Revisiting Cardfight Vanguard

Written by Ross Locksley on 21 Jun 2015

It's been a while since our last Cardfight Vanguard tournament, and with the addition of some new decks (not to mention the excellent Fighters Collection 2014) we had plenty to go at. 

The key players were myself (your humble publisher), James Taylor and Sophie Wales, long-time friends of the site. Sophie was new to Vanguard but James and I have played before, so the main aim of the tournament was to try out 3 new decks, 2 new sets of expansion cards and see if Sophie, as a newbie, could keep up! (actually she did better than I did!)

I can't emphasise enough how important it is to play with experienced players, or to watch one of the many Vanguard tutorials online. Most of the rules are straight-forward, but there are some nuances that require explanation. We're not going to get too technical in this article, but the official Youtube channel is a good place to start if you need help.

The first few games we played, we opted for some classic decks - I played with my Bermuda Triangle deck (can't beat a deck full of cute Mermaids... except somehow it always happens!) and Sophie played with a custom deck made up mostly of Pale Moon Circus cards (we aren't sticklers for not mixing decks!). James played with the Oracle Think Tank set.

Our newcomer picked up the rules pretty quickly, and even pulled off some advanced card calling techniques, trouncing my Bermuda Triangle deck. James' experience with Oracle paid off and he managed to batter her into submission quite quickly.

To make things more interesting, we dived into a set of Vanguard Fighters Collection 2014 booster cards, kindly provided to us by Esdevium - the Fighters Collection features only RRR cards and as such gives your existing decks a tremendous boost. There are only 3 cards to a booster pack instead of the usual 5, but you're paying for quality and our sets certainly delivered. I was very pleased to see Bermuda Triangle get some love (though only 1 card out of 37) with Duo Delicious Girl, Ciao in the box.

The core game remains fun and quite challenging. The fun of mixing a deck is still (in our opinion) equal to playing the game, and some of the booster packs I picked up from our local gaming shop proved very useful. All in, the game was as fun as we remembered, and we felt confident trying out the new set, Vanguard G.