This Space
For Rent

More of the Same Bad Gambit Is Not a Solution 

Sometimes the bean surprise is just beans on top of beans.

I’m mentally bracing myself for some sort of shitstorm here because my new self-professed love for the new Brawler deck coming this January basically IS one gambit done several times at first. But I’m not here for that. I’m here to talk about why I’ve dismissed some of the new G decks as shit.

I say some and not all because props to a lot of it solving its old problems like doing more with their gambit in conjunction with the old strategy, such as G Angel Feather doing a pretty decent column game AND toolboxing. But for some decks, all they seem to be doing is trying to just the same old shit over and over in the hope that something will stick.

Take Oracle Think Tank for example (I’m using this example since pretty much every pro acknowledges this and it’s easy to understand). It is agreed that if Silent Tom were to somehow fuck off and be banned tomorrow then the entire deck as a concept would go straight to hell. It would lose its only decent finisher and whatever advantage it grabbed would mostly be shat on by anything that can garner as much advantage back AND something else.

The problem here is mechanics. Each clan seeks to exploit one or more mechanics to win. We then start to encounter problems once people realise that there are only two end goals to whatever it is we’re doing: more of a card gap or more damage. And because of whatever mechanic a deck exploits, if it cannot translate it into something else meaningful, they’re stuck. Something like Shadow Paladin for example: Revengers can retire things, pack at least 2 re-standing Vanguards, can call new allies from the deck, etc. All in all in terms of initial card advantage it sounds like it is doing not much different from OTT, but then it takes whatever it gains and then proceeds to do…whatever it damn well WANTS to do. OTT on the other hand can only garner hand specifically to tank against heavy hitters and maybe get a new field down against field-fuck decks.

Just one of the reasons G Gold Paladin sort of fails on a fundamental level to almost everything, really.

Flexibility when it matters is always welcome. Back in the old days (particularly in the Crossride meta) every deck had to be geared towards fighting them and so almost every deck choice was largely the same. Whatever cards were unique were the G3s and whatever techs they could spare. If these decks were basically homogenised then it would basically boil down to whatever managed to sack first, since each gambit had similar end results. But that’s rarely the case assuming controlled skill, since in theory whatever has the most dominant strategy should take the game the most often. And anything that only does one thing with almost nothing to show for it afterwards doesn’t really strike me as dominant. Field filling strategies that don’t do anything with their field are pretty notorious for this. Anything that can basically have its shit ruined by entering a contest of vanilla with the enemy is going to get steamrolled unless it can do something else (G-BT04 Neo Nectar did wonders to pull its socks up).

On that note, remember how there is basically no good foreseeable Kagero for anything ever? Well, at the time, yes, I suppose I could have been grateful for the lack of any riff-raff that could make me overhaul my deck, but that was before, when everything else in terms of G Support was fairly fresh and almost everything was pretty vulnerable to retirement. Now, the most recent G Support was more retiring, and when it wasn’t it was crap GB1s that did nothing useful. For fuck’s sake people, where’s our Stride Fusion and/or Glimmer Breath clone? For that reason the only Kagero deck that worked (and to be brutally honest is still the only one) was Overlord, because that at least had something else to do and was capable of early kills sometimes.

That may not have been Kagero’s fault though. It got relegated to a minor clan and of course Gear Chronicle would have had the largest pool of viable cards, if only because it got so many that were relevant to its meta. What I have beef with are clans that continue to do their crap and don’t make any attempt to solve whatever problems it has. Well, more specifically G OTT, since G-Booster 5 offers a lot to each of the clans and old decks it supports, whereas they’re going to get a keyword and stuff working with that keyword but otherwise it’s more of the same shit as before.

Actually, that reminds me of something. The Fighter’s Collection cards that have been coming out lately. I’m definitely against crap nostalgia as you may or may not remember, but I fucking hate cards that are token and don’t do anything to help relative to the new meta. The upcoming Seal Dragon support for example is flogging a fucking dead horse, the latest in many flogs and many horses (Legion Era and Limit Break Era) and a lot of it looks like it’s basically just doing the same as before. I hate it for what it represents: it assumes that we’re going to be fucking morons and pay for something that is in practice inferior to other options available to us. We (or I at the very least) won’t be fooled. Metas exist in Vanguard now and dishonourable people like me will exploit the ever loving shit out of idiots who don’t know any better because not every gambit is equal. Some are more equal than others.

It’s all basically going to boil down as to whether the rear-guards are going to actually start pulling any weight once crunch time hits. Are they going to allow you to win, or just stop you from losing? If it’s the latter then your deck is probably not going to be good at what it does and you need to change to something faster, in which case, sure, you may be an exception to the people who complain about GB1 being too slow.

Then again if you had that much self-awareness from the start you wouldn’t have been running that deck in the first place now would you.

Ask if in my heart I desperately yearn for Seal Dragons to not be shit at saikyocardfighter@outlook.com

Tell me brownies with nuts are the only kinds to have at saikyocardfighter@outlook.com