Nagle’s Notes: Origins 2019 Battlefield Report - By the Numbers – Transformers TCG

Greetings!

I’m Ken Nagle, Lead Designer for Transformers TCG. Today I want to present more findings in addition to my previous article on attending Origins Game Fair 2019 and its tournaments.

Rise of the Combiners Constructed Metagame

We ran 4 qualifier tournaments that each sent 8 players to a final 32 single elimination tournament with $10,000 in prize support. These were Wave 1 and Rise of the Combiners Constructed decks with a 1 character + 10 battle card sideboard. I have almost all of the decklists from John Temple of Pastimes, who ran the qualifier tournaments. After a good 10 hours crunching numbers and adding formulas, here’s what I found from the 4 open preliminaries that ran Thursday, Friday, Saturday morning, and Saturday evening (this does NOT include the Sunday Top 32 tournament).

These numbers are probably not completely exact for a variety of reasons, but it’s still fun to look at them, and they illustrate some interesting things about our first big competitive event.

Cards

There were 6473 total cards played.

536 character cards
5937 battle cards
Number of unique character cards: 81
Number of unique battle cards: 146

Since there’s 108 characters to choose from, that’s 81/108 = 75% of all characters appearing at Origins.

Since there’s 172 battle cards to choose from, that’s 146/172 = 85% of all battle cards appearing at Origins.

Waves

3884 Wave 1 (60%)
2581 Wave 2 (40%)
308 Wave 1 characters (57%)
224 Wave 2 characters (43%)

This makes sense given Wave 2 has many more dependencies like full Combiner teams and the Tech Research + Superior cycle. Wave 2 certainly adds plenty of variety, though.

Frequency

Most Played characters:

24 Barrage – Merciless Insecticon
23 Insecticon Skrapnel – Insecticon Leader
23 Prowl – Military Strategist
23 Ransack – Insecticon Commando
23 Wheeljack – Weapons Inventor
21 Fireflight – Sky High Recon

Most Played Characters scaled by stars (this rating multiplies copies by the character’s opportunity cost in stars):

225 Metroplex – Autobot City
221 Optimus Prime – Battlefield Legend
200 Bumblebee – Trusted Lieutenant
184 Wheeljack – Weapons Inventor
161 Insecticon Skrapnel – Insecticon Leader
138 Ransack – Insecticon Commando
110 Optimus Prime – Gleaming Commander
108 Nemesis Prime – Dark Clone
105 Fireflight – Sky High Recon
105 Arcee – Skilled Fighter
100 Bumblebee – Legendary Warrior
100 Kickback – Cunning Insecticon
100 Jetfire – Air Guardian

Most Played Battle Cards:
1. 234 Improvised Shield
2. 214 Grenade Launcher
3. 212 Peace Through Tyranny
4. 170 Force Field
5. 164 Supercharge
6. 163 Bashing Shield
7. 160 Erratic Lightning
8. 156 Security Checkpoint
9. 154 Reckless Charge
10. 142 Handheld Blaster
11. 134 Press The Advantage
12. 125 I Still Function!
13. 113 Treasure Hunt
14. 108 Ramming Speed
15. 105 One Shall Stand, One Shall Fall
16. 100 Reinforced Plating
17. 100 Power Punch

Loneliest Characters – only one of each of these were played:
1. Autobot Jazz – Special Ops
2. Blitzwing – Relentless Foe
3. Bombshell – Decepticon Psy Ops
4. Devastator
5. Dinobot Swoop – Bombardier
6. Dirge – Doombringer
7. Megatron – Arrogant Ruler
8. Megatron – Decepticon Leader
9. Optimus Prime – Freedom Fighter
10. Skywarp – Sneaky Prankster
11. Skywarp – Teleporting Seeker
12. Slipstream – Strategic Seeker
13. Sunstorm – Fusion Flyer
14. Windblade – Combiner Hunter

Loneliest Battle Cards – only one of each of these were played:
1. Cybertronium Bow
2. Electrified Spikes
3. Recon System

Battle Icons

If we total up all the battle icons on all battle cards played, we get:
7142 battle icons
- 3183 orange (41%)
- 2149 blue (27%)
- 890 white (11%)
- 920 green (12%)

-Also, there were 659 (8%) battle cards played with no icons.

The interesting part here is that 890 white icons is around 11% of the battle cards, or between 4 and 5 cards per deck, which is not an unreasonable number to play.

Sideboards

Origins 2019 used a sideboard of 1 character with 20 stars or fewer and up to 10 battle cards. For game 2 and game 3, you can swap cards in the sideboard into the main, but your main deck still needs 25 stars or less and 40 battle cards or more.

Most Sideboarded Characters:
1. 11 Arcee – Skilled Fighter
2. 8 Ransack – Insecticon Commando
3. 8 Bumblebee – Legendary Warrior
4. 7 Bumblebee – Trusted Lieutenant
5. 6 Chop Shop – Sneaky Insecticon

With only 1 slot there’s the most competition possible to get on this list. Arcee wins by having innate Pierce against blue decks. The other slots are the Insecticons and Cars players deciding which characters to put in their sideboards versus their main decks.

Most Sideboarded Battle Cards:
1. 63 Force Field
2. 55 Cornered!
3. 48 Press the Advantage
4. 44 Ramming Speed
5. 42 Espionage
6. 41 Bashing Shield
7. 36 Enforcement Batons
8. 36 Photon Bomb

When the most played deck is Insecticons, there’s lots of orange battle icons, and Grenade Launcher is the weapon of choice, you’re going to need to max out on Force Fields. Combiners get slowed down from Cornered! in post-board games seeing that there were zero in main decks. Ramming Speed and some green upgrade removal round it out. Photon Bomb is impressive against a blue Combiner team like Aerialbots.

Observations

Now that War for Cybertron: Siege I cards have entered the metagame. There’s several birds-eye-view good things I can see:

There’s an aggressive slant to the metagame – Wave 3’s Secret Actions will almost universally slow games down.
The aggressive cards like One Shall Stand, One Shall Fall and Reckless Charge doing damage to your own characters can be turned into a benefit with Wave 3’s Battlemaster characters since they become powerful Weapons after being KO’d. All those Bashing Shields won’t help against Battlemasters, so in that regard, the metagame might get faster.
Watching players play, there’s a large upfront “threat assessment” required just to start playing your first turn. If your opponent isn’t playing an established team or have an obvious plan, your first attack and flip will have consequences for the rest of the game. This is double-compounded if you don’t know your own team well. Just the sheer number of additional characters in Wave 3 will make it harder to build, play, and play against all the possible teams. While assessing threats is a normal part of games, it seems like a particularly rewarded/punished skill in Transformers TCG starting on turn 1.

Conclusion

That’s a by the numbers tour of the preliminary qualifiers at Origins 2019. The metagame is changing in some interesting ways and showing a lot of transformative potential with the release of Siege I.

Until next time, may you find wisdom deep in the dirt.