to include in this deck, we should talk about the two characters we want to focus on in this project: Sergeant Thundercracker and Raider Nova Storm.

Sergeant Thundercracker
The new Sergeant Thundercracker is a 9 star Decepticon Plane character card. His stats are surprisingly good – 4 / 14 / 2 in alt, 5 / 14 / 1 in bot. His attack values are pretty strong and on par with characters like Captain Ironhide and Wheeljack, but his health stat is the highest of any 9 star character. He is Ranged on both sides so Marksmanship, Armed Hovercraft and the new Sturdy Javelin are all great fits for Thundercracker.

Thundercracker‘s bot mode ability let’s you scrap a card from your opponent’s hand when you attack… but there’s a cavaet: the amount of cards you can choose from are determined by the number of Black pips in your flip. That seems kind of lame but consider this: very few character abilities let you choose which card to scrap, most let the opponent choose instead. The ability still requires you to have Black pips in your flips though; to use this ability, you must run Black to some degree.

His alt mode ability is even more Black-centric; reveal the top card from your deck, for each Black pip, move a damage counter from a Plane to an enemy. Note that it is reveal, not scrap, so even if this doesn’t do anything you will still know what that card is (curiously, the ability to reveal was first seen in Wave 1 Skywarp, another Seeker). The dream is to reveal a double or even triple Black pip card.

Moving damage is kind of interesting in that we haven’t really seen it much in competitive play, and I don’t think I’ve ever discussed it in Flip Flip Bang Bang, beyond Elita-1. We’ll go into the subject of moving damage later in the article.

Raider Nova Storm
The third and final Rainmaker, Nova Storm is a 7 star Decepticon Plane character card. She is among several 7 star characters revealed in Wave 4 that are associated with a pip colour; naturally Nova Storm‘s colour is Black. Her stats are 3 / 12 / 1 in alt mode and 5 / 12 / 0 in bot mode; she’s about on par with Barrage, trading one point of health for one point of armour (arguably not a good trade depending on how the deck is built). Like Thundercracker, she is Ranged.

Nova Storm‘s bot mode ability gives her Pierce 3, and her alt mode ability lets her move 1 damage from herself to an enemy… but both of these abilities only apply if she has an Black pip upgrade (Metal Detector, RR Disruptor Blade, Increased Durability, etc.).

Nova Storm is less interesting than Thundercracker, which I guess makes sense – she isn’t a classic G1 character, and she’s a Common not a Rare.

Partners
We’ll need to partner up these two with 9 star of other characters. For this project I’d like to stick exclusively with Decepticon planes, at least for now. That means we’d either need to use Thrust (doubtful), an 8 star Decepticon (Someone like Blackwing, who has no native Pierce but a high attack), or two of the Air Strike Patrol (which could provide 15 points of health between them). If she was more readily available, I’d have considered Slipstream.

Anyone we pick would want to be in alt mode most of the game.

Ways of the Plane
Whilst there haven’t been any new ‘plane’ cards in Wave 4 (EDIT: Except Multi-Missile Pod for both Planes and Helicopters) , the development team have strongly suggested they feel certain abilities are ‘plane’ abilities. These include:

• Direct Damage (most Planes are Ranged)
• Moving Damage (Slipstream and Bombing Run have previously focused on moving damage)

and now, at least with Thundercracker and Nova Storm:

• association with Black pips and Pierce.
• … and thus association with hand removal.

We absolutely do not need to talk about Direct Damage; it was a big part of a project featuring another Seeker. If you need a primer, you should check out that article.

There’s some interesting albeit situational actions that do Direct Damage in Wave 4, but mostly the only new addition I’m interested in including here is Sturdy Javelin (especially as Thundercracker is on it).

Moving Damage
“We’ve also decided to give black the “move damage” ability when possible since it’s a kind of piercing damage but in an evil way because usually your opponent must help you by damaging your characters first.” – Ken Nagle

The ability to move damage from one character to another is very interesting: because whilst it appears to be repairing damage from one bot and placing damage on a second, it is its own separate mechanic. Therefore, it bypasses any anti-repair tech (Torox, Needler, etc.), as well as bypassing any anti-direct damage cards (Captain Ironhide, Motormaster, Defensive Driving, Take Cover, etc.).

That second point is fairly important – in a game that is increasingly favouring ‘The Ranged Package’ of Marksmanship, Armed Hovercraft and possibly Sturdy Javelin, having a means of blocking direct damage isn’t a bad idea. Thus, having a means of bypassing that defense is worth considering as well. There’s ways to block moving damage like Bumpers… but who plays that??

Moving damage does have a downside though – you actually need to have damage on you in order to do the move. That means the abilities are useless in the early game, and remain useless if your plane dies before you can move the damage.

Moving damage has always been linked to planes, most notably in the action Bombing Run. Still, abilities that move damage see very little play in both competitive and casual environments; as part of this project, I’ll be trying to include as much damage moving cards as possible (within reason; nobody needs Fling in their deck).

Hand Disruption
“Having a hand disruption effect can be swingy but we’ve decided that hand disruption should be a black mechanic.” – Ken Nagle

This isn’t really a plane mechanic, rather it’s a general mechanic that has been newly associated with Black, and thus by association planes. It’s also integral to Thundercracker‘s abilities, so worth highlighting.

Hand disruption has already proven to be a powerful mechanic; it was critical to the success of Sentinels in Wave 2, and likewise Major Shockwave in Wave 3. It’s also been a key part of any success Soundwave might have had.

There are arguably two breeds of hand disruption – hand disruption that just kills the opponent’s hand (Shockwave), versus hand disruption that allows you to see what is in your opponent’s hand at the same time (Sentinels, Soundwave). Thundercracker is sort of half way between these two, but does lean more to the latter – you get to see some of your opponent’s hand and kill a card based on that. This matches one of the new Black pip cards in Wave 4:

I’m uncertain about leaning into this mechanic too much; I suspect maybe having the usual Security Checkpoint and Espionage cards is enough for an initial deck.

On top of the usual cards we want to remove such as combiner enigmas and other key cards, we’d also want to look at removing any card that blocks Pierce (Point Defense System and Stable Cover), since our deck is Black-focused and thus Pierce-focused.

Black
“Sergeant Thundercracker is a new archetype all by himself. He does a great job of highlighting the places in the game we want to push like Decepticons, Planes, and black icons that haven’t been in the spotlight enough.” – Ken Nagle

Wave 3 introduced Black pips, but other than a few odd cards here and there, Black cards were a novelty rather than an archetype in and of themselves. Even Blue/Black decks were’t that popular. There’s a few reasons for this; the first is that during Wave 3 there was a very limited pool of cards to choose from, and secondly players were still resistent to the idea of mixed-pip decks, considering a black pip card to be an effective blank card. In addition, the cards themselves were nearly always a limited version of an alternate Blue or Orange card. For example, Dismantle…

… is a much more limited version of Ramming Speed or Vaporise; it does a similar thing, but two-thirds as well since it can’t remove utility upgrades.

Wave 4 introduces a heap of new Black cards, in various configurations too: double-Black cards, more Orange/Black, more Blue/Black, a single White/Black, and even a triple-Black star card. With Wave 4, we have a much larger pool of Black cards to pick from so whilst some of these cards will still be two-thirds power cards, we at least now have options.

We can also think about ratio percentages when building a deck, since we have multiple Orange/Black and Blue/Black cards at this point. Our options include:

• Pure black
  (essentially the deck needs to think like an Orange deck – have ways of staying alive beyond Blue, but ultimately must be able to achieve it’s goal very quickly. Minimal native Pierce.)
• Orange/Black
  (as above, but might require more native Pierce if we want to get value from all the Orange and Black we flip)
• Blue/Black
  (uses Blue to stay alive, Black and other Pierce to get damage through.)

Blue/Black definitely sounds like the most appealing of these combinations, since Pierce is generally speaking a keyword preferred by Blue decks and Black just adds extra Pierce. I’d like to explore all three of these options in our project though; does pure Black or Orange/Black work?

We’d also want to experiment with the actual percentages of these colours; do we go in full on Blue/Black, then split the rest down the middle? A bit more to Black? A bit more to Blue?

Other Plane Cards
Finally, I should mention that there is one card in Wave 1 that doesn’t really fit the current Planes mold, but is special in its own way:

Aerial Recon is a psuedo-Focus card that introduced the mechanic a good two waves early. It doesn’t really see much play, and I don’t know if it really fits our ideas. It’s worth considering though, especially if we have a very mixed deck and don’t mind an Orange pip.

I should also mention one of my own pet cards that happens to be for planes:

I don’t think I’ll be running Crash Landing either; I run this with a Ramjet deck and I have never managed to get it to work. Whilst tempting and very Planes with the direct damage, I think it is better suited for a different project.

Both of these cards are also competing with new utilities in Wave 4, and I’d much rather play with those instead.

Next
We’ve laid a general idea of what we want to think about in this deck; the next thing to do is to discuss Black-pip cards in general, especially since the amount of such cards has dramatically increased in Wave 4. We then want to make an initial deck, and try it out and see how it does – from there we can work out which direction we want to go in.

There is potentially a lot of ground to cover on this one; Black pips are still a bit of a mystery, and there’s other new things linked to Black pips that I think we’re going to bump into sooner rather than later. We’ll see how it goes and where this project leads us.

Until next time!

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