This Space
For Rent

Don’t Panic About Mixing Clans
(Too Much)

It isn’t just limited to your own imagination. There are in fact other limits.

I was going to upload a completely different topic but current affairs dictates I stay somewhat relevant and make this instead. Thank you, Vanguard player base, for staving off my writer’s block for another week.

An email from Bushiroad recently confirmed that mixing different clans in a deck is disallowed in legal tournament play unless stated otherwise as of March 30^th . Before the announcement, this has caused several people to completely lose their shit thinking about potentially unexplored possibly broken combos to exploit. All the endless possibilities. The only limit is your imagination.

Or is it?

Depending on what gets released, I, and I’m sure a lot of players, will think about older stuff before deciding if it should be ignored or mixed with other stuff to bring out more of its potential. And it’s the older stuff that’s going to limit what can be reasonably played and what can’t.

Think about it. Until Fighter’s Collection 2014 when Bushiroad decided to cut the middleman (and wasted ink), almost every card with a good skill required having a Vanguard of a certain clan, or sacking cards of a certain deck type or clan to activate. And so, for the sake of consistency of these decks, you would basically be limited to having to run lots of that type of card just for those sorts of skills. And it’s not as though the reprints got errata’d to remove these limits.

No, as far as mixing clans go, I wouldn’t really panic. Before the runaway power creep train, mixing clans was for the ones who didn’t have enough support to run mono, like Nubatama pre BT13. Even now, even if you could mix clans I don’t see why one would reasonably want to. Many would point to the infamous Thing/Abyss deck as an example. Popularity however was never an indicator of quality to me, and if you looked at it carefully it’s just a deck aiming to generate enough soul for two shots at Thing Saver except in an overly-complicated and sometimes inconsistent way. Kill Wingal Brave and the deck is fucked. And it did nothing mechanically that a pure Seekers or pure Revengers build couldn’t reasonably duplicate.

I also don’t believe that there are enough people with enough imagination to actually build a hybrid that was strictly better than a mono-build. It’s not really like Yu-Gi-Oh! where a lot of the deck ideas can be hybridised because there are a shit-ton of universal cards that are helpful no matter where they are. Vanguard’s more situational than that.

It’s largely just down to the fact that most of the cards that would aid in setting up whatever big bad boss you want to abuse next already belong to the same clan as the boss card. Occasionally you’ll have one or two people who use the most recent support that’s not clan restricted in a completely different deck, but most of the time it’s basically just that one card splashed into an otherwise reasonably pure deck. Flavour’s essentially the same, but you can tell they’ve added the shaving of a rhinoceros horn to it.

In fact, just about the only deck I can think of that mixes at least 2 clans together and comes out better than mono-decks like it is Lambrose/Extreme Battlers. This is not simply Extreme Battlers with Lambrose, in case you’re wondering. It incorporates other cards such as Famous Doctor, Big Belly and Magnum Assault because they synergise surprisingly well. Now this is actually a powerful build, but I wouldn’t say that this alone would open the floodgates to other decks like it. There’s a lot to be said for originality but it doesn’t mean that it would actually hold up when placed in a controlled testing environment. Certainly, originality in Vanguard isn’t really something that’s especially NEEDED anyway. I could drone on about how certain strategies are more optimal than others all day so why fix what currently isn’t broke, right? My deck’s just the result of a happy accident, anyway.

So if these really were the directions in which the game would have progressed if Bushi hadn’t listened to their playerbase, as is pretty standard M.O, at worst, I can only really see people mixing up their G-Zone and just fucking the concept of Cray Elemental in its dirty little hole by being able to drop a Chronoscommand or something no matter what you run. Assuming your ace lacks Lord or isn’t a BT05-BT08 card. And I suppose that could blow the price up a bit but that relies on everyone else realising the same thing and making adjustments. Which is giving the Vanguard player base a bit too much credit. Unless they simultaneously asked for my Extreme Lambrose build and bandwagoned the shit out of it.

So it isn’t “just limited to my imagination”. I could say that if I was to design a dildo for my own use, it wouldn’t be JUST limited to my imagination. I’m fairly sure the size of my anus would play a noticeable role in it too.

Anyone who got that reference drop me a line at saikyocardfighter@outlook.com