Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-192.107.46.241-20130703015436/@comment-9234979-20130703022855

1. Cube farming is a way to build up your blue battle cubes, which you must spend in order to fight bosses. There are several ways to do this during an event. Firstly, scan for bosses on your own. When you find one, attack it. You can choose spend 1, 2, or 3 cubes on your attack, with 2 and 3 leading to increased multipliers on the damage you can do. Early in the episode these bosses will be so weak that you can kill them with one cube. This means that you are the person who starts it, you're the MVP (did the most damage), and you're the person who finished it. Later on, with tougher bosses, you will work with a team to kill it. The finisher of any boss gets a blue battle cube as a reward. So even though you spend a cube in this one-cube-kill situation, you get one back, and so you break even cubewise. Meanwhile you get other rewards such as medals, pink energy cubes, and episode points. But since you also get a free blue cube every hour, the automatically regenerating un-storable kind, you can spend each of those on one-cubing a boss and get a storable cube to keep. So in this way you gain storable cubes.

Also, sometimes you run into a Level ??? boss when you're out scanning. Instead of Level 1 or 4 or 7, its level is ???. These give different rewards than normal. You get a blue cube for starting, one for MVP, one for finishing, and one for something else, maybe just participating. So even though you spend one cube to attack it, you get four back. If you used an auto-regenerating unstorable cube, then you have earned 4 storable cubes. But it's a good deal even if you have to spend a storable cube - you still get three back.

And you can also hang out in the Boss Encounters screen where boss help requests queue up. If you can find a boss whose health is within your ability to one-cube kill him, you will get the finisher reward of a blue cube. If you used an auto-regen blue cube to attack, you have come out ahead by gaining a storable blue cube.

Also, as you reach rank thresholds as you accumulate rank points, you get rewards, including 2 or 3 blue battle cubes among other things.

So that's how you build up your blue cubes. I think when people are talking about farming, they are mostly talking about scanning and one-cubing their own bosses for the most part, and effectively converting unstorable auto-regen cubes into storable ones.

As the event counts down, you want to use your blue cubes to kill as many bosses as possible to gain as many episode points as possible so that you can get the rewards listed in the Episode Rewards screen, such as bot cards, alt cards, weapon cards, cubes, medals, transmetals, etc. So you want to farm as many cubes as you can.

2. Only matching cards can be transcanned together. Level 3 Starscream bot card can only be transcanned with Level 3 Starscream alt card. Level 4 Starscream bot card can only be transscanned with Level 4 alt card. In some cases, you will get a Level 4 card outside of an episode, but then get another Level 4 card of that same transformer during the episode, but if one of them is a non-episode card and the other is an episode card (it will say so in parentheses), you can't transcan them together. Also, it doesn't matter if you use a Level 3 Starscream as upgrade fodder for a Level 4 Starscream. It doesn't give a different effect than, say, a Level 3 Optimus would if you use that as upgrade fodder instead.

As you build a more and more powerful deck over time, naturally your weakest members will fall out of your starting lineup even if they are transcanned. Hang onto them for a while because some events give bonuses for all-Autobot or all-Decepticon decks. And while a given transcanned R3 wouldn't make your best bipartisan deck, it may still make your best single-faction deck. After a while though they won't even make a single-faction deck because they've been made obsolete by stronger cards, whether higher level R cards of the very same transformer or of any other transformer. At some point their stats just aren't enough for them to get used. I have yet to sell any of mine or use them as upgrade fodder, but there may come a time when I'd rather have more open slots than continue to let them be taken up by dead weight. No practical reason to keep them.

It's perfectly fine to use an R4 Starscream and an R3 Starscream in the same deck if they happen to be two of your most powerful cards. There's no conflict or anything. The bot on the card doesn't really matter. All that matters are the stats. So you could have a deck of all Starscreams if that was the way it worked out and that was the best team you could field.