Today, we continue our early reads into cards that we’re interested in playing around with once we start cracking open those Siege II boxes NEXT Friday, November 8th.
RJ — Raider Heavytread
This might be cheating as Skytread is technically two cards, but in this case I don’t care, because I am super intrigued by this guy. Dreadwing was probably my favorite combiner to play in wave 2, the problem being he really only wanted to be paired with Slipstream. While Slipstream is a fine partner, it really limited the amount I wanted to play Dreadwing before it got too stale. Enter Raider Skytread.
This duocon is a combined 12 stars and with 13 stars left over, the possibilities really are somewhat endless. You could pair it with OPBL, or go four wide with something like Flamewar and the 8 star character of your choosing.
You’ll definitely want a bunch of card draw in here in the form of things like Work Overtime because his combine mechanic is similar to Dreadwing’s, though not as harmful. Going back to the OPBL suggestion, these guys are almost like the perfect partner for him because they don’t flip, so you can continue to abuse Prime’s flip ability to pull things back into your hand while setting up for his turn, or even Skytread’s combined turn. This guy looks like a lot of fun, and I can’t wait to try him out.
Kevin — Raider Caliburst
While there’s a lot of good uncommon characters coming in the next set, Raider Caliburst is the one who’s going to change the meta. In bot mode, this little guy is going to shut down draw decks. Did your opponent play Confidence to try to find that Start Your Engines? They take 2 damage. Inspiring Leadership? They take 3. I mean, what deck doesn’t run at least 1 Pep Talk or Work Overtime? And even when he gets KO’ed and switches to upgrade mode, he still keeps your opponent’s hand size in check while refilling yours.
Now, many of you reading this might assume that Caliburst makes the most sense with someone like Wave 1’s Shockwave (and he does make a great partner for him), I think he makes an even better partner with Lord Megatron. Because if you want to force your opponent to be going through their deck even faster than what they normally would be doing, then you need to be helping them with cards like System Reboot and Testify; thus they’ll be taking damage from Caliburst’s ability and setting them up for Megatron’s. Megatron even benefits from Caliburst being KO’ed, changing his ability from 4 damage to 7, which should finish off anyone who’s been suffering all the pinging damage they’ve been dealing with all game.
Also, if you don’t inflect and stress “Testify!” when you play the card, I’m afraid you’re doing it wrong.
joe — Raider Kickback
I currently do not have any interest in his alt mode side. His bot side is what I am looking to abuse as is probably everyone else. Raider Kickback is going to turn a black/blue bug deck into a direct damage + pierce race. Can blue bugs survive a full blown orange Oonslaught (foreshadowing)?
Editors Note: I have no clue what Joe is trying to foreshadow.
I will be looking to try Kickback1/Kickback2/Barrage/Raider Aimless. It will contain all of the usual refinements of a pierce heavy blue deck while adding in the appropriate black pips. Aimless is there to supplement landing direct damage during attacks to overcome the opponent’s ability to flip for defense, as well as dancing around Force Field.
If I had to choose a Merc to replace Barrage so I could make use of Opportune Offensive, it would be Nightbird.
brian — private greenlight
Greenlight was not a character that instantly wowed me when she was first revealed. Her bot-mode artwork, however, is really cool. She has some pointy elf ears and some sort of weird techno-magic pink energy going on. Intriguing concepts for my future fanfiction, but nothing that really wowed me in terms of building a list that uses her.
Then I started to mess around a bit with Sergeant Hound from Siege I. It was a lot of fun to play with the green-pipped “collection” upgrades to boost Hound up to bonkers ATK values, since it was relatively easy to collect multiples and since you could play multiple copies at once.
Greenlight doesn’t get quite as much raw ATK value from these upgrades, but she compensates for that by also being able to use green-pipped actions to supplement this. In addition, you don’t necessarily need to play those upgrades or actions on her in order for her to get the ATK boosts, which also opens up some more versatile plays.
Unfortunately, for much of spoiler season, we didn’t see any new green pipped “collection” upgrades or actions. The only card we had available until recently was Focus Fire, which increases Bold and primarily helps orange-based decks, which would work against the Tough that you want to stack with Extra Padding.
Then we saw War of Attrition, which finally gave us a stackable blue/green pipped action.
Now, I should be clear that you don’t NEED to use the collectible/stackable green pipped upgrades and actions, but it fits with the overwhelming attacks I like to try to build up to in my “for fun” decks. ANY green pipped card that you play on your turn will give Greenlight +1 ATK while she’s in bot mode. It’s also probably a smarter idea to just stick with an orange-focused deck and build using orange/green cards instead of blue/green, but this seems like it’ll be fun to try.
It should also be noted that her car mode is also intriguing from a defensive possibility. If you’re trying to build up those green pipped cards in hand, you can send her out with a decent Armor upgrade knowing it can’t be removed and that she’ll only suffer 3 damage from the first attack.
An early idea I have will be to pair Greenlight with Sergeant Chromia from Wave 3.
The goal will be to have both characters in bot mode, then flip Chromia to car mode, in order to play Extra Padding(s) to boost up Greenlight’s ATK value. I’ll then still have my action and upgrade steps to try to pump her ATK even further (ideally playing multiple copies of Attack Drone and War of Attrition). I wish Greenlight was one star less, so that I could also play General Optimus from Siege I, but I’ll be looking into potential 10 star characters that I could use. It’ll make sense to go with a third car (or maybe two 5 star cars) so that we can play with Turbo Boost and Start Your Engines in order to get multiple activations.
As always, keep your eyes on the Wreck ‘n Rule YouTube channel for our usual shenanigans. Also consider supporting us on Patreon, since the proceeds go toward helping us upgrade our recording set-up AND toward throwing some sweet custom swag your way! Plus, we now have merch available too!
Wreck 'N Rule 