Cosmoballers

## Overview

Ladies and gentlemen, get ready to witness the biggest, most cosmic event of the year! Bring out the mechanical pigskin and get ready to shoot for the stars with the Cosmoballers custom deck! This team of otherworldly athletes is ready to take on any opponent that comes their way.

The deck revolves around transferring actions to your minions, with payoffs for doing so. Sometimes the payoff is card draw, sometimes it's movement, sometimes it's recursion. There are actions that grant talents to a minion, much like "The Touch" from Changerbots, that you can transfer to multiple minions in a turn and activate their talents each time. The leader, Bomb Trady, can do this in the base-scoring phase for extra exciting plays!

### Details

#### General

* Name: Cosmoballers
* Author: Onassi
* Complexity: 3/5
* Version: 1.0
* Last updated: March 30, 2023

#### Special details

Made with AI art courtesy of Midjourney. Senri Kita was the artist used in the prompt.

### Breakdown

Cosmoballers have the standard 10 minions and 10 actions, with a total minion power of 30 and an average minion power of 3. Among their actions, they have:

* 7 play-on-minion actions: 2x Prolate Spheroid, Team Captain, Sidelined, Inter-Planetary-Ference, Big Dekes, Handoff
* 0 play-on-base actions
* 3 standard actions, 0 of which directly affect one or more minions: 2x In Position, Touchdown
* 4 actions directly increase a minion's power: 2x Prolate Spheroid, Team Captain, Sidelined\* (gives power counters but does not directly increase power until action has left the minion).

### Minions (10)

* **1x Bomb Trady (5):** Talent: Transfer an action between your minions to give the receiving minion +1 power until the end of the turn. Special: You may use this minion’s talent before a base scores.
* **2x Linecracker (4):** Look at the top two cards of your deck. Store any number of them under this minion and return the rest in any order. Ongoing: After an action is transferred to this minion, you may draw a stored card under this minion, or play one as an extra card and discard any other cards stored under this minion.
* **3x Large Recipient (3):** Ongoing: Once per turn after an action is transferred to this minion, you may move it to another base. Talent: You may discard a card to transfer one of your actions to or from this minion.
* **4x Sprinting Back (2):** Special: After you transfer an action between your minions, you may play this minion on the receiving minion’s base as an extra minion. Only use one Sprinting Back’s ability per action transferred.

### Actions (10)

* **2x Prolate Spheroid:** Play on your minion. Ongoing: This minion has the ability, “Talent: Give this minion +2 power until the end of the turn. Special: You may use this granted talent before this base scores”.
* **2x In Position:** Draw an action that can be played on a minion off the top of your deck OR transfer an action between your minions. Play an extra action**.**
* **1x Team Captain:** Play on your minion. Ongoing: This minion has the ability, “Talent: Place a +1 power counter on your other minions here”.
* **1x Sidelined:** Play on a minion. Talent: Place two +1 power counters on this minion. Ongoing: Power counters on this minion do not add to its power.
* **1x Inter-Planetary-Ference:** Play on a minion. Talent: Transfer an action to or from this minion. If it is another player’s action, you may destroy this card to take control of it.
* **1x Big Dekes:** Play on a minion. Shuffle a card from your discard pile into your deck. Ongoing: Once per turn after you play another action on this minion, you may transfer this action to another one of your minions and trigger this action’s on-play ability.
* **1x Handoff:** Play on your minion. Draw a card. Ongoing: After this action is transferred to another minion, draw a card.
* **1x Touch Down!:** Special: Play after a base scores where you were the winner. You may return up to two of your actions played on minions there to your hand.

### Bases

* **(22) Sunday Slamdown (421):** On your turn, you may transfer an action to or from one of your minions here to give the receiving minion +1 power until the end of the turn.

* **(19) Conditioning Camp (321):** After you play a minion here, you may place an action that can be played on a minion from any discard pile on top of your deck.

## Clarifications

* Prolate Spheroid, Team Captain: The talents are granted to the minions, which means that the granted talents can be used more than once in a turn if the action has been transferred to more than one minion.
* Sprinting Back: Even though only one Sprinting Back can be played per action transferred, you may transfer the same action multiple times for more triggers.

## Strategy

### General

Cosmoballers aim to pass their play-on-minion actions amongst themselves. They do this for a few reasons, the first and foremost being to take advantage of the talent-granting abilities of **Prolate Spheroid and Team Captain**. If Prolate Spheroid is on Large Recipient, the minion gains +2 power with its talent. Then, if the action is transferred to a new minion, the new minion may also use Prolate Spheroid's talent, resulting in a net positive power gain of +4. Secondly, there are peripheral abilities that activate when actions are transferred, such as **Linecracker** being able to draw or play a stored card, or **Sprinting Back** being able to be played as an extra minion from hand. These plays can be very powerful, especially if **Bomb Trady** uses his talent in phase 3 to activate these abilities before a base scores - this can result in a major swing of the board. Worth noting that all other 3 types of minions can hugely benefit from Bomb Trady, so use him wisely. Other actions, like **Handoff or Big Dekes**, can provide you with more resources if you wear yourselves out before halftime. **Touch Down!** can play a big part in keeping resources handy.

**Sidelined**, one of the deck's most potent cards, can safely add lots of power without adding any power creep to its attached minion's base. When the time is right, transfer the action off, and you'll suddenly have a lot of power on your minion. This can also be a great counterpick action against factions that focus on stacking power counters on their minions, as Sidelined can go on rival minions as well. Problematic First Mate with 9 power counters on it? No problem - Sidelined.

Your **Large Recipients** will be very important to manage properly - they are the only source of movement in the deck. Alongside **Sprinting Backs** they are able to sneakily converge onto target bases quite effectively, but if you're using its talent frequently you'll be throwing away a lot of cards that Cosmoballers find difficult to get back. Managing **Bomb Trady** and **Big Dekes** will be very important in sustaining the core of the deck.

Factions that can stall and destroy Cosmoballer minions will be effective against them. As mentioned earlier, they do generally have limited recursion and their play-on-minion actions are destroyed alongside the minions themselves, and they have very little protection. In these matchups, it will be important to have a partner that provides either great recursion or lots of protection to have a fighting chance.

### Partner Suggestions

Obviously, Cosmoballers will generally pair well with factions that have a lot of minion modifiers. They have a very potent double feature, **In Position**, that can grab you a minion modifier off the top of your deck, and many partners will love that. Another very interesting aspect of the Cosmoballer game plan is Bomb Trady passing an action to Linecracker, which can play a stored card from underneath itself. Factions with single cards that can result in big plays will love that interaction. Cyborg Apes and Nightmare Before Christmas are safe bets, but let's take a look at some more niche combos that are still very effective.

#### Published

* **Werewolves:** At this point it goes without saying that Great Wolf Spirit is kind of busted, and even moreso here. With GWS out, Prolate Spheroid is an Augmentation that can be passed around, Bomb Trady can pass multiple actions around in a turn, Sidelined can net 4 power counters that don't add to power creep; the list goes on. There are even a couple of powerful minion modifiers that Werewolves have of their own.
* **Kung Fu Fighters:** With a similar desire for doubling talents (with Expert Timing), Kung Fu Fighters **love** access to Sidelined and can even use it as a power counter generator in order to help pass around more power counters. Kung Fu appreciates the recursion that Big Dekes offers, and destruction actions coming out of the Linecracker/Bomb Trady combo can lead to some pretty devastating solos.
* **Mega Troopers:** With the amount of special abilities going on, including phase 3 Linecracker and Lightning Rescue (which can use In Position to transfer an action somewhere to start a chain), you'll keep opponents guessing as to what kind of power you can play onto a base right when they think they've scored first place on it. Black Trooper has lots of juice with all the specials, as well. Many Mega Trooper abilities require lots of minion presence, which can be easier to do with extra Sprinting Back plays.

#### Custom

* **Diamond is Unbreakable,** by Berryl: These two decks seek to accomplish similar goals, but Diamond is Unbreakable also controls opposing minions by using their modifiers antagonistically. They bring a lot of action transference to Cosmoballers. With two leaders that transfer actions between minions, it's hard to see how this combo could be bad.
* **Paladins,** by Sonus: While Paladins are simple and effective, they offer minion modifiers, extra power, and most importantly for Cosmoballers, protection.

## Author Notes

As a few of my factions are, this was a birthday faction for a friend who loves American football (and space). I know very little about football, so hopefully I've done this faction some amount of justice anyways.

## Reviews

Leave a review for your faction, or keep this open-ended so others can post reviews.

Review by Crossfire7

The faction's action transfer theme has potential, but needs work. There aren't enough reliable ways of transferring actions between minions to make the faction all that fun to play. And though I can appreciate extra play recruits, I think this faction would benefit more if they rewarded you for transferring actions to them. Recommended changes:

* Remove discard cost from Large Recipient's talent. Compare to "Skinny Minnie" from Truckers, who likewise can move to a base to transfer a pob and does not require paying any extra cost to do so.
* Change Sprinting Back's ability to "Ongoing: Once each turn, after you play an action on this minion or transfer an action to it, it gains +1 power until the end of the turn and you may transfer that action to another one of your minions here." This way, you are encouraged to play them before transferring actions, and you are rewarded for playing several on one base, as they can chain together. This also allows them to synergize nicely with Large Recipient, as you can chain multiple Sprinting Back triggers together before handing the pom off to Recipient, who in turn can move to another base and use its talent to pass the pom to a minion there.
* Change Prolate Spheroid's abilities to "Ongoing: After this action is transferred to a minion, that minion gains +1 power until the end of the turn. Use this ability only once per minion each turn. Talent: Transfer this action to another one of your minions here." This would make Spheroid great for enabling the pom transfer strategy, either by starting a chain of Sprinting Back triggers or allowing another minion to continue the chain.

Just these three changes would go a long ways towards making the faction more consistent and fun. 8/10 of your minions would have the ability to transfer poms, and you'd have a couple more poms that can transfer themselves in addition to Inter-Planetary-Ference.