Interview with Wizards of the Coast’s Drew Nolosco About ‘Titan Masters Attack’
Wizards of the Coast released the latest expansion to the Transformers Trading Card Game, called “Titan Masters Attack” (also called Wave 5 by fans, with five meaning the fifth set to support the game), on May 29th, 2020. Together with players Bob Murray and Jimmy Murray, we reached out to Drew Nolosco, global brand manager for Transformers TCG at Wizards of the Coast, and asked him some questions about the new cards and rules.
Manny: Let’s first talk about promo cards for Wave Five. Are you doing anything different with them now that retailers have to adjust due to the pandemic?
Drew Nolosco: One of the things we heard from store owners and fans was about the promo cards that were being released for Wave Five. Some store owners were saying that “we know these are promos that are given out when players play at our stores, but with covid-19 and curbside pickup, playing in our stores would not be possible.” We relaxed our rules of how promo cards were being released and distributed. They are not allowed to sell them, but can use them in creative ways or incentives to help sell Transformers TCG and their business. For the buying box promos, we send out to every store who signs up a certain amount. If you are a local game store owner and don’t have enough buying box promos, contact your WPN (Wizards Play Network) store rep, not customer service, and as supply lasts we will send out more buying box promos.
Manny: Last year Wizards of the Coast did a great job with tournaments at conventions, and product releases. What’s going to happen now for the rest of 2020, now that a lot of conventions are being postponed to next year?
Drew: There are two potential ways to answer this question. First, I could talk about what our various contingency plans are, like, here’s contingency plan A, and if this uncertain world we’re in starts to shape up like this then we’ll do that. And if that doesn’t work then we’ll do this next thing.
But ultimately I think that’s a pretty unsatisfying answer, [given] the level of uncertainty that the future holds. We’re seeing the covid-19 situation evolving rapidly, and most critically, differently in different areas of the United States and around the world where we serve up the Transformers TCG to fans. So, the other way I could answer this question and the one that I’m actually going to answer it, and I think it’s the true way to answer and that is: We’re going to evaluate the situation on a week-to-week and month-to-month basis, and make decisions that best reflect what [will be] in the best interests of safety and health for everyone in the community — from the players, through local game store owners, our distribution chain, people who work in our warehouses, all the way back up to our staff.
But I can tell you about some of the decisions we have made based on what we see already.
There won’t be competitive play at conventions for the rest of this calendar year for Transformers TCG. You and I, we both see significant numbers of conventions, both at the national and the regional, right down to the local are canceling in the interest of community health and safety. So, we’re not doing contingency plans like, “oh maybe there’s one convention in November won’t get cancelled, we’ll rush it there.” We don’t think it’s correct to serve an ad hoc experience to our fans, and kind of rush like, “ok, that convention can do it, we’ve got two weeks.” That’s not the way we want to put this experience together, so we’re just holding off on convention presence throughout [the rest of] the year; if something happens, you know, and late in quarter 4 it’s suddenly ok and a couple of conventions spring up. So we’re going to focus our efforts on what happens after that.
As for product releases, we’re also going to play a little bit of wait and see about that, because the retail community is rebuilding right now. Local game stores are going through a really tough time and “Titan Masters” packs come out Friday, May 29th. But different communities and retail stores are rebuilding at a different rate. We’re evaluating how “Titan Masters” do at the retail level and after that we’ll make some decisions on and when the correct timing is.
Bob Murray: I have a question about Stratagems. Villainous Spotlight and Heroic Spotlight really stood out to me. I was wondering if, based on the viability of the Blaster/Soundwave set, if that was the catalyst to incentivize more star cards in the deck because of the lack of star cards use being utilized.
Drew: That is a really perceptive look to why those particular cards and there’s a few others stratagems that also let you play for extra star cost. When we set out new mechanics in any game, we play the heck out of it and put our best face forward. When we put out our first set of star cards there was a lot of interesting stuff that was going in a lot of different directions. For example, Tech Research and other star cards may not see a lot of play because the power levels weren’t there for the metagaming at the time.
With Stratagems, we allow players with much more flexibility in how they build their deck and their team. We want to have a small portion, about 20% of the Stratagems, to really give you extra flexibility when it comes to star cards to feel like you are getting more bang for your buck there. Some star cards are obviously very powerful and you play them whether you use Stratagems or not. So there’s a mix bag.
Jimmy Murray: How concerned were you guys about the power level of the new cards, in particular with 6-star Ironhide that has no abilities from the Starter Set, and 6-star Outback that has two abilities.
Drew: So I’m going to break apart your question into two answers. The first part, let’s compare cards that were designed for bolstering new players with cards meant for players with experience under their belt. And there I think the power level equivalent doesn’t apply because cards in a starter deck are meant to teach you the basic parts of learning the game in a pretty clean manner. So although Ironhide is significantly less powerful than most other 6-star characters, that’s okay because his purpose is to teach you attacking and combat so it needed to be a really clean card for the Starter Set to teach families and kids, those who don’t have a lot of TCG experience, can have their first experience be groundable.
As for the second answer, let’s compare Outback to other 6-star release characters. We’re not trying to power creep, we’re trying to push out “wide,” and offer lots of additional strategies. Some of which may turn out to be any particular metagaming microcosm may be better or worse than others. By releasing Stratagem cards, it gives us designers and players an outlet for cards that may have been actually underpowered in the past, particularly when we first released the game. Orbital Strike is a Stratagem that boosts Autobot Cosmos for example. Cosmos was wonderfully designed, one of my favorite designs in the game but is kinda underpowered. His Stratagem card gives him an extra star of more power to the character, making his power level more balanced with the rest of the game.
Bob Murray: I’m a big fan of Combiners. Do you feel that Counterespionage card in Wave 5 may discourage players from using Combiners?
Drew: We tested Counterespionage against Wave Two Combiner style decks. And there were a couple of things that we noticed. Some of the most competitive of the Combiner teams that performed well at open level events, combine pretty rarely. They’ve used it as an alternative win condition. Stuff like the Aerialbots are really focusing on damage control for example. Manipulating which Aerialbots take the damage, how the damage is spread out, making opponents decks less efficient. The Optimus Maximus combiners we saw never combined in competitive play.
A lot of players really enjoyed Combiners. The Green Pip on Enigma cards make Counterespionage less of a “hard stop” and more of a “not right now,” and slows down some of the combining. We also saw that players with Combiners decks really didn’t want to combine very quickly. They want to do a lot of set up so the Enigma cards getting Counterespionage early is less of an impact because you can “green pip” it later in the game.
We do recognize that Counterespionage does serve as a check on Combiners and we are watching and there are more five or six wide Combiners we want to bring in the game so we will take into account cards like Counterespionage.
Jimmy Murray: I noticed that the Headbutt card is kind of a pun. Who can we give credit to that amazing joke?
Drew: [Laughs] I do not know for sure. As far as naming it, that was Matt Smith. Let me explain briefly how the design process works.
We design cards two ways. They are mainly mechanics focused or creative focus. In mechanics focus, the designers say we have a cool game mechanic and we want to build a card around it, we ask Matt Smith how would we match that with the Transformers IP? Hybrid pips originated that way, the designer team was looking for ways to have one-half step of granularity more than they currently could. For example, before, we asked what if we wanted to add half a blue pip without writing a lot of complicated text. They came to us and said that they found a way to add half a pip to a card by matching it to an alt mode which progressed to what we have in Wave Five.
The Creative focus way, we wanted to include a character or theme to the next wave and we go to the design team and explain we would like these characters to go to this set and if they can match the design. Tidal Wave is an example of that where we knew he was a three part combiner, and one of his alt mode is a transport ship. Transport ships have guns but they are not known for being bruisers so the design team took a look at it and said. What if the transport ship deployed other characters? And that’s how it was represented and additional oomph added to your team. And that is how we have Tidal Wave in his current form. He is my favorite character in this set.
Manny: Drew, every time I have met you, you always carry a deck with you in case anyone challenges you on the spot, and your team always changes with each set that comes out. With Wave Five out now, what characters are you playing with?
Drew: If we were meeting face to face, you would be playing against my Tidal Wave deck. My Tidal Wave deck has a couple of different ways that I can play it because of little characters that I can get deployed. That is what we would be playing if we met in person. I also have a Sky Shadow deck I enjoy playing and I have a silly deck that is into swapping heads
Manny: Thank you Drew.
