Pojo's Cardfight Vanguard Site

Pojo Home
Cardfight Home
Message Board
Card of the Day
Cardfight News
Contact Us

Saikyo Presents:
Cardfight!! Bad-guard

Saikyo Cardfighter R on Cardfight!! Vanguard
 May 9, 2016

Give Gold Paladin a Re-Standing G-Unit

Wait! Let Saikyo explain first!

When I first typed out my article regarding the most optimal choice for those who held a pathological hatred for being with the in-crowd, I knew that I would inevitably upset some people by not including whatever under-supported clan they main. Well, I’m sorry, but it’s kind of hard to get excited about a clan that doesn’t really scream the name “Cunt-Wrecker 4000” in my face if I can name better. But I think there is a solution to suddenly make everyone’s background character decks stand out a bit more. What we need is to give them all a re-standing G-Unit or something like Jingle Flower Dragon, except using whatever mechanic they happen to use.

When I examine a mechanic such as Hollow and Magia, which gives you units temporarily and then makes them all pull a vanishing act so they don’t get fucked up by field control, I suppose that’s as good a mechanic as any, but this is my beef with it: it exists for basically no other purpose other than to counter field control. The number of decks that don’t focus on that far outweigh the ones that do, and some of them, like Gear Chronicle and recently Kagero, have stopped caring owing to their G-Zone selection (Nextage, Time Leap specialising, Vague, the Ace, etc). So assuming your opponent isn’t playing a reactive deck, yours looks rather bleak in comparison. It hasn’t escaped my attention that Magia decks aren’t brilliant at the columns game, not to extremes such as G Neo Nectar, and lacks a reliable finisher. G Granblue is much the same.

Gold Paladin has it worse, at least until enough kick-ass Unite cards are revealed. The overall quality of their own card advantage sucks dick. I’d much rather put more stock in Liberators (the Bluish Flames build, anyway) than Gurguit, if only because URLEH GAEM, and the fact it has a game-ender.

I feel that what would fix all three of these decks is something that can actually bring pain to an opponent at an opportune time, rather than keep going with the same ineffective strategy. And so, I propose that all clans lacking a big column-former, guard sealer, or re-standing Vanguard should get at least one, especially a re-stander. WAIT LET ME EXPLAIN.

I would actually say that with G-Units, this is probably one of the more healthy times to play Vanguard. I wasn’t keen on decks that only worked to not lose rather than win because there wasn’t really a sense of overall security with their main gambits. Now, with G-Units, your Vanguard isn’t stuck doing the same shit over and over no matter how futile it seems for the matchup you’re up against. In theory, anyway. Granblue and Gold Paladin have it bad because currently their best G-Units basically is just more hard advantage to you, which is predictably costed and not exactly efficient that late in the game, when Soft Advantage at that point can wreck so much more by destroying more hand for the final push. If you gave both these clans absurd column formers or at least more cards to turn themselves into absurd column formers, then they can keep up, while at the same time still allowing access to their unique mechanic. It isn’t like the old age of Crossrides where every deck was equally boring just to keep up with each other.

Alternatively, if you ever decide to continue with the manipulation of predictably costed hard advantage on the part of your rear-guards, then they need a re-standing Vanguard instead. It is the only way to justify your otherwise not-so-amazing mechanic. If your rear-guards can’t really be trusted to bring home the bacon, then it has to be centralised to one amazing column, rather than just make it beans on top of beans. The main issue here is redundancy. Re-standing Vanguards operate on Late Game, or at least the strongest and most reliable ones do. By that stage the field ought to be more or less full, so trying to rely on a G-Unit that calls on top of that is basically only looking to swap a column for more attacks, or is simply trying to get a normal field up in the event of a board-wipe. It’s especially bad for Granblue and Gold Paladin because they don’t have the “insta-board for 1 CB” bullshit Magia gives Pale Moon, so they’re still at the mercy of resource control.

Once G-Guardians become available to us in English this is going to be even more obvious. As I mentioned before, it’s going to be biased towards any clan that has a frankly bullshit finisher they can drop as a first Stride. The rest of the minor clans need some way to take advantage of this window of opportunity, rather than just sit on its own hands and wait for the inevitable card fuck on the opponent’s next turn.

One might argue that this would be totally unhealthy for the game if everything just got generic re-standers without a proper balancing act going on, and I’d agree. However, that would basically only be the case if the Vanguard was locked into doing one thing constantly: because then it would automatically default to whatever deck had the best mechanic in terms of overall efficiency and reliability. That cannot really apply in the wake of G-Units, where your Vanguard can be pretty much anything, in Gear Chronicle’s case especially. The hypothetical re-standing G-Unit would be an unquestionable staple in whatever G-Zone it went in, but it still wouldn’t force its users to overhaul their own deck to use it, especially if it’s generic enough: even Spectral Blaster Diablo can gain the main skill without a Diablo heart.

Keep in mind I have absolutely no vested interest in monitoring any minor clan for a long time unless I strongly suspect it’ll be meta almost immediately, but all the same, every under-supported clan needs at least one fucking decent finisher, if only to make things a bit fairer for everybody involved. Because right now, all Golds have in regards to two vanguard attacks is an old and outdated card, and Pellinore. Please don’t be that guy who uses Pellinore.

Call me a fucking hypocrite for praising Granblue when it first came out at saikyocardfighter@outlook.com