Core Principles - Offence Strategies Part III - "Abrasion"

So far we have talked mostly about big powerful attacks, but it's entirely possible to win with small attacks too. A weak attack may be easy to stop, but each individual attack you make still takes at least one cards worth of guard to stop, enabling you to make up for power with just sheer quantity of attacks. Indeed it can and has been said that quantity has a quality all of its own.

When you first start playing Cardfight!! Vanguard it's easy for a player to divide their hand up into "offensive cards" consisting of your grade 1, 2 and 3's minus any sentinels and then "defensive cards" which will be mostly triggers and sentinels; indeed that is how many players would prefer their hand to play out. An abrasion strategy however aims to throw a major curve ball into that assumption.

With triggers being predominantly worth 10K in guard value, if you are able to break your attacks up into numerous smaller chunks that only require 5K shield each, you force the following decision on your opponent:

1. Use those 10K shields and waste large amounts of guard potential or...
2. Break into your offensive units to be able to use 5K shields instead.

Indeed an abrasion strategy will put the average opponent instantly on the back foot as you are able to either overwhelm their defence if they commit too many cards to the field, or be capable of crippling any early offensive momentum against you if they hold cards back to guard, as such it does exceptionally well in the early game and is one of the fastest offensive strategies you can get. So what does an abrasion deck look like? There are several key components...

A Quickly Filled Field

Your attacks are at their most effective early on, before your opponent has even had a chance to get much draw power or in-hand guard. Abrasion decks look to leverage this by getting as many early attacks in as possible and the best way to achieve this is to fill your front row with attackers as quickly as you can. For that reason, abrasion decks are either able to quickly and reliably call extra units to the field, or run unusual grade ratio's such as lower amounts of Grade 3's or sentinels in order to bulk up on early attackers.

Stand Ability

All abrasion decks will want to be able to get at least four attacks per turn in once at grade 3, though five, six or even more attacks of good quality is desirable. Stand triggers is one way of boosting your attack count over a game but is not reliable enough on its own; superior calling new attackers during your battle phase or having re-stand abilities in built is what you are after as per the examples below.

Not all decks need the vanguard to provide these abilities though as there are countless supporting rear-guards that further your aim. Aqua Force in particular specializes in rear-guards that provide extra volume of small attacks in order to trigger additional abilities on your vanguard.

Draw Power

Lots of attacks requires lots of units on the field - units that can always be blown up in retaliation. A good abrasion deck will always be backed up by a consistent draw engine that ensures the deck doesn't run out of steam in the late game against decks with retire abilities.

When you combine the early pressure of an abrasion strategy eating up your opponents grade 1 and 2 units, with an improved draw engine, you are also generally able to put up a solid defense of your own, making the abrasion strategy overall a fairly balanced one. With that in mind, when playing an abrasion deck you are able to focus on putting up the best assault at all times, holding nothing back.