Hasbro was nice enough to send over a free box of goodies introducing me to their new Transfomers Trading Card Game. Opening the box, I found a starter set and couple of booster packs for the new game. Needless to say, I couldn’t wait to rip the Starter Set box open and check out these cards.

The first thing that stands out about the Transformers Trading Card Game is the size of the Transformer character cards, which are twice the size of standard playing cards and feature prismatic printing on the robot side of the card. That’s the other cool thing about the character cards, one side is the robot mode and the other side is the alt mode, think Optimus Prime as a tractor trailer or Ironhide as a truck.

The cards in the set seem to be modeled on the classic G1 incarnations of the characters.

The Autobots Starter Set has enough cards to get a two player game going. You get four character cards, Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, Ironhide and Red Alert. Also included is a deck of battle cards, these are upgrade and action cards that affect your Transformers and your opponent’s Transformers in different ways.

After looking through the starter deck, I quickly gave in to ripping open the booster packs. Each booster pack has one Transformer character card and seven battle cards. I like that you can quickly build your Transformer army through the booster packs. One cool thing about the booster packs is that the cards are sandwiched between two pieces of white cardboard, to both prevent damage and tampering.

I was excited to pull Mirage as my character in my first booster. Mirage has always been a favorite of mine since Transformers first debuted in the 1980s.

But where are the Decepticons? Thankfully, I pulled a Decepticon in my second booster, one of the jets, Ramjet. He’s no Soundwave or Shockwave, but I was glad to have someone in my character collection who wasn’t an Autobot.

I really like the oversized cards for the characters. It really lets the character artwork shine. And I’m excited for the possible potential Hasbro has of introducing even bigger cards for the truly gigantic Transformers like Fortress Maximus. I can only imagine how big the Unicron card would be.

The Transfomers Trading Card Game is available now from retailers. The Autobots Starter Set retails for $14.99 and booster packs retail for $3.99 each.