This Space
For Rent

The Vanguard’s Okay,
But Your Rear-Guards Suck  

 Your Vanguard isn’t so powerful that it doesn’t need help. A LOT of help.

So for reasons beyond my control I couldn’t get this up Monday. But anyway, here I am now. Blame the boss. As you should have been doing every OTHER time my article came out on a Tuesday.

Anyway, I don’t tech, if my very first article is anything to go by, or if I do, I don’t do it at the expense of anything more important than what I have. Having more of something good and cutting what’s unnecessary increases the odds of getting what you need, which is common sense advice.

However, there is such thing as having TOO much of a good thing, honestly. We start to hit a snag when a deck becomes entirely dedicated to just one trick. Okay, nothing wrong with that inherently, but it matters when the main gambit isn’t even that deadly on its own anyway. The sum of your entire end results may result in just one play that isn’t even THAT brilliant, and that’s not really on for me.

When Fighter’s Collection 2015 came out I was incredibly pleased with the new Kagero support we got. This was largely down to the fact that nothing in it felt that it was thrown in simply because they had a gap to fill, although we got generic G-Units in the form of Mahmud in G Booster 1 so of course we wouldn’t get anything utterly boring but that’s beside the point. With these came new options, options I could use at virtually no penalty to my existing deck. I liked my old the X build, but I was a little put-off by how it expected me to basically sit on the X all the time, but once I adjusted to include Generation Break and other Stride support we were rolling. I mean, Blademaster to Zahm to Sadegh to Zahm as my first big play? Beats Mahmud when Legion won’t happen yet.

The big problem I see in a lot of decks like this is the fact that most people build the deck, expecting to have their Vanguard do all the work with the rear-guards being just afterthoughts. A typical Grade 2 lineup consists of Neoflame, Burnout and Burning Horn. None of these units continue to have any presence after being summoned unlike something like Twilight Arrow Dragon; they just sit on the board and act all vanilla. There’s basically no flexibility to change should the opponent not do as you planned and completely balls your strategy up somehow. That’s why I chose Blademaster as my backup Grade 3: because Lava Flow Dragon could then without minusing me 1. Search for a fail-con better than The End. 2. Drop an Overlord early for a swift Burnout retire. 3. Grant me freedom to load my Drop-Zone with what I want to Legion. I can’t do any of this if I chose Overlord the Great instead.

Prominence Glare was another good example before this. Out of all the builds I saw online and at tournaments and at local shops, I found all of them ran virtually the same cards and none of them ran anything like the Blaster Blade Liberator/Balan engine. This meant that Prominence Glare alone was basically pulling the weight of the entire deck, and when that couldn’t finish a guy off you were screwed with no other way to win. I’m fairly sure BT12 Revengers wouldn’t have been half as good OR consistent if Dorint didn’t exist.

The common link between the two decks is that although the main boss is GOOD, when you break each skill down in terms of quantity neither one is all that devastating alone. I mean, assuming one does not wish to eat another VG attack, the X is looking at a chance-based +1 for CB1. Big deal; The Great can do that do, WITHOUT needing to hope for a certain thing to work. Which is why I advise to stop fucking around with those Calamity Tower Wyverns because you need better support than that. Prominence Glare meanwhile is looking at 20k+ sealing Perfect Guards. Not bad, but without help not feasible alone since combining his own two skills together means a Counterblast cost of 2. CEO Yggdrasil is better supported for this job. When you centralise everything to only one thing doing anything decently useful, it just means until you can do it, you are opening yourself up to being taken advantage of if your deck is too slow or inconsistent. I said in my review of Big Bang Knuckle Turbo that you are not obliged to Legion first, so if you have room for anything equally viable, do it. I know unlike chess you can’t suddenly switch up tactics like that all the time but if you can and it doesn’t interfere with what should happen normally, that’s probably the better thing to do.

Ultimately, no matter how powerful a Vanguard may seem, the rear-guards are responsible for making sure you can actually eat enough shield or save enough hand for you to actually win. Or not lose, depends on who you ask. I believe in helping those who are willing to help themselves so even though I don’t like the idea of depending on everything being perfect like Neo Nectar or similar, there is no shame in getting a little help. Especially if you happen to have a skill to summon the right amount of it.

I guess you could interpret this article as me saying that other people don’t run good things despite every opportunity to do so, but the point I’m trying to get across here is that when you start running stuff out of obligation and it doesn’t do a whole lot by itself, constantly, then you may just want to consider other options. Because as I said, if I can name better, all I can do is recommend that instead. If I can kill stuff faster than you, and I can press my advantage harder than you, and I can make fewer mistakes than you, I can beat you. And that’s something worth the money.

Ask me why I’m not running the “better” starter that is Red Pulse Dracokid at saikyocardfighter@outlook.com