This Space
For Rent

Interaction with the Opponent

You could either let the opponent charge themselves up, or boardwipe and tell them to suck a dick.

Whenever I post a new article detailing the newest stuff to hit the western shores, you may notice that I remain lukewarm to a lot of it. Largely because I go by first impressions and I know better than to be overly-hyped by anything, but also because I’ve gotten a lot of the clans gimmicks and flaws down to a science, although the G Boosters are doing well to fix most of the problems.

The biggest reason for it however is that I habitually compare whatever comes out of the packs against the deck that I main: Kagero. One build of it specifically. I shouldn’t be so cynical really, since I understand how each one can win. But it’s not hard to see that decks these days win either through a hand the opponent cannot surpass by plussing, or huge-ass columns that are near un-guardable. However, almost nothing that comes out these days motivates me to buy packs or even go online. Because I cannot in good faith justify any of it compared to what I have currently.

The reason for it is thus: it’s reasonably easy to shut down most of these things by eliminating their combo pieces.

I played what I played primarily for the fact that they were unfair by design and I’m selfish. Every game is selfish: there can only be one winner. I do what I can to make sure that winner is me. I know it gets me a lot of flak: the primary response from most of the people at my locals is “Of course you won, you play the X”. I’m not going to stop for you though. I play hard because it’s the only way it justifies the effort I put into Vanguard in the first place.

Almost any deck these days that pump columns up tend to require some specific formation to work, such as Neo Nectar, and can in some cases be even more restrictive than that due to lack of ways to reliably draw the key cards. And if anything requires a certain something being already there when you do, it makes more sense therefore to try and eliminate whatever’s causing you problems or will foreseeably cause you problems later. The only REAL exception I can think of from the top of my head is Sanctuary Guard Regalie, since the Vanguard alone is responsible for columns and works with basically anything. And new Altmile since he won’t require the perfect field right away.

Moving on to cards that seek to gain advantage through number of cards, the gap can be closed by anything that can take as many cards away as they gain. I often find that decks that seek to gain hard advantage as a primary strategy lack truly heavy hitters that bring pressure. Yes, I know Swiss-Army play between columns and card advantage is Neo Nectar one-oh-one, and so does something like G Shadow Paladin with Grosne, but again, they need to be alive when you Stride, and that’s begging for a retire effect to the face.

One of Vanguard’s flaws, to some people, is the total lack of interaction each player gets from each other. There is almost nothing to stop the opponent from pulling off whatever strategies they use, and on top of this, there is no penalty involved by attacking since you’ll gain some benefit all the time, either card advantage or more damage, Hagakure and Blister and their ilk being the exception. In this kind of game, it is therefore on paper more appealing to use Kagero and any similar clan focused on disrupting an opponent. Anything that can get rid of a problem permanently is certainly more appealing given it’ll only need to be gotten rid of once. On top of this, while there is nothing to take specific cards away from the opponent at leisure, what must be kept in mind is that there is no card that can do the job of the entire deck, especially not rear-guards. If it is possible to take away half, or all of the combo pieces necessary, you can result in a situation where using RG-reliant cards such as Lambros is unfeasible, or at the very least, its potency is castrated. If anything is setup reliant but cannot search its pieces, it’s also chance reliant.

That’s one of the leading reasons I’m not fond of gearing a deck towards dependency on rear-guards when its main strategy is disruption of RGs itself. I briefly considered Dragon Monk Gyokuryu for my own deck but eventually decided against it since its instances of usefulness got outweighed by the situations where I wouldn’t really want it. Not over my other stuff. See, the more you need to depend on something, the more it will sting when things don’t go as planned or it gets disrupted. Every new factor you introduce brings a new uncertain element to the deck, so unless rear-guard dependency was the aim of the deck from the beginning and it can comfortably accommodate it, you tend to be better off with anything that can fuel your primary gambit before you add anything token. Then again, I’m not sure I want to keep using Neoflame. I could run 10k G2 beaters to justify him instead I guess.

Well, I say that, but if the other builds of Dragonic Overlord “the X” are anything to go by, you have to retire to fairly ridiculous extremes to truly get anywhere. I honestly do think that the reason it fell out of favour with so many people was because it simply couldn’t kill enough things to actually address whatever was about to set the nuke up in its face. Most of them tend to be bland and vanilla in design when they really can’t afford to be, so whoever was playing the Overlord just used skills to compensate for what was lost and kept going. That’s why I use Blademaster as my fail-con instead of the Great: sometimes what can be gained now will provide a fuck-ton more long-term benefits compared to what can be gained a bit later, and the Zahm/Sadegh engine is far too fucking good to pass up.

I am a big believer that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth shoving into your opponent’s face for over and over again. A deck really should not attempt to try and juggle several strategies at once unless it was designed for two purposes in mind from the beginning, when one single goal streamlined and polished is harder to trip up, especially when it isn’t reliant on anything to function properly.

And yes, I know that setup-reliant decks can still take a win from time to time, and can sometimes go reasonably toe-to-toe assuming both sides follow the same common sense rules, but people in Vanguard tend to not be rational. They rationalise, but that’s fundamentally different from using solid facts to establish what works. I don’t think token Stand Triggers in your deck is a bad idea. I KNOW.

Tell me about your non-successes with Kagero in an attempt to prove me wrong at saikyocardfighter@outlook.com