Stop This No-Context Theory Crafting

Actually, I totally shat on Chaos Breaker Dragon, thank you for asking.

I am at least willing to be wrong, if I had to name anything good about me. I'm pretty sure if anyone else tried they'd find they'd come up dreadfully short. However, I have never been more sure of the fact that save for some extremely dumb niche card like Tempest Bolt Dragon, this is the age of obscure anti-Stride decks. If you are going to posit otherwise then I sincerely hope you are willing to have numbers to back this up.

I bring this up because I find that whenever I bring up my Grade 1 Blitz deck to anyone, they will almost immediately bring up something like 'Oh Chaos Breaker Dragon would tell this deck to eat shit'. Those people annoy me, and not just because their uniformity of thought leaves me with little hope of watching these people NOT stagnate for another fucking year, but also because they turn out to be wrong.

The problem is that whenever people theorycraft without any assertion like this, there is always going to be some sort of fundamental flaw that's overlooked, sort of like how Conquest doesn't check Magia like you think. Like Chaos Breaker for example: lock one of my rear-guards? Sure, except that's a -1 to the hand to you, which I would have taken away by attacking, and I still have 2 other columns which you should guard or die. Tested for margin of error it will get bodied to death reagrdless. You'd have to draw and keep Photon and Chaos in the same hand together just for your snowball's chance. But that's a game assuming you didn't brick. I rarely brick because the setup is so freaking simple. I am aware that my deck does nothing fancy, but please don't mistake it as doing nothing full stop. It takes vanilla play to its most extreme and as a result is hard to trip up because everything is nothing but steam, unlike something like Seven Seas.

It's not unbeatable, sure, nothing is, but I don't care. As long as it is demonstrably better than most other decks then I will use it.

Vanguard is a game where time is used as a function. Assuming one plays it the way it was intended to be played, then you are spending the early game preparing and everything after that doing. Grade 1 Rush is actually technically not broken, as everything it does is within the legal parameters of the game, but it is functionally better than almost everything. In fact, I was very much aware of Grade 1 rush being a possibility but because of the small card-pool at the time, building one while adhering to Clan Fight wasn't possible. Now, about four-fifths of the playable clans have at least 1 Anti-Stride deck.

So why theorycraft? You would never see this shit pulled anywhere like Magic, or Yu-Gi-Oh or Pokemon where the good players are actually willing to sit down, crunch numbers and actually take a no-bullshit approach to the game. Well, I'm going to go ahead and blame it entirely on the fact that Vanguard has absolutely no good leaders in this game, and any ideas that get accepted are only when there are popular, regardless of how completely full of shit they are. This annoys me, because nobody can be anything but right if no-one is in fact wrong. So if anyone is going to submit anything to me, unless they can actually prove it without pulling shit out of their own ass, I generally won't believe them. I will call bullshit if I know you're wrong and can prove why you're wrong. I in turn expect people to call bullshit if I am in turn wrong, but if you are, I'd rather you have observable proof. I will say however that people who call bullshit even when wrong are a bit more admirable than the idiot sheep who stay silent.

I therefore have decided that if I cannot stop people being idiots (and given that we're entering a fifth year of the playerbase still being retarded at Vanguard that seems incredibly likely to not slow any time soon) I can at least give you some advice on how to make any hypothesis actually sound, and not a steaming load. So without further ado:

1.            Never assume best-case scenario with anything at all. As I mentioned before, Chaos Breaker Dragon is basically asking for the perfect hand (Chaos and Photon with a spare Grade 2) in order to actually counter Grade 1 beat. The problem is in testing, cards generally don't like being told where they ought to go. A counter is pointless if that counter isn't going to happen regularly. If it's not 50% guaranteed then it's generally not worth bothering with. So before you submit a supposed counter to anything, think about how likely it is to happen first. I know something as basic as statistics may be a bit much for you, given some of you are still running a low Grade 3 count because you're fucking idiots, but throw me a bone here.

2.            Think about what your theorycrafted counter would actually involve. Depending on how much external setup is required, your theorycrafted bullshit may not be realistic. Even if Vanguard has no concept of countering during the opponent's turn apart from when attacking, you can't expect the opponent to just sit on their ass and do nothing. They will do whatever they are able to do to prevent your shit, whether it's anti-field like Gear Chronicle or Kagero, or just running a high Critical Trigger count to make the opponent throw away more cards sooner to not die.

3.            How fast is your counter? The new Character Booster came with at least 2 cards with skills to let you play G Units regardless of the opponent's Grade. My beef with them is that the Great Nature one requires you be at turn 4+ and you have an ideal hand to use it, and the Dimension Police one doesn't have a lot of GB1 skills worth it for the deck it's in and is too heavy a cost for a deck that's struggling with card advantage as it is. Against a deck that aims to win at about Turn 3-4, you're going to have an uphill battle actually keeping anything on the table to fight back with.

4.            In the rare case that a deck actually does completely legitimately counter your shit, it's like one matchup. Get over it. Unless it counters all of your OTHER backup shit too. Then I guess sucks to be you. Fancy saving some money for the best shit around?

I’m taking requests for articles if there’s something about Vanguard you need to gripe about. Email ideas at saikyocardfighter@outlook.com. Or drop a message on my Twitter account!