This Space
For Rent

Deck Do Grow Old With Age And Die

I won’t fault you for not letting go of a deck. Just PRAY it gets a good renaissance if it gets on though.

There’s been a sudden increase in many old cards suddenly getting some new support in the hopes of making some if not all of those cards relevant again. They are however still bound by several established laws of what’s good and what isn’t as long as you know how to break a card down, so if they get anything, it had better be useful. And not, say, along the lines of Enigman Tornado, the expensive piece of wank.

Anyway. I bring this up because I know that many people including myself hold onto decks in the hopes of new support that can make them the trains of death that they once were (if they ever were, anyway). I write this in order to basically tell everyone not to get their hopes up and not get sucked into the hype. It’s how I managed to not waste money and how I’ve kept winning.

Take Majesty Lord Blaster for example (no thanks). I mentioned in my review of him last week that he hadn’t aged well. And it’s not just because of MLB gaining a Crit and seemingly not much else, because that isn’t the REAL problem (so I can tell at the very least Nanya wasn’t paying attention to my Crit-gaining VG article in his review of it). No, it’s because since then a butt-ton of cards came out that does his job except better.

Alfred Exiv is one such card. He hits harder than MLB, doesn’t minus as hard as MLB, and doesn’t require as much liberties in deck design as MLB. But people still keep combining him with Thing Saver Dragon “because he fuels soul”. But…so can Alfred Exiv. Riding over Legion is a thing you know.

What’s wrong, exactly, with having good cards all the time? I mentioned like last week the fail-condition has to be able to keep you afloat in the event of an emergency. MLB can’t: he sucks up two attackers and then waits for something else to appear. Perhaps he can in theory be ‘faster’ but I’d rather take whatever hurts less to run and can actually take proactive measures in fuelling himself (Gildas and Alfred Exiv’s second skill exists so don’t give me that bullshit about him being hard to set up. And Stride keeps you busy until then anyway).

It isn’t simply just that trying to combine something that can be shown to be worse than something else that can be combined with the same support for better results is basically milking hamsters. Old decks staying relevant aren’t really something practical to depend on assuming the end result is winning. It could be ages before they receive anything that is even remotely decent, after all. And then there’s the Power Creep that is inherent in Vanguard.

Yes, I know that people would fall back to the old standby of saying everything can still beat everything and try to justify that as an excuse to not spend any more money. Except that’s a fucking retarded thing to say for several reasons.

One, just because something can be beaten EVENTUALLY it does not justify the several levels of salt before that caused by running rampant with a deck that’s bullshit. Even if you don’t win ALL the time with it, the fact is if you have an optimal deck and the other players don’t, assuming equal skill (a VERY generous assumption, I must point out) the odds are stacks in favour of your deck. That’s like saying BT05 Murakumo could fight the End and win. PFFFFFFFFFFFFT.

Two, the reality is hardly anyone will have equal skill in your immediate circle of friends. Even if you can beat something, it could be because that deck was poorly designed, or you sacked and you haven’t played enough games to actually find out if it was just a one-off, or the other player sucked balls…that’s why I NEVER use other people’s experience to build a case. Because people are by nature shit witnesses.

Three, it is still up to you to at least make SOME effort to mitigate chance assuming you play competitively. Otherwise you’re just being notoriously lazy about the whole thing. Run more of something. Run searchers if you have any to use. But for fuck’s sake, please try. And don’t use G3 searchers as a first Vanguard assuming they are foolproof, you morons.

The TCG model is a prevalent business plan, unfortunately. I know it sucked when we got BT05 and everything got fucked up, but if you wanted to play a game where everything was equal, you should have taken up chess.

That’s a good question. Why HAVEN’T you taken up chess?

Demonstrate to me you paid no attention to anything I just said at saikyocardfighter@outlook.com