I quit playing Cardfight!! Vanguard this year. I suggested I would last year, but it took me until November to call it an end. It wasn’t the easiest decision to make as it had been a big part of my life over the past 3 or so years – I met new people, travelled a bit, spent way too much money and had a ton of fun – but it was a necessary one for my time, my wallet and my fucking sanity.
Because Vanguard is not a good game. In fact it’s terrible. Irredeemably, fundamentally bad. The problems are present top to bottom, from core mechanics, through Bushiroad’s handling all the way to the player community. Taking a step back, it’s so easy to see it for what it is.
But I think some context and my history with the game is important before I dive into that. I started playing in the summer of 2014, after graduating from uni. I turned up at my friend’s place for our RPG night to find them grouped around the table playing a card game – Vanguard – and suggested I give it a shot. I flatly said no, as I didn’t want to get suckered into a moneysink hobby. Eventually they convinced me to play a game with one of their decks (a game which I won), and I distinctly remember that my exact words after that were: “oh, fuck you guys.” I was hooked already.
(In retrospect, picking up a children’s card game as soon as I entered the real, adult world probably says a lot about me, but whatever – I was enjoying myself.)
Vanguard scratched a major itch. See, I have a history with card games. I collected Pokémon cards, I got into Yu-Gi-Oh! when it first came out, I dabbled with Magic: the Gathering when I was 13, I tried Hearthstone a bit but mostly watched videos, and so on and so forth. I enjoy card games. Vanguard just happened to be in the right place at the right time – if it wasn’t that, it would have been something else.
I started slowly, buying a box of the Bermuda Triangle booster set Banquet of Divas to get me started. I bought another soon after. Then two of Dazzling Divas, followed by four of Divas Duet. Singles then started, initially at £2 or £3 a card, but it wasn’t long before I was buying full playsets of £15 cards. And I was still only playing casually with friends! It took a while (early 2016!) until I started playing at locals regularly, and that sunk me in even deeper. And all the while, I was loving it.
Enthusiasm began waning in the summer of ’16. It wasn’t any one thing but rather the combination of four, each hitting me from a different direction. V-Mundi’s discovery and analysis of grade 1 rush – which they determined to be mathematically optimal – made me realise just how fundamentally flawed the games mechanics are. Blessing of Divas was one of the worst sets Bushiroad has ever printed, leaving me angry and disappointed. I attended the regional qualifiers near Birmingham; I got up early travelled for 2 hours and played 2 whole games before being knocked out. I had heard the criticisms of Bushiroad’s organised play and tournament structure, and how the game wasn’t really fit for anything more than casual play, but this was the wakeup call to make me know it. And finally, I picked up Android: Netrunner. And that opened my eyes to what a good game could be.
It’s impressive that my interest survived even slightly intact from that quadruple whammy, but such is the power of friendship and being-kinda-good-at-something; playing at locals was fun and gratifying, albeit in the cheap sorta way you get when it’s because you’re winning easily. I held on, still spending money all the while, but half-heartedly. The only thing that really stirred me was my drummed up hype for Prismatic Divas, and the vain hope that it would explode Bermuda Triangle wide open (it didn’t). By then I was looking for a reason to quit. Friends dropping out, the scene at the LGS collapsing, Bushiroad doing something so heinous that I couldn’t possibly justify it anymore, something.
In the end, Fantasy Flight Games delivered the killing blow: Legend of the Five Rings, their new LCG, released.
I wanted to play it, and when I tried it I liked it. I really liked it. I didn’t have the energy to juggle three games, so that was that: bye-bye Vanguard!
Anything I was holding onto to trade was given away at locals; some five or six playmats and a bunch of promos and cards I didn’t care about in total. I could have got a fair bit for it on eBay, but I just couldn’t be bothered. Besides, it was a nice way to say farewell. In either case, that was that – I was out.
And there’s your story. You can stop reading now, if you’d like: what follows is me seeking closure from this fucking game by giving a detailed, in depth analysis (slash rant) of everything that is wrong with it. What follows is exactly why this game is bad.
Let’s begin.
Gameplay problems – we’re talking fundamental design and general game direction, nothing too specific – are caused by four main things: high levels of chance, virtually no interaction, very limited strategies, and a swathe of negative play experiences.
Of course, I should qualify all this (and most of the rest of my criticism) by saying that it’s all a matter of preference; certainly I’ve had fun despite – and occasionally because of – these design issues. But even those who love the game often wish it was something more, and usually these complaints are the root of it. They definitely become more noticeable with familiarity and focus, and even more apparent when you try better card games.
First up: chance. Every card game has chance, it’s one of the appeals of the genre, but the extent to which it’s relevant in Vanguard is egregious. Chance is omnipresent and implemented in ways that are highly detrimental.
At this point I imagine it will be beneficial for you to understand how the game works. I doubt you’d understand any of the criticisms without having a passing knowledge of it, after all. Fortunately, Vanguard is fairly simple.
Each player has a 50 card deck. Each card is a unit – think ‘creature’ in Magic – meaning there are no spells or anything like that. There are 6 spaces for units on your field: 2 rows of 3. Units in the front row can attack units in the opponent’s front row; units in the back row can ‘boost’ a unit in front of it, adding their power to the attack. Front and centre is the eponymous vanguard; every other unit is a rearguard. Each unit has a ‘grade’ from 0 to 3. Both players start the game with a vanguard already on the board, which is a grade 0 unit chosen from the deck.
At the start of each turn you draw a card. You then have an opportunity to ‘ride’ the vanguard – you may play a card of grade equal to or 1 higher than your current vanguard over your current vanguard, replacing it. However, the previous vanguard stays under the new vanguard in the ‘soul’, which can be discarded as a resource for paying costs (‘soul blasting’). You can only play units with grades equal to or lower than your vanguard as rearguards – meaning you want to ride to grade 3 at the earliest opportunity to get your most powerful units out.
When your vanguard attacks you perform a ‘drive check’ – you reveal the top card of your deck and add it to your hand, and if it’s a ‘trigger unit’ you apply an additional effect (which is always an increase in power followed by either a draw, an extra point of damage, reactivating or ‘standing’ a rearguard, or healing a point of damage). Grade 3s perform ‘twin drive’, which is the same except you drive check 2 cards. So not only does getting to grade 3 give you a more powerful field, it gives you greater card advantage and more opportunities for power gains.
When a rearguard is hit it is discarded (‘retired’); when a vanguard is hit you take damage instead, performing a damage check. Damage checks function the same as drive checks, except that instead of the card going to your hand it instead goes face up to the damage zone. Face up cards in the damage zone can be turned face down as a resource for paying costs (‘counter blasting’). Damage can be prevented by guarding. Each unit has a shield value; when one of your units is attacked, you may effectively discard cards from your hand to add their shield value to the battle. If the combined power of the attacked unit and added shield value is greater than the power of the attacking unit, the attack is blocked.
First to 6 damage loses.
An important additional mechanic is ‘striding’. After the ride phase, if both you and your opponent are at grade 3, you may discard cards from your hand with a total grade value of 3 or greater and from an extra deck choose a powerful grade 4 to be your vanguard for the turn. In addition to a huge power boost, it also has triple drive. Many cards require you to have strode at least once in order for their effects to activate.
I hope you got all that; there a few things I skipped, but that’s the gist of it, and should be enough for now. Certainly enough to understand how drastically chance effects the game.
Initially, it doesn’t actually look that bad. Your mulligan is a selective shuffled one (draw 5, choose X to shuffle back in, then draw X – once) which is pretty solid, and you end up drawing 2 or 3 cards per turn innately – sounds a lot like consistency to me! But you don’t have to look too closely for the cracks to start appearing.
Take riding: you will want to get to grade 3 as soon as possible. If you’re unable to ride to the next grade (because you simply didn’t draw a card of the relevant grade), that hurts. A lot. It’s not an instant death, but I’ve played enough games to know it confers a SIGNIFICANT advantage to the other player. The maths is quite straightforward, and the usual distribution of grades – 14 grade 1s, 11 grade 2s and 8 grade 3s (not quite optimal but close enough and has other benefits) – means that you successfully ride all the way to grade 3 with no problems in 82% of games. In about a fifth of games, you will misride and take a huge hit to your tempo and card advantage through absolutely NO fault of your own. Fun!
While they did later add a rule that allowed you to try and fix your ride, it has its own flaws with a significant cost and substantial chance of failure. They also added ways to punish grade-stalling – the tactic of intentionally staying at a lower grade instead of riding – which also punishes misriding, as no distinction is made. This alone would be a disgusting level of variance by itself, but we are far from done.
That trigger check mechanic I mentioned earlier – it’s sufficient to swing games by itself, regardless of how well your deck is constructed or how well you played. The drive check can rapidly accelerate games – hitting a critical trigger and dealing that extra point of damage (or two, in the case of twin drive) when you only need to deal 6 to win gives you so much advantage it’s not even funny. Of course they can always guard the attack, but because guarding is done before the drive check it’s possible for the power boost from a trigger to put you over the shield and hit. To an extent this adds an extra layer of strategy for the defending player – knowing when to overcommit shield and by how much is an important skill, and does separate good players from the bad – but it’s still another aspect where variance can make or break you with only limited input on your part.
That power boost is far more relevant on damage checks – if you take damage and hit a trigger, you still get to apply the effects. Sure, that critical is meaningless, but the power boost added to the vanguard just saved you some valuable shield! If that occurs during a combo turn, it can both severely neuter if not outright end the combo and waste all the investment – all because of sheer bloody chance. And the less said about so-called ‘miracle heals’ the better – if you check a heal on your 6th damage, you stay in. Your opponent has by rights just beaten you, but nonetheless you get to survive. I’ve personally had a game where I miracle healed twice and went on to win, which was so thoroughly undeserved.
Speaking of damage, the card added to the damage zone? Random! Hope you enjoy seeing the combo piece you needed rendered completely inaccessible! Same thing with soul charging – adding cards from the top of the deck to the soul to fuel your resources. If you aren’t playing a deck that manipulates the soul, you can just as easily find yourself losing all copies of a necessary card. Hell, that lack of control is often present even in the parts you do control. The cards you ride? Entirely dependent on your opening hand and very early draws – oftentimes you’re stuck riding something entirely suboptimal without any semblance of control on your part.
We can extend this criticism to drawing in general. Despite the high amount of drawing, the fact your hand pulls double duty as options and shield ultimately leaves Vanguard in a position where it’s the worst game for relying on ‘good’ draws I’ve played. Draw into triggers too often? Well, they’re basically useless for anything other than shield, so good luck exerting any pressure. Don’t draw into triggers often enough? Rad, you just had to sacrifice your strategy just to stay alive. Draw into too many grade 3s? Cool, grade 3s have no shield so enjoy taking everything to the face. NO grade 3s? Whoops, looks like you’re either not striding or taking a big hit on it. Didn’t get the perfect guard before your opponent swings in for fuckoff huge numbers? Haha you just lost through no fault of your own. There is so much scope for draws to screw you over in insidious ways that I’d argue it’s worse and more common than mana screw in Magic.
All these chance elements may not sound like much in isolation, but when you’re playing 15 games in the space of a few hours and hitting on combinations of them it wears you down – especially when it robs you of a tournament standing. Misriding, hitting 2 crits in a single attack, healing twice in a single game or failing to stride are sufficiently damaging as to have a high probability of swinging the game one way or the other – and all of it is essentially out of your control. By some calculations as many as 60% of games are impacted by at least one of the above, leaving Vanguard feeling less like a game of skill and more like gambling.
The helplessness these chance elements can instil is compounded by the dearth of interactivity in this game. A friend of mine described it as “two ships passing silently in the night”, which is apt; for most matchups you’ll be doing your thing and your opponent will be doing their thing and shielding is the only point at which they’ll intersect. During their turn you get to sit back and watch helplessly as they combo off, and they get to do likewise during yours. A few decks can do some removal or other types of field control, and one can force hand discards, but virtually nothing that can be considered a reaction. The small handful of cards that do do stuff in reaction are therefore very powerful; the G Guardians (ultra-powerful shields played from the extra deck by discarding a heal trigger in hand) that can remove opponents rearguards are hugely feared because they can utterly destory their combos, but there’s only like 4 of them and not every deck has access to them.
There’s no inter- or counter-play, very little scope to play around strategies, and no meaningful depth to engagements. I can appreciate some simplification to make it easier to get into, but Vanguard doesn’t offer anything to raise the skill ceiling in return. In the end, games feel like a race to get your combo off first – you can’t stop theirs and they can’t stop yours – with both sides hoping they happen to draw into good shield and their opponent draws crud. Not the most engaging or skilful gameplay.
This is a major causative factor in the low strategic variety; it all devolves into “attack the vanguard a bunch until they run out of shield”. Sure, some decks like to do a lot of little attacks while others like to do fewer big attacks, and they all have different ways to enable those strategies, but it’s still just aggro. Aggro that – thanks to the deckbuilding problems we’ll get onto later – has become really undemanding as the powercreep has pushed consistency really high with all manner of tutoring, ultimately leading to the same lines of play being made again and again. In a substantial number of games you don’t even need to worry about their rearguards; just swing for the vanguard until one player wins.
Control decks are at least different, but all they do is removal and attack denial; you win by either reducing your opponent’s handsize indirectly (letting your aggro push through) or reducing their overall power (giving you comparatively better aggro, helping you win through attrition). Aggro still wins.
(I should mention that there are a couple of decks that have alternate win conditions – “you win if you meet condition X” – but mercifully they’re not consistent enough to be truly viable. And as the conditions are met through what amounts to solitaire, they become an uninteresting race to your wincon).
Gameplay gets so boring – without the dopamine rush of a lucky trigger, there’d be no excitement at all. You play it enough and you’ve soon seen everything the game has to offer, with only marginal scope for personal improvement.
“Boring” is bad enough, but Vanguard attacks your fun further with far too many negative play experiences. Take control: there’s no significant interplay, just a choice of “do I play this card now and let it die, or keep it in hand and be weaker”. In extreme cases, you just don’t get to play your deck, and you can know this as soon as you sit down and see your opponent’s starting vanguard. Those games are typically very slow and grindy, with – once again – your only recourse being to hope they brick at some point. Unless, of course, you’re on a mirage deck where your field disappears at the end of the turn, in which case the control player gets to sit and watch as their deck does nothing!
I mentioned the ‘stride’ mechanic earlier, which requires both players to be at grade 3 – there’s a major problem there. Likewise with ‘legion’, a different mechanic that has the same requirement. In any game, relying on your opponent to do something for your strategy to work is a bad idea. If they don’t do the thing, your strategy fails – you are giving them the choice to simply shut you down. When legion and stride both require the opponent to ride to grade 3, and decks are often constructed with being able to do one or the other as a requirement, the opponent can just not ride to grade 3 and deny you your deck. This isn’t theoretical: grade stall decks can be hugely powerful, and have in fact won the past 2 world tournaments. Cards had to be printed to specifically counter them, showing the weakness underlying the design. In fact, it’s just not a weakness – it’s an amateurish, anti-fun fuckup. Creating a state where a player’s deck gets shut off by the opponent trivially not playing the game as expected, where the optimal strategy is a denial of fun, is fucking terrible design.
Speaking of aggressively anti-fun design, let’s talk about my most loathed mechanic – guard restrict! So I think at this point I’ve established that the only slightly meaningful point of interaction in Vanguard is guarding – the choice of which cards to use and how many has some semblance of skill and thought to it – and that it’s also your only real way to stop yourself from losing. Well, guard restrict says “fuck that!” and prevents you from using certain cards as shield. In some cases, you can’t guard at all! How fucking fun.
At the right time they are essentially “I win” cards; at most other times they exert horrific, game-swinging pressure. Neither skilful nor subtle, they are just a cheap way of making powerful decks, symptomatic of a game more interested in easy sales than interesting design. They are yet another element that leaves you helpless to chance; too many times I’ve had games end with me rolling my eyes and hoping for a heal.
Dark Dragon, Phantom Blaster “Diablo” is the worst of them and a great example of what I’m talking about. When it activates its ability – with a cheap, trivial cost, I might add – it gains a huge power boost and an extra critical. And then when it attacks, the opponent has to choose 2 of their rearguards and retire them. If the opponent does not – or cannot – they can’t guard. At all. Best case: this card wins you the game out of nowhere. Worst case: you get a huge advantage and tempo swing. I’ve played against decks using this card. You have to spend the entire game playing around it, just to not instant lose. Note that the deck typically has many other ways of retiring, so you have to commit so hard to stop it. And even once you’ve done that, you may simply not have the cards in hand to guard anyway, considering the power boost. It also entirely invalidated a mechanic: resist. Resist prevented cards from being chosen by opponents’ effects – Diablo makes the opponent choose cards. Have any rearguards with resist? Well, that’s one less card on the field as far as Diablo is concerned! What a fun fucking game.
A very specific result of many of these gameplay problems is grade 1 rush. I won’t go into too much detail, as there’s a lot of maths and detailed knowledge about the game to explain it (I made a… controversial post on reddit about it if you’d like to know more), but the gist is there’s a strong argument to suggest it mathematically solves the game. Grade 1 rush involves a deck that doesn’t ride beyond grade 1, throwing down a full field and hurling out attacks ASAP. Given the right setup (and most grade 1 rush decks are obviously designed to get that setup as consistently as possible), you can expect to win on turn 4 on average.
You deny your opponent stride and legion, likely forcing your opponent into a vanilla game. You never get gradestuck (if your opponent does it’s basically a free win). You’re almost always guaranteed to have a playable hand. You can guard surprisingly well. It has an unbelievable amount going for it. No wonder then that Seven Seas rush (by far the strongest, and so strong it survived multiple nerfs through banning) won last year’s world’s – in fact, the final was a goddamn mirror match. Of course, they’re not fun or interesting decks – your strategy really is just “hit the vanguard until they die” tuned to the logical extreme of aggro, and you go so fast that your opponent doesn’t have time to do anything (if they haven’t been locked out by the grade stalling already) – but they win. They’re also dirt cheap. They have a high success rate and they’re incredibly accessible, so you’d think they’d have destroyed the game by now, but that has turned out to be the case.
They never really caught on, for several reasons. First: like I say, they aren’t fun. Unless you only care about winning, there’s little appeal in playing them long term. Second: chance is still a significant enough factor that there’s a hard limit on the winrate outside of Seven Seas – some 60% or so, by estimation. Third: the community… well, that’s best left until a bit later. Let’s just say they didn’t take kindly to it, or the people pushing it.
In either case, grade 1 rush makes ‘competitive’ Vanguard a joke and reveals just how fundamentally flawed the mechanics of the game are.
Deckbuilding is, for many people, one of the most enjoyable parts of card games. It’s a way to assert your creativity and personality on the game, to explore and discover interesting and novel strategies, and a well-crafted deck is often a source of pride for the player in question. So of course deckbuilding in Vanguard fucking sucks. It began with heavy limitations and has only become more linear and uncreative as time went on. Let’s walkthrough the construction of a typical deck.
In the 50 card deck, you can have a maximum of 4 copies of any card. You must have 16 trigger units (all of which are grade 0) and there are only 4 types – heal, critical, draw and stand. 4 heals are standard, and the vast majority of decks are perfectly optimal running 12 criticals. Draws are a trap (they have reduced shield value offsetting the benefit of the plus), stands are circumstantial, and crits win games, leaving 4 heal/12 crit being what most decks want. Note that most triggers don’t have skills, so what we’ve done is already used up a third of our deck on vanilla cards. Great start!
Of our 34 cards, one must be our starting vanguard. Now, while there are a couple of trigger units that can function as a starting vanguard, they suck; we want a purpose built one. What you’d choose will obviously depend on the rest of the deck, but even in the best case there are usually only 3 viable options; more often than not, the best starting vanguard is obvious. Now we have to choose cards for our main deck. We obviously want to max out copies where we can, so that would be 33/4 = 9 unique cards.
If you don’t run 4 perfect guards you are a bad player. There’s some choice that can be made there, as many now have skills (they used to be all identical) but again you’re choosing between about 3 options. If you’re planning on striding (which, let’s face it, you are), you’ll also want 3 or 4 stride fodder cards (counts as grade 3 when discard for stride). That’s another choice effectively made for us.
So we get to choose 7 whole unique cards. Amazing! Oh, but it’s not entirely a free choice – remember the grade ratio I mentioned earlier? 8-11-14? That means our choice of 7 is actually a choice of 2 grade 3s, 3 grade 2s and 2 grade 1s (perfect guards and stride fodder are all grade 1s, counting for 2). So much scope for inventiveness! They do say restriction breeds creativity after all… right?
This game revolves around archetypes to a heavy degree nowadays. You don’t play a Bermuda Triangle deck, you play PRISMs, or Duos, or Harmony, or Pacifica, or whatever, each with their own tailor-made support that is (usually) significantly better than generic alternatives. As a result, card choices are painfully obvious. As soon as you choose your archetype your grade 3s are usually chosen for you – they’re typically the ‘boss’ cards around which the archetype revolves. When there are multiple options, it doesn’t take a close comparison to figure out which one’s best (hint: usually the newest one). Grade 2s and the remaining grade 1s are where the real choices are made, but only for larger archetypes. If you play a smaller one then the designed synergies become inescapable.
Something I haven’t really noted is that the card pool is divided into ‘clans’ – 24 in total. You can’t mix clans in a deck (reducing deck-building scope) and if you don’t play one of the main clans your options are much reduced. Because while the main clans get support every other release or so (what with essentially being pushed by the anime), the secondary ones get support far less frequently (and with less consistent quality). Net effect being that the obviously good cards have even less competition.
In short, Vanguard deckbuilding is severely limited. Novel decks that go outside the obvious design are rare, and when they do exist it’s usually in service of some degenerate infinite power combo because of an interaction the designers overlooked. The idea of an obscure, unintuitive but powerful deck waiting to be discovered simply doesn’t exist; there are too few viable cards for any given deck and too few deck slots to make it work. The game would rather shoehorn you down pre-fabricated synergies than allow you to discover your own – and it’s mostly as a consequence of questionable design decisions.
I guess we should now talk about Bushiroad’s continued handling of the game instead of the flaws baked into the design. Because you better believe that Bushiroad disappoint!
Power creep is an obvious one: the cards of today are significantly better than the cards of 2 years ago. Any card game without rotation will almost always fall prey to this – you need some way of deprecating old cards to encourage uptake of the new, and thanks to the clan system they can’t rotate out by sets as some players will be screwed over FAR more heavily than others. It’s almost impressive how rapidly the powerlevel rose in this game – it’s not to the level of Yu-Gi-Oh! yet, but it’s certainly on pace. There’s no point going into details, as it’s the same story as most other card games, and just as frustrating. It’s not fun watching swathes of your collection go from great to utterly useless. But I will say, the very rigid mechanics and fundamental strategy means that as power creep progresses the game gets even more swingy and chance reliant; a lower power level gave you more breathing room to eat damage, whereas now it can be positively game-ending.
Their organised play and approach to ‘competitive’ play does warrant more detail. I say ‘competitive’ in air-quotes because, as should be clear by now, this game is not suitable for that kind of play. The chance elements are far, far too high. That could be alleviated with sensible tournament structures that account for that – best of 3 and swiss for example – but Bushiroad don’t care. At least when I was paying attention to competitive play, best of 1 and double elimination were the rule – which is why I got knocked out after playing 2 games at regionals that one time (the bare minimum games possible). They say it’s because they want the event to be over quickly and a load of other bullshit, and the entire playerbase hates it. Just one of several ways Bushiroad demonstrates contempt for its players.
Healthy competitive play requires a banned and restricted list unless you are very good at design, and while Bushiroad does have one it’s not a great one. Instead of banning cards for being too powerful and skewing the overall balance, they just go with overuse. If a deck sees too much play at sanctioned events they ban cards to reduce its popularity. While that can help in the long run, it’s not exactly proactive and means degenerate decks stick around for a long time, and unpopular clans with broken decks tend to avoid nerfs. At least they quickly ban infinite combos when they emerge, I guess.
Besides, there’s little point in trying to play in official tournaments. The prize pool is non-existent – a certificate and maybe a unique hot-stamped promo is your lot. It’s a joke! I’m not asking for cash rewards, just something more than bragging rights! Making it even more hilarious is that despite the lack of reward, despite the terrible tournament structure, despite the absurd levels of chance screwing you over, the prices for singles are ridiculous. Not quite Magic or YGO level, but certainly up there and certainly beyond any justified realm. This is a casual game you pay competitive prices for – save your money and pick up something else.
Bushiroad’s design and balance of the clans is all over the place; support is often hideously uneven.
For example, I main Bermuda Triangle. They’re special, in that they only appear in sets dedicated to them, and there’s only one such set a year. This means they need really good support to keep them competitive for the duration of the year. The past two years they received garbage. Blessing of Divas was actual trash, one of the worst sets they’ve ever released – it almost pushed me to quit there and then. Prismatic Divas was better but the cards were spread too thin between the 7 or 8 archetypes featured, and the new archetype, Chouchou, was massively under-developed. And thinking back, Academy of Divas wasn’t great either – it was just that Olyvia and Spica were legit (so maybe it should be three years).
Oracle Think Tank had it even worse – at least Bermuda Triangle had PRISMs, which were legitimately competitive. OTT have been a joke for years – Bushiroad actually commented on how badly they’ve been treated earlier this year by stating that they would just… go ahead and make them powerful. And they did. There’s something about just openly, brazenly stating “we’re going to give this clan almost broken cards because we just haven’t bothered before” that rubs me the wrong way.
Gear Chronicle are an interesting example – when they were introduced, they were basically a worse Kagero. This continued until they were tier 1, at which point they remained tier 1 for the rest of time. It’s just… bizarre how Bushiroad can actively, consciously decide to make a clan extremely powerful and just do that without thinking that maybe that approach is an unhealthy approach to design.
Now why would this happen? Why would there be such a huge (and remarkably consistent) disparity between clans? Especially when they demonstrate that they can make a clan good if they choose to? Because there are – or at least, it is commonly speculated that there are – multiple teams working on the design, and they do not coordinate at all. They don’t even appear to have the same design philosophy; there’s at least one team more interested in creating weird and interesting cards without any idea how to make them good, leaving the clan hugely uncompetitive. Bermuda Triangle seem to be tackled by this team, and maybe OTT were. Pale Moon definitely are, as handily demonstrated by the Rummy Labyrinth booster set. That set was dedicated to Pale Moon and Granblue, and the tremendous difference in card quality made it a joke. Granblue’s already high competitive standing was boosted further; Pale Moon just got more tools to not win with. About 2 of the Pale Moon cards in that set saw play, and the difference in prices between their higher rarities is hilarious.
And thanks to Bushi’s announcement about OTT, we now know they have clans they care about (main character clans and surprisingly popular ones) and ones they don’t (the rest), and the ones they care about will inevitably get the good support. It’s fucking obvious. But honestly, what do you expect? They have to juggle 24 clans. That is WAY too many! Even assuming a perfect split, that’s like a year’s worth of playable cards for a clan every 2 weeks! No wonder something like this has happened.
They should never have created that many clans. They have proven they cannot support and balance them all equally, nor give each of them a deep card pool. The worst part is that there is so much redundancy – nothing is gained by having that many clans other than a wide range of aesthetics. Royal Paladin and Gold Paladin really don’t differ much, and the divide has always struck me as unjustified. Megacolony for the longest time were a worse Link Joker, and even now the two could be merged and it would mechanical make sense. Kagero and Narukami are not distinct enough in my eyes, and Aqua Force and Nova Grappler are also too similar (except that only the former get good decks). The more you look at this game, the more you wonder what Bushiroad were ever thinking. At every level, the design is questionable.
And finally, because this has gone on for over 6000 words now, the online community. Not Bushiroad’s fault! I’m not blaming them or the game for this one! But it is yet another reason to stay away from Vanguard. The online community is, for the most part, trash. Immature and childish, it’s what you should reasonably expect from an anime-as-heck children’s card game populated by ex-Yu-Gi-Oh! players – actual children, edgy, chuuni teens and adults-in-name-only. This of course doesn’t apply to everybody – this is hopefully obvious, as it is a large community spread out over many places – but it’s the impression one inevitably walks away with when looking at toxic, popular shitholes like Pojo and the wikia.
It’s not just that they’re unpleasant, but that they’re also bad players. People reject maths and objective, well-reasoned findings in favour of personal bias and groupthink to a huge extent. The overwhelming hatred of the website V-Mundi is the perfect example. V-Mundi was what helped me find my ‘competitive’ bearings in the game, and I rode their lessons to the fucking bank. For what little it counts, I was one of the top players at my locals despite not playing T1 decks because of the fundamental mathematics V-Mundi wrote about years ago that everyone else fanatically rejects.
Crits are the best trigger, and draws are imaginary advantage? Nope, rubbish! Tournament results are meaningless, as high levels of unfactored chance and over-representation of popular decks means they don’t necessarily reflect their actual quality? Bullshit, everyone knows that if a deck tops in Japan once it means it’s T1. Grade 1 rush being good? We refuse with hideously flawed logic. Now, I will happily admit that a lot of V-Mundi’s reputation is its own fault – Alice, the admin, can be an arrogant, unpleasant shit and that attitude filtered down to a lot of the regulars, and nobody likes someone saying that only they’re right. They were just as toxic as everybody else (although the community was much smaller, so it didn’t flare up as often), but V-Mundi at least put in the fucking effort. They ran the numbers, they did extensive playtesting, they showed their working, and when Alice caught a regular basically fabricating results she banned him. They took this dumb game seriously. But because others didn’t like what they had to say, everyone rejected everything they said. Hell, some actively did the opposite… to spite them? I don’t know. The reaction against them was disproportionate and really highlights the immaturity and non-competitiveness of the game. Fuck, if V-Mundi said “breathing is a good idea” a significant portion of the playerbase would suffocate.
Maybe making a game with a very low skill floor and a high chance factor allowing for easy, undeserved wins was a mistake. When most of your players think they’re hotshit because your game requires no skill, it’s no wonder they’ll all start acting like they know what they’re talking about.
It wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t offer some praise, and there are definitely some very good things about Vanguard. Not enough to justify playing, but certainly worth noting.
This is a great game for players new to card games, disregarding price. It’s easy to learn and encourages highly synergistic decks, which gets you thinking about deck construction in the right way. The shield mechanic teaches the importance of card advantage in a brilliantly straightforward fashion. The low skill floor makes it very accessible, and the high chance factor levels the playing field allowing beginners to get some wins against better players. At the start, it is good, easy fun, and while I can’t get any value out of it anymore, it set me on the path that lead to discovering Netrunner and Legend of the Five Rings, both of which I adore.
For all my complaining about the core design, there are kernels of genius ideas there. The drive check mechanic is a brilliant way of making games faster and adding consistency, while also not making it too powerful as a bunch of your hand has been revealed (adding a dimension of skill – remembering what you’ve seen and what’s been played). The mistake there was mostly the implementation of triggers, which are too powerful and took away too much from deck-building.
And were it not for the chance factor, the ride mechanic would be a sublimely brilliant piece of design. Riding forces a minimum number of turns, ensuring early/mid/late subgames develop and denying the entire existence of first-turn kills; it provides a sense of growth and scale to your board presence, creating a natural power curve; and it provides you with resources at a reasonable rate by making use of the existing vanguard in the form of the soul. I have never seen any game so elegantly handle pacing, power growth and resource generation in such a simple, elegant, self-contained and evocative manner – the interplay between riding and the soul still blows me away.
Damage is similar – as you get closer to losing more resources open up to you, allowing you to make bigger plays to push back with. It is so very anti rich-get-richer, in some cases making it better to (strategically) take more damage! Counterblast is the perfect name for it. But again, the chances elements hurt it.
Despite the large number of clans being a problem for the health of the game, it has allowed for a tremendous variety of aesthetics, be they beautiful, goofy or chuuni-as-fuck. Sure, a bunch of them boil down to ‘knights and dragons’, but existing alongside them we have medical angels, a megacorporation of Japanese spirits and deities, furry university, obligatory zombie pirates, gangster bugs, literally the insane clown posse, demonic American footballers, and cyber dinosaurs. Like steampunk? Gear Chronicle’s the clan for you. A fan of the holy trifecta of mecha, kaiju and tokusatsu? Check out Dimension Police. Colossal weeaboo? Bermuda Triangle with their mermaid idols has you covered.
And then there’s Neo Nectar. While not my main clan, they were always my favourite aesthetically. Flower maidens, dryads, and forest dragons, they had such a beautiful, delicate look to them and would often receive gorgeous art. And within them is the Musketeers archetype. They represent such an inspired update on the hideously clichéd wood elves while capturing their spirit: they remain skilful at range, only their bows and arrows have been replaced by muskets; clothing is now impeccably stylish while still allowing for a ton of floral influences and motifs; and their status as protectorates of the forest is as unambiguous as ever. They are so fucking cool and I’m surprised nobody thought to do something like that sooner.
And that’s that. Maybe there’s more I could have said, there’s probably stuff I missed, and no doubt there are inaccuracies, but I don’t care anymore. I wanted to get all this off my chest so I can say that I am finally done. My investment in this game is over. I hope you found this post – all 7,500ish words of it – to be somewhat interesting, even it is rambling. Vanguard is a compelling case study in bad design – it’s good enough that you won’t notice the problems for a long while, but once you do the whole thing comes crashing down. It makes so many terrible mistakes, but a lot of them are subtle or even non-existent in isolation.
Suffice to say, I don’t recommend it. Not when there are so many other games out there that offer much, much more rewarding experiences.
tl;dr: game sux lol
I know this article was written around two years ago, but a lot of it still holds up entirely and it resonates with me as someone who is on the way out (as soon as I find the best way to offload all of my cardfight stuff). I hate breaking it to my friends, but I can’t really pretend like this game isn’t one of the most inherently flawed TCGs I’ve ever played. Just because I have so many warm and fond memories of it with my friends (and is how I met a lot of friends too) doesn’t mean I can overlook all of the problems with how things unfold in the game. I get that all card games have variance and luck to a degree, but the disgusting swingy-ness of triggers and when they’re checked is just SO un-fun after having played for years. Win or lose, I feel disgusting taking a tournament win because, “aw shucks, I pulled two critical triggers when you were at three damage! a-hyuck!” like…that shouldn’t be possible. There shouldn’t be this much reliance on a factor completely outside of your control that makes or breaks your success in a game like this. I could ramble more, but I really appreciate you outlining pretty much everything that has been in my head about this game lately.
I 100% agree with everything you said. Each and every problem Vanguard had boils down to two things. The reason of its inception, and the one who granted it. 1) Inception- the team who developed CFV are a combination of ex-Duel Master designer/Developer and the people behind Yu-Gi-Oh R. Its not the exact thing they said, but what they said boils down to simply they are not satisfied of how Yu-Gi-Oh and DuelMasters had been. For short, they made this game OUT OF SPITE FOR YUGIOH AND DUEL MASTERS. Anything made out of spite is lacking of Humility, and can have certain amount of arrogance in it. Evident enough with their card design that is almost anti-Yugioh. Where ad Yugioh as the time of Vanguard’s inception where mystic or medieval in Eisthetics, Vanguard was Quazi Technological. They spite Yu-Gi-Oh for its lack of Cost System, its over consistency and its FTKs, while spiting DuelMasters for devolving into a game of total powercreep, not realizing they produced a worst combination of both.
2)the one who granted their inception: BUSHIROAD. For all intent and purposes, Bushiroad is a Trading Card Company, NOT A GAMING COMPANY. You can only play with their cards, but their specialty is making cards you want TO COLLECT. That is why their poster girl TCG was Weiss Zwarz(I can’t be bothered spelling it correctly). In Wiez, each set represent a different anime, with only atleast a single Starter deck and 1 set of booster. No set can be mixed as each represent a different anime entirely. You should see the problem with this in just that. They were never a card company that COMMIT to a card game, Bushiroad was known to make 1 shot cardgames that just die IN A YEAR. Cardfight Vanguard was rumored to be the first they had that Lasted this long, because they never expected it to last this long, because THEY NEVER INTENDED IT TO LAST THIS LONG. Rumores said that Vanguard was intended to end with the first arc, that is why so far, it is thr only arc that is quite solid storywise. It was unexpectedly been too popular to the public, and so they extended it with the new season. And the rest is history. That is why the clans where repetitive and almost only different by name. The reason why Royal Paladin, Mega Colony, Oracle Think Tank, Nova Grapler, Nubatama, Spike Brothers, Tachikaze, Dimension Police, and Shadow Paladins and other season 1 clans seems to be the only one to have distinct characteristics of their own, because those were basically the only one the first pioneers were ever designed. Everything else after that were designed by Bushiroad as fodders. Hence they feel repetitive and un inspired. For how much we ditch Yu-Gi-Oh, at least Konami has a pedigree as a a legit Game Developer(Though they suck too), that is why for how much brocken the meta was, it still retains an sense of coherency and game design standard. Older archetype gets supported. Older cards can become viable again. There are so many ways to pull a win. And each archetype has a unique distinction of gameplay on their own. Bushiroad Lacks that, because THEY ARE A TRADING CARD COMPANY, not a GAMING COMPANY. And i was saying this, they just canceled luck and logic, a half bake card game they made. I remember they did some other TCG too, who never take off around 2018, but it never do any impact hence its not even worth remembering.
So what I’m hearing is, you sucked & you rage quit lol
The mechanics do not feel rewarding tried the game out only to get a big slap in the face by the damn game rewarding my opponent with nearly 2 or 3 crit triggers on their turn and draw or heal triggers on my turn. This would happen excessively while I couldn’t even get a single damn trigger and if I did the triggers were crit triggers when it wasn’t my turn the heal triggers almost at the very start of the match waisted because I haven’t even toke damage. The triggers in this game are a fluke and shows no consideration. I stopped playing after my friend triggered 3 over triggers on me in 3 different matches in a row while I was barely getting cards because my triggers were no where to find except for that one heal in one match at the very start of the match. Players will say that the game is ment so everyone can at least win at it so long as you can deck build but it sure doesn’t feel like it. Feels like the game is giving me a middle finger! After coming out with 1 win vs 14 loses you’d be thinking to defend the game if you are one of the die hard fans “shouldn’t he have learned something at least maybe from his mistakes?” Nope even my friend said my decks were decent or done well, I was playing the game exactly how it’s attended even in his own words being a player of the series for years and getting experience “sorry bud I don’t know why the game is just giving you the middle finger” it started feeling less and less fun realizing that I am always going to lose due to mechanics.