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

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).

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

Waves

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

Frequency

Most Played characters:

1. 24 Barrage – Merciless Insecticon
2. 23 Insecticon Skrapnel – Insecticon Leader
3. 23 Prowl – Military Strategist
4. 23 Ransack – Insecticon Commando
5. 23 Wheeljack – Weapons Inventor
6. 21 Fireflight – Sky High Recon

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

1. 225 Metroplex – Autobot City
2. 221 Optimus Prime – Battlefield Legend
3. 200 Bumblebee – Trusted Lieutenant
4. 184 Wheeljack – Weapons Inventor
5. 161 Insecticon Skrapnel – Insecticon Leader
6. 138 Ransack – Insecticon Commando
7. 110 Optimus Prime – Gleaming Commander
8. 108 Nemesis Prime – Dark Clone
9. 105 Fireflight – Sky High Recon
10. 105 Arcee – Skilled Fighter
11. 100 Bumblebee – Legendary Warrior
12. 100 Kickback – Cunning Insecticon
13. 100 Jetfire – Air Guardian

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%)

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.

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.