The Superior Call: March 2015

15 March, 2015

Silverthorn Victorious

Yesterday counted as a "money where your mouth is" day with the first local tournament of stride era and after all the theory craft put into my Silver Thorn deck I was going in to the 16 man event ready to crush and come top of the pile.

Format for the day was 4 rounds swiss draw (best of 3) then a cut-off to top 8 for single round elimination and as anticipated, almost everyone was running a shiny new stride deck. Matchups for the day were as follows:

Swiss

Royal Stride (1-2) - The only match set loss for the day as I died on the backswing after my opponent 6th damage healed on the first attack and I proceeded to get no triggers from my Atmos Stride. The cross-ride from Luquier really goes a long way to hampering the Royal tide of superior called attacks
Aqua Force (2-0) - Easy matchup vs one of the young local players.
Nova Grappler Stride (2-0) - Got some good aggressive hands to deplete his field and hand early leaving him with nothing to stride with.
Nova Grappler Stride (2-1) - Longer more drawn out games due to rides of 8K and 10K vanillas which slows the aggression right down.

Single Elimination

Nova Grappler Stride (Win) - Very tough game here but managed to last out vs 3 stride attacks, deliberately keeping him off enough counterblast to use his second Victoplasma.
Jewel Knights (Win) - Hit a perfect hand and won before my opponent got to grade 3.
Gear Chronicle Stride (Win) - Again my deck got slowed down by the 8K/10K rides but the cross ride gives a great late game advantage against all the guard restrictions. He hit 3 of his draw triggers early to give a great hand advantage but my high power columns slowly whittled that down. Ended up all-in on the final turn but got the win.

Was hoping to come up against the Neo and Kagero stride decks that were about too but luck of the draw and all that saw me facing a spam of Nova Grappler. The key things i want to pull out from the days deck test though were:

Out of 13 games i never needed to G-Assist to hit my grade 3's. Theory says I should have needed to once or twice but in practice, running 6 grade 3's worked well in keeping the deck aggressive but reliable.
I saw spare grade 3's enough that over those games I got to stride 3 times. Each time the attack got hit by a Perfect Guard so definitely don't be wasting counterblast on Atmos unless your back is against the wall.
The Nova starter needs to die... horribly... in fire. Having no retire skills can certainly get frustrating for a deck.
The Silverthorns themselves were very soul hungry, so much so that i'm likely going to tweak it a bit to get Irina in the deck instead of the 10K attacker.

06 March, 2015

G-BT-01 Set Overview

The first full set for Vanguard G launches in the UK this Friday. As each new set launches for the season i will pull out individual cards or mechanics that personally interest me and may just get you thinking about things in a way you never expected.

At a quick glance, G-BT-01 is a great cover off for new players entering the game, giving access to the rudimentary basics of the five core strategies:

Abrasion - Covered off in a halfway decent manner by Royals and their battle phase superior calling.
Power - Ironically given by Nova Grapplers and their re-standing stride unit Victoplasma.
Defense - Fueled by the draw power of OTT
Disruption - With Kagero providing the most efficient back row retires
Penetration - Gear Chronicle having a pseudo Silent Tom and guard restriction skills on their vanguards.

As a first set, it's rather well designed and balanced in this regard, however because this framework needs to be set in place, very few cards in the set actually stand out as doing anything new that wasn't already strategically available to players in the original series of Vanguard. The biggest potential within the whole set actually rather deceptively sits within the new Oracle Think Tank shell.

So what's so different? Oracle Think Tank (or OTT) have always been a clan focused purely on drawing cards however for a long time it's been proven that simply drawing a large volume of cards isn't enough to be a winning strategy. The Magus line and to an extent the original Amaterasu attempted to help out OTT players by giving a preview of cards they would draw and allowing some degree of card filtering but it became overly complicated.

Stride Generation has heavily moved this clan on by allowing OTT players to check multiple cards from the top of the deck and select the one that is most relevant to draw. For anyone who has played Magic The Gathering, this ability to filter your draws and dig deep into your deck is exceptionally powerful as it allows a player to reliably search for powerful combinations of cards that can win games together.

Here in Vanguard, this increases the defensive power of the clan as you are able to dig for your perfect guards and then play an outlast game. That however is not using the ability to its full potential as you ideally want to be finding an aggressive combo that lets you win rather than just bolstering your defense. To date OTT lack that combo, however my locals are deciding to hold extreme fight events so i'm rather looking forward to throwing the Nubatama Legion into the OTT shell to create what might be the first Defence/Penetration cross strategy deck.

Two more things from the set stand out from among the rest for me:

1, PG-G's or the new style of sentinels. With the cost of abilities generally stabilizing out to the point where 1 counterblast gets you 1 cards worth of value, having sentinels unflip a point of damage later in the game essentially nets out the cost of discarding. For extreme fight players, the removal of restriction on your vanguard needing to be of the same clan for the sentinel to work is just even more wonderful.

2, Trigger unit abilities

There has been a significant jump in the power of triggers that have abilities within the new G series. Not only do they now look to be going back into the deck to improve your drive check odds rather than vanishing to the soul, but doing so now gives much stronger benefits.

Before, trigger abilities were a way to gain a minor offensive edge, turning a defensive card into some more punch if you had pulled ahead or were in a desperate corner. You could generally value it at being a gain of around half a card on the attack. Now the abilities most definitely net you a whole cards worth of benefit and in the right situation can be worth even more. I greatly look forward to seeing what new trigger abilities come out in the future.

01 March, 2015

Taking Silverthorn into G-era

So after all this game theory, it's time to drill it down and put it into practical application. Going into the release of G-BT-01 it's essential that you prepare your deck to face both Stride and Legion as the meta will be full of it. With that in mind I settled on the following priorities for my chosen deck:

I definitely want to be playing an abrasion deck and go aggressive in order to put stride decks under heavy pressure and fully take advantage of the benefits of G-assist.
I will need a good amount of draw power in order to hit my perfect guards reliably to protect me against stride.
With Kagero and Gear Chronicle both about, I will also want to be playing a deck that is resilient to retire - in particular I need to be able to recover my field if ever Chronos Command manages to hit.

From all of those criteria I have settled on an updated Silver Thorn deck to take me into G-BT-01. Back in BT-15 it was one of the most powerful early game decks and the ability of Dragon Empress Luquier to recover the full field if required is heavily appealing.

The basic Cray Elemental stride units add a lot to the deck as its main weakness was a lack of finishing power, now with stride, that problem is heavily reduced and if you lack the cards in hand to stride you still have Upright Lion to create a large attack with. So let's take the basic Silver Thorn deck template from BT-15 by taking Jeremie Raso's winning deck from France's regional qualifiers:

Grade 3

4x Silver Thorn Dragon Empress, Venus Luquier

2x Silver Thorn Dragon Tamer, Luquier

2x Miracle Pop, Eva

Grade 2

4x Silver Thorn Beast Tamer, Maricica

4x Silver Thorn, Upright Lion

3x Silver Thorn, Rising Dragon

Grade 1

4x Silver Thorn Hypnos, Lydia

4x Silver Thorn Beast Tamer, Ana

4x Silver Thorn Assistant, Zelma

2x Silver Thorn, Breathing Dragon

Grade 0

1x Silver Thorn Beast Tamer, Emile

4x Silver Thorn Juggler, Nadia (Heal)

4x Silver Thorn Beast Tamer, Serge (Stand)

4x Silver Thron, Barking Dragon (Crit)

2x Poison Juggler (Crit)

2x Silver Thorn Marionette, Natasha (Draw)

First things first, we can cut the grade 3 count down to just six thanks to G-Assist so Miracle Pop is out, freeing up two slots in the deck.

The initial instinct with those two slots is to straight away go for a 4-4-4 split on the grade 2's and have one floating slot free. However i'm going to push a different route - the true power of Silver Thorns comes from the combination of Maricica/Ana and having a Zelma in the soul; if you lack Zelma, it doesn't work anywhere near as well so i want to boost the consistency of Zelma.

Two copies of Dancing Princess of the Night Sky will help with that consistency challenge by being able to force a Zelma in the soul for the cost of a counter-blast. Now counterblasts are at a bit of a premium in the deck, particularly if you have to ride the original Luquier but being able to make your core work is vital.

The final thing to review is the triggers as right now they are set up for almost pure offense - we do however need to hit our perfect guards so a little more draw power is desirable, as such the quantities of draw and stand trigger will switch to 4x draw and 2x stand. Finally as a matter of personal taste, the quantities of Upright Lion and Rising Dragon will also switch.

With the addition of some Cray Elementals in the G-Zone, this gives a final list of:

Grade 4

4x Heat Element, Magum

4x Miracle Element, Atmos