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Earlier this month, while waiting for the Energon Invitational to come up at Pax Unplugged, one of our locals Scott, who likes to play goofy decks brought a truck deck to our weekly game night. Scott will self admit that he likes noncompetitive decks. Sometimes he brings something that can inspire the shell of a competitive list. Scott’s list had starter prime, Ironhide, hound, and Kup. Yup, his Kup lyfe was in full effect on this one. Scott’s deck inspired me to create Truxs and Buxs, patent-pending. I still don’t know if this deck is for real, or is it just a meme?
As you can imagine his whole deck was revolving around Team-Up Tactics and 4-Wheel Drive. While Scott’s deck was a ton of fun to play, it got me thinking about the truck tribal archetype and whether or not it was actually any good. After that casual night at our local game store, Scott asked me to think about a competitive deck for the archetype. I have to admit the idea of many pumps such as 4-wheel Drive, Head-On Collision, The Bigger They Are, Leap Into Battle, etc… got my head spinning around the possibilities.
During Wave 3 EIQ season I had really started to play around with General Optimus quite a bit. Neil had been working with Scott Landis over at VectorSigma.info in regards to Prime and how a 3 wide control deck would be best suited for a field of Blaster Aggro and Bug Aggro. Scott would later release his sphere’s article and we’d have him on our Pod to discuss those spheres. From that conversation, we started to realize the power of a mixed pip, or as it’s come to be known, a control archetype in the Transformers TCG.
When I started thinking about a truck tribal deck, I brought it up with Neil and his very first statement was to me, and I’m paraphrasing here “Wave 3 Optimus is the best truck in the entire game.” As I thought about it with Neil and started looking through Wave 4 spoilers, I was having a hard time arguing the point. It would synergize nicely with the Focus on Prime. Prime could also flip for value from his heavy defense side with head-on collision, and 4-Wheel Drive.
At this particular time, Neil and I were convinced that a 3 wide control archetype would dominate the EI and we’d have to play through a ton of Shockwaves and Sabotaged Armaments. To me, that meant we had to get the value off of the bots and flips because item play was going to be severely limited by wave 4 actions and hand disruption is going to be prominent.
Aggro decks in Wave 4 become extremely draw dependent. We can no longer fish for our pump spell, RIP Press The Advantage. The best way to help withdraw dependencies is to create redundancy in the decks. Truxs and Buxs have quite a few different cards that are similar to each other. The
se redundancies mean that we can find incremental value from the synergies of the bots in play. Additionally, since I felt the deck needed to be predominately orange, and because we were not going to have great access to ranged characters, we were going to have to find ways to get creative with direct damage and sheer overwhelming combat damage.
Well obviously Powertrain isn’t actually a train, but he’s a Truck! While General Optimus (Wave 3) is a great enabler of Bold and Tough, he was quite literally only half of the equation. With Powertrain on board, we can rock and roll to the tune of Bold two right out of the gate. With an EV(Expected Value) of 2.8 with Bold 2, our littlest trucks are happy to swing for 5-6 damage without any card assistance. This tactic on the opening turn is okay, but I would argue this is one deck that most likely wants to play on the draw. This is certainly not the largest turn one deck out there, but it’s respectable for using only a 4-star bot to get it done.
Playing on the draw for this deck is advantageous because we can get prime into the correct mode to bolster our off-road patrols, and we can suit up one of our patrols out of the gate. Our opening attack would be with Highjump or Mudslinger, hopefully with either a Head-On Collision, or a 4-Wheel Drive, but in a worst-case scenario we can slap down a Noble’s Blaster, Erratic Lightening, or even Grenade Launcher. This gives us an opening Salvo of nearly 10 attack. Not bad for a 4 star!
While this deck has Blue Pips, and they can certainly bail us out, we are really aiming to suite up General Optimus Prime and Powertrain. Powertrain contains that all-important leader trait. Putting a Matrix on Powertrain keeps our utility slot open on General Optimus for those ever-important Energy Packs. With Powertrain having Stealth and the team being wider than most teams, it makes killing Powertrain very difficult. The goal of this deck is to continue to push out as much damage and offset as much damage as necessary. Composite Armor is an on-color upgrade that does the job very well. Although an argument could be made that Forcefield is a pure upgrade on defense here. It would most definitely be considered for my sideboard.
Fighting Sabotaged Armaments is certainly difficult to play around. SA is a very powerful card that completely shuts off many of the weapons played in the game. Truxs and Buxs as a whole have a couple of great strategies to combat the menace. First, if you are holding multiple upgrades and your opponent has a face down secret action, and you know SA is in the deck, you probably have to consider not playing a weapon this turn in favor of either armor or utility that can be helpful instead.
This deck can still win through SA, by simply maximizing the pump spells played each turn. Additionally, if you absolutely must play a weapon and your opponent is holding a face down secret action, you most likely have 2 attacks in that scenario, since we are wider. When we are going to attack with two bots, don’t put all of your proverbial eggs into one basket. Prime is a monster, even without a weapon. So put the weapon on Power-Train, and boost Prime. If your opponent has SA great, they weaken Powertrain, while Prime punishes them.
You can view the list at FortressMaximus.io here: Decklist