Vroom vroom.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Frenchie wrote this article before our weekly Wednesday night casual tournament. Without any collaboration, Joe played the same line-up against me earlier in the week (different deck, though). In this article, Frenchie explores his thinking behind the deck prior to the event, and then his thoughts about it afterward.
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To the new players who joined us, welcome to Transformers TCG and Wreck ‘n Rule! To our usual followers, I am glad to have you back reading this article! In this excerpt, I will summarize what is the Hot Wheels deck and try to update it with the new cards available to us through Wave 2.

Frenchie, what is Hot Wheels?

Hot Wheels is a heavy aggro car deck made with Prowl, Wheeljack  and another car (most likely Bumblebee). Its strength lies in its ability to untap the cars after delivering an attack. This strategy has three benefits:

• Untapping will let you attack one more time with your bot
• It limits your opponent’s chance to “two shot” your bot as you will untap it to the back line while sending his battle buddy forward
• You can set up what I would called childishly the “ultimate attack” with the following steps:
  • having all you cars untapped while all your opponent’s bots are tapped
  • flip Prowl to his alt mode to enable BOLD 2 for all your cars
  • roll over your opponent, GTA style

What has Wave 2 provided for Hot Wheels?

Quite a lot I would say… Here’s a list of cards I have added to my version of the good ol’ Hot Wheels:

• Bashing Shield: remember how frustrating it was to flip your Ramming Speed on attack or defense when you were looking for it to get rid of a pesky Force Field or Reinforced Plating? Here’s the solution! The green pip will let you hit it consistently in any games. Plus, it’s orange like the Ramming speed. This card will probably be heavily played going forward in many decks.
• Backup Beam: The Backup beam is to the Flamethrower as the Bashing Shield is to Ramming speed. However, you are trading the orange pip for a blue one. I chose to try Backup Beam to have more chance of giving bold 2 to my bots.
• Espionage: The Combiners are no joke. By the way, hats off to the game designers for providing us some quite unique “transforming” game play experience! Espionage is probably one of the key counters that would set your opponent’s Combiners quite far back if you hit his/her enigma. Hot Wheels probably does not need it, but Espionage will still be a “live” card which can disrupt your opponent’s plan (in doubt, call green if your opponent just picked up a card he needed lol).
• Confidence: This card will let you dig through your deck to look for your key combos. Plus as you start with only Autobots, you will be able to play another action! You will hit your Start Your Engine or Turbo Boosters with more regularity.
• Bumblebee – Trusted Lieutenant: First, he’s beefy: 14 hp and 5/6 ATK is quite a lot for 10 stars. Second, his bot mode lets you discard an action to draw two (basically a Pep Talk) on attack and flipping back to his alt mode is essentially playing a Brainstorm. That’s two really good action cards on a stick, folks. Playing another action on top of Roll Out or Start Your Engine is actually dumb and super duper strong…

Frenchie, enough talking, give us the deck list!!!

If you read that far, then here is your reward!

As usual, this is up to you to accommodate the deck to your meta! Tonight at my weekly event, I am expecting quite a lot of Combiners which is why I’m choosing to try Espionage. System Reboot can also get rid of your opponent’s enigma (or other green pips cards that they acquired) while replenishing your hand. You will also run out of steam fairly quickly, that is why I am also playing Backup Plan. Remember that if there no pretty good situation for playing these action cards, you can turn them into Pep talk with Bumblebee! There is 12 blues in the deck thanks to Roll Out and Matrix of Leadership (Bumblebee is even a leader! ). I believe that the blues could make the difference against any other deck that is trying to one shot my bots. This, although, is highly debatable.

Hot Wheels saw some good days early in Wave 1, but has not shone quite as much lately. So I hope to bring this tier 1.5 deck to my weekly tournament and have some fun with it! I will also start another set of articles called the Battle Log which will update you weekly what our local weeknight scene looks like! Stay tuned folks, and thank you again for following us!

Frenchie out, à votre service!

Emergency add-on…

So, it’s 2:13 am and I have revised a little bit my article so that it can come out for you folks on Thursday. However, I did not want to do an overhaul of it, and decided to just do this add-on. I was completely wrong thinking that this deck is not incredibly strong… This deck has improved tremendously and I actually felt bad playing it at our local tournament. I clearly made some of my opponents quite frustrated, which is actually not enjoyable for me neither.

Having played and competed in different card games during the past 5 years, I came to the conclusion that the weekly tournament is a place where players gather to enjoy themselves with the community after a long day at work, to have a breather, and have fun with friends. I will explain myself more in detail in the Battle Log article, but I will not be playing that deck again in a weekly casual tournament.