Basic Deck Construction Tips...

Latest Article! Third in the series! Basic basic deck construction tips...

Ok, so now that you had hopefully listened to me and protected all your cards, what do you do? Yup! You play the game. And how are you going to play the game of Cardfight! Vanguard? You will need your personal deck!(of course you can play the game using a trial deck, but the fun in trading card games is in the variety of decks that you can play. Part of the fun is in playing using a your own personal deck!) A deck that reflects your play style, a deck that tells people who you are!

Now, I am not a cardfight! expert, so I am just sharing with you what I know. If you disagree or think that you have better experiences or viewpoints, do share them in the comments section below!

So here are some basic deck construction rules that you need to know before making your own deck. These are all found in the rule book that comes along with the trial decks. A deck needs to have exactly 50 cards. No more, no less. It must contain exactly 16 triggers with a maximum of 4 of them being heal triggers. That's it. That's the basic requirement of a deck. The rest of the cards can be anything provided that they are not triggers. However, you can't really do anything with a mish-mash of cards with 16 triggers right?

A typical deck will consist of about 17 grade 0s, 14 grade 1s, 11 grade 2s and 8 grade 3s. The actual numbers will vary according to the type of deck that you are making. A spike brothers deck may contain up to 11 grade 3s and a granblue deck may contain up to 19 grade 0s. So how do you know how much of each grades do you need? By play testing your decks! If you find that you are not able to ride to a specific grade consistently, you might try adding in more of that grade. Having too many grade 3s and you may play like Morikawa!(If you had watched the anime....)

Another thing about deck building is try to have cards from the same clans in your deck. Do note that you can only resolve a trigger if the trigger card is of the same clans as one of your vanguard or rearguard, thus having too many cards from different clans may not be optimal. Most of the cards in cardfight! vanguard act synergistically with other cards of the same clan as well. So it would be a good idea to not mix clans too much. Of course this is not a hard and fast rule, about 1 or 2 playsets of different clan cards may be the maximum.

There are also cards that would work well together, such as cards referencing each other, so it may be a good idea to put them together in the same deck. Also there are sets of cards in an evolutionary lines, these cards may have the similar names or may feature a same character in the card art, albeit them getting stronger as the grade increases, these would generally be found in one deck as well.

So start making your deck with these very basic deck construction tips and then try play testing them. I'll talk about other deck construction techniques, like imagine!, magic numbers, triggers and others soon!