12 Days of Anime #2: Stand Down the Vanguard

I’ve mentioned before, but I play Cardfight!! Vanguard. Have done for approaching 2½ years now, and have spent several hundred pounds and countless hours on it.

It may soon become “played”. Bushiroad, the game and the community surrounding it are not going places that fill me with hope, and my interest is dropping like a rock.

Given how much energy and passion I’ve put into it in the past, and given that it has an anime and mostly anime-style art, I felt this warranted a post.

(Warning: this post is long, unnecessarily  and makes no attempt to make sense to people who don’t also play this crappy anime card game)

I mean, this year started well! The Neo Nectar support in set 6 helped the clan tremendously, and given the Ahsha deck is one of my main decks I was thrilled to have that much needed boost in consistency and power. Then they announced Fighter’s Collection 2016 and with it the introduction of G guardians, a much needed boost to the defensive side of a game where aggression was getting a bit silly that also represented an opportunity to bring in a bit more interactivity (which it did in many cases after this first batch)! And then I went to Springfest with a bunch of friends for a team tournament, where we placed 30^th out of 54 – not too bad for a first tournament, even if my deck dragged us down (I personally went 2-4…). It was looking like such a good year for Vanguard for me!

But then came the summer…

Bad sets I care about

My main clan since I started playing has been Bermuda Triangle, because I am weeb trash. It’s entirely cute mermaid idols. I’m garbage. Now, they’re quite unique within the game because they’re the only (non-promotional) clan that gets all their support (promos and sets supporting every clan excluded) from booster sets that only contain them. If you’re a Bermuda Triangle player, you only have to pay attention to one booster set each year, which is quite convenient! It also means that set has to carry you for an entire year – it needs high quality support.

Last year’s Bermuda Triangle set – Academy of Divas – was alright. It introduced their G-era build along with the Harmony keyword and a slew of other goodies. PR♥ISMs got a nice boost with their three cards, but it didn’t solve the problems holding them back from competitiveness (although certainly laid some incredible groundwork). Duos didn’t get much but the Nemuel/Vepar Legion created a very strong and very obnoxious deck that avoided riding to G3 until as late as possible, amassed ridiculous card advantage, looped perfect guards and reduced the deck to critical triggers. It wasn’t quite tier 1 (probably because of tournament time limits and sensitivity to opening hands) but was still the strongest Bermuda Triangle build at the time. The Harmony deck itself was nothing special, primarily due to choking on counterblast hard. You had to run Duo White Crystal, Ricca, Kura/Nina, and of course the new PGG just to keep some counterblast open. And what you got out of it was a fair bit of card draw but again, nothing that special. A Lauris/Riviere hybrid did some good work in a couple of tournaments, but not to a hugely notable extent. Where the set shined was in School Etoile, Olyvia, the GR, a strong and very cost-efficient finisher that enabled a lot of amazing combos and immediately became staple at 4 in every Bermuda Triangle deck, and Admired Sparkle, Spica, a RR, which is remarkably flexible and seen in a lot of decks as a result. So: a lot of promise and some immediately powerful cards, with clear signs on how to improve moving forwards. Not too bad, but no Divas Duet.

This year brought us Blessing of Divas. Let’s start with what little good there is.

PR♥ISMs got the last bit of support they needed to push them into competitiveness – a second critical trigger (consistency!) with an effect that enabled some really potent combo plays (power!), a new grade 3 (options!) with some really nice synergies defensively (defense!) and a stupidly strong finisher that, with the right setup, wrecks face (actually able to close out games!).

Raindear – a common grade 3 from back in the first Bermuda Triangle set – became an entire archetype out of nowhere. The deck itself is pretty good fun and a fairly challenging one to play, making it even more enjoyable for me. It still needs rounding out and is strictly a ‘for fun’ deck, but it was a nice positive.

Sparkle in her Heart, Spica, was an actually good backup G3 for the Harmony build that provided a small bit of early game and redundancy with Admired Sparkle, Spica, for the Olyvia/Spica combo turn – which is great!

But that’s it. The rest of the set is almost a waste of the cardstock it was printed on.

Coral got new support but it doesn’t do anything – your endgame (Frontier Star, Coral) is only strong if you setup a lot of Corals in the soul, and so you need the rest of the support to achieve that, and by the end of that (and after staple PGs and Stride fodders) you have a single tech G2 slot to make any choice in… with the net effect that your endgame is now incapable of comboing off anything consistently and is similar but worse to School Etoile, Olyvia. It even requires you to stride Frontier first before it can do anything interesting! It makes no damn sense!

And the Harmony/G-era support, which represents the bulk and focus of the set? Aside from the aforementioned G3 Spica, it is terrible.

Commons are almost all unplayable – no-one expects them to be good, but it’s far worse than last year’s set where you got some stuff you could use in some decks. Single rares are either more restricted clones of existing cards (without a better benefit to justify it), weird janky stuff that isn’t worth playing, or cards that would have been mediocre in the first Bermuda Triangle set. None of them see play, ever, and trying to build decks that incorporate them is an exercise in futility.

The RRs are where the real insults lie. When Garland Blossom, Ayna was first revealed, my initial thought was that it’d be the junk RR of the set. It ended up being the best by default. Take Miracle Twintail, Wyz – the keyword PG that lets you discard a card to return it to hand. Why would you ever -1 to have a 6k booster on the field? It’s literally worth less than the OG PGs because being able to PG rearguards is far more useful than that ability. Mermaid Idol, Elly was the OG PG and as a result an iconic Bermuda Triangle card… so they revived her as a slow, unreliable 11k attacker G2 that doubles as a slow, unreliable, 10k intercept. What a waste. Magical Charge, Vita is maybe on the same level of Ayna? The effect is certainly playable, but all it really does is CC1 slowly, awkwardly and with fragility. It might see play in a Madre/Ciao deck, except for the awkward timing of Legion AND GB1. Great Ascent, Liddy has gorgeous art and the name alone suggested a new archetype (or at least complementary support) with Sincere Girl, Liddy, but instead it’s slow and expensive at doing basically nothing. And finally, the new G guardian of the set, Hand in Hand, Leona. She is niche, and circumstantial, and costs you a minus for 5k extra shield. Other clan’s new G guardians blow her out of the water. She still has use – bouncing a card during your opponents turn has power – but it only gets used fully in PR♥ISMs or Pacifica, because you’ve got ways of bouncing cards for more power and therefore defense or making up minuses cheaply, or otherwise making the minus really efficient. I’m still not happy about it, because ‘bounce a RG’ without a minus would not have been anywhere near as powerful as the cost makes it seem.

The only RRR that has not been mentioned thus far is Prestige, Cetia. Paying a fairly hefty cost up front for a small power gain and an on-hit effect that is easily stopped is not worth it. She doesn’t see play, and is a waste of a RRR slot. Literally, the set would be better without her and no replacement because you’d get a better concentration of RRRs in your boxes (it would also mean you’d have as many RRRs as last year’s set did… the greed is palpable).

And finally, the cover unit and GR of the set – Celebrate Voice, Lauris. School Etoile, Olyvia took this slot last year and climbed as high as £45 per card because of how powerful and staple she was. Celebrate Voice, Lauris has… not. She is circumstantially useful. You get a field reset, power gain and a crit, which is nice! But Olyvia can bounce the entire field, gains the crit, and enable multiple attacks instead of power gain which is far, far more useful when the opponent is at 5 and you only need to land one hit. Also Lauris needs every card to be in Harmony, and so therefore is only really playable in the Harmony deck – which is not good.

So let’s talk about the Harmony deck and what this set should have had. The biggest issue with the Harmony deck is that it’s counterblast heavy. It eats counterblast like it’s nothing, and the gains aren’t that good. So you have to run sub-par counterchargers just to keep up! A simple fix? A 7k G1 that countercharges 1 when it enters harmony. Make it GB1 if you want. It would single-handedly give the deck a huge boost. Further to that, a CONT effect that gives power to the front row – which would enable a lot of interesting attack extension combos that don’t fizzle out on opponent power. 2 cards! 2 cards would have done it. But no, we got a set of junk. Fucking great.

Bad sets I don’t care about

Something the terrible Bermuda Triangle booster made me realise was that my interest in the game was sustained heavily by excitement and hype set to set. Even If I didn’t care about the contents, it was still fun to read about the cards! The build up and reveals for Blessing of Divas killed my enthusiasm, hard, and it never really recovered. Set 6, at the beginning of the year, was great. Technical Booster 1 was super interesting. Fighter’s Collection 2016 was huge. Set 7 was fascinating, and did have a big impact, but was contentious. Blessing of Divas was trash. Technical Booster 2 had no impact. Set 8 was filler. Gear Chronicle clan booster was filler. Set 9 was filler. Try3 NEXT is filler if you don’t play Neo Nectar.

The game feels like its stagnating, and the terrible Bermuda Triangle booster brought this into sharp relief. And I’m not alone in this! There’s an increasing sense of frustration in the community! The biggest change to the meta was a Granblue Seven Seas grade 1 rush deck introduced in set 8 that is beginning to see significant tournament play, but is otherwise almost the same as it was at the start of the year! Without that loop of interest I am surprisingly losing interest!

And speaking of grade 1 rush…

Grade 1 rush/blitz

During the summer, the folks at V-Mundi accidentally stumbled upon a Dark Irregulars G1 rush deck. “Dark Irregulars” and “rush” don’t belong in the same sentence, but when they tried it out (after a good laugh) they found it was crushing everything they threw at it. Long story short, this prompted a surge of interest in that community in grade 1 rush, a bunch of decks were discovered, a lot of testing and analysis was performed, and the conclusion was that grade 1 rush decks are dominant. Not just dominant; they are borderline mathematically optimal.

A trading card game has all but been solved. That is dumb.

Why care about the game when an optimal, clan-neutral strategy has been found? If you want to be competitive, running G1 rush is the best shot you have at winning. On top of that, the decks are cheap. You’d be stupid to not run them!

This leads into a separate, but related point:

The Community

V-Mundi is not popular in the wider Vanguard community. They are perceived as elitist and arrogant. However, they were the only community doing real testing and maths to discover optimal play. They pushed 12 crits for years and even now most players include 4 draws for garbage reasons that should have been long discredited. So when V-Mundi were pushing G1 rush, others wouldn’t listen. It was rejected out of hand basically on principle. I made a long, detailed post in the Vanguard subreddit about G1 rush, and while I expected contention the outright hostility surprised me. Most arguments I got against it were poor, either addressed in my post already or fairly trivially countered with a bit of thought.

“G1 rush is terrible”, they all cried. But then the Seven Seas G1 rush deck came out of Japan, and everyone took it seriously. The arguments for why it’s good fundamentally were covered in my post, but stayed ignored. The only reason I can see for why they took this one seriously are: a) it’s the best G1 rush deck currently, so the power is a bit more obvious; b) it came out of Japan, and the community is full of weebs who treat Japanese tournament results like their God’s revelations; c) it involves new cards and therefore hype (the most defining element of the meta); d) it didn’t come out of V-Mundi. You’ll notice that only the first 1 is really reasonable.

It was a disappointing response, and acted as a bit of a nail-in-the-coffin for my engagement in the community. V-Mundi quit Vanguard, the subreddit is very casual and a too in-group-y, the wiki is toxic, and Pojo’s worse. There’s no good discussion to be had, and definitely none that’s competitive.

My first singles tournament

But the big killer for me was the first singles tournament I attended in late August. I knew Bushiroad tournaments were kind of garbage – no prize support and best-of-1 double elimination in a game with a very high margin of chance – but experiencing it first hand was something else.

I brought a grade 1 rush deck, but what I brought is barely relevant. I played 2 games. Lost twice in a row. The first game especially I lost through pure chance. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong and I had precisely zero control over the outcome. It was a colossal waste of time.

And it made me realise that this game does not support competitive play. Even if they did swiss instead, it would still suck – there is such a high margin of chance that can decide games that fairness is barely there, and the skill ceiling is so low that it’s not hard to do well with a good deck. It often just feels like “I win if my combos go off first” and “if I don’t get deckscrewed, I have a chance!”. Tournament results are discussed in terms of decks, never players, because the pilot of the deck is practically irrelevant.

It just strikes me as a waste of time.

Netrunner

Back in September I tried out Android: Netrunner, the premiere LCG. I love it. I suck, I’ve got so much room to improve, and that in itself is deeply satisfying. The skill ceiling is high. So high. The game has so much depth. It doesn’t have an exploitative business model! Online discussion is mature and largely intelligent! My locals is actually a fairly internationally prominent one for the game, so that’s incredible.

I could go on and on, but what I’m finding is that Netrunner is killing my interest in Vanguard by virtue of being outstandingly better in just about every respect, both in the game itself and surrounding the game, even if the games can barely be compared mechanically.

I’ve just got something more worthwhile to spend my time on now.

In conclusion

It’s not all doom and gloom. The new Neo Nectar support genuinely piques my interest and I’m quite excited to check it out, but I’m wondering if this is just habit now. Do I truly care about this game? Do I really want to keep spending money on it when I resent so much of it? Why bother?

It’s a sad way for a hobby to die. There’s losing interest naturally and then there’s being pushed out, which is basically what’s happening here. And all this came to ahead in the space of like a month this year. I haven’t even touched upon the rampant power creep, but that’s to be expected in a Japanese TCG to be frank.

For now, I’ll keep playing, but I’m half waiting for the local group to give up. I have friends there – if they stop playing, then I have no reason to keep playing. This isn’t how a passion should go.