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.
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