Vanguard 101 : Being Advanced

Every newcomer feeling. right?

I'm actually pretty new to this game, been playing from the release of Set 12 or so.
During my early days, it is so hard to find myself a good source of newbie guides to be an advanced players as fast as possible.
Not until i read V-Mundi's Vanguard 101 Articles. read it here.
While the whole article was a good read, REAL GOOD one at that. Some people doesn't have the time and hearts to read all of them.
So, i'm trying to compile everything I took from V-Mundi and mustering all my knowledge and past experiences for creating a simple, straightforward article to help everyone advancing themselves.



1. Knowing the Basic.

Yes, it is normal for everyone to nt reading the manual.

As a new player, before playing competitively you need to understand the basic of Vanguard and learning the general rules to avoid people accusing you breaking some rules.
Go check on Cardfight!! Vanguard's Official Quick-Start Guide here and here. There's also a Facebook link here.
After all that links, I hope you guys grasped basic understanding about skill timing (CONT, ACT, AUTO) about phases on a fight, abilities of each grades, and a lot more of basic Vanguard things.
Alice also already put on some things that the official guide book doesn't mention here.
Basically, at this point you need to grasp all the basic element on Vanguard properly and know how to implement it first hand before moving to building your own deck,

2. Building Your Deck.
Building your deck also mean choosing your clan. Or you just build everything pique your interests.
To help you guys choosing your clan, Alice once again helped us with her 'What Clan Are You' article.

No, deck that suit you doesn't come from your shoe box,

After deciding the clan you going to build, you need to decide the deck's winning image.
Winning image means how you want your deck win (obviously) and how to achieve it.
There's lot of concept you want to build, let's use Kagero's Blademaster build.
In aforementioned deck, the winning image I want to create was a win by controlling your opponent unit, and gaining advantage from retiring them.
With that winning image, I picked units that goes well with that specific image such as Twilight Arrow Dragon and Dragon Monk, Gyokuryu.
You could also define your winning image by choosing your main G3 ride first, in aforementioned deck I decided to build a deck around Dragonic Blademaster. With choosing your Main Boss first, you could analyze what kind of skill you could build a deck around with. In this case I choose to do consistent retire to controlling my opponent and thus choosing units that goes well with Dragonic Blademaster's skill.

After a short meditation to decide on the winning image and unit supporting them, you now decide on the whole decks selection and build several decks available from them. This time, I'm going to use OTT as an example because we had 2 options namely Tsukoyomi & Susanoo Variant and Susanoo & Coco Variant.
After deciding on some best build you could ever think, now it's time for testing it against a solid, math proven decks you could find at V-Mundi.
For a good testing methodology, i used a modified V-Mundi's Testing Methodology you can find here.
In general, use V-Mundi Testing Methodology.

3. Playing a Game
After building and testing your deck, you absolutely want to play a game against other people.
During a game, you need to manage your resources efficiently, scale your field to be able hit your opponent Vanguard effectively, and prepare your card to be able to guard you safely.

No, fighting blindly equal with digging your own grave.

Scaling your field means calling Rear-guards that able to hit opponent VG properly. Field Scaling also an important factor when building your deck as a proper field scaling was a form of pressuring your opponent.
In general, you need to build a  deck that able to reach minimum of 16k columns at any time.
Hitting 18k column counted as bonus since 18k was a Crossride unit Magic Number but they tend to be consisted of 10k and 8k vanilla unitor 12k beater and 6k / 7k booster.

Managing resources also other important things, since you want to gain advantage as much as possible with given resources.
The best example of a deck with good resource management was VG-G-BT01 OTT's deck-lists because the clan used 5 CB for drawing 5 which means 1:1 ratio.
While building your deck, you also need to think about how much your deck going to spend the resources.
In general, there's a deck that CB-Heavy and CB-Light with CB Heavy tend to spend all the CB for the main Boss skill. vice versa, CB-Light decks tend to be more flexible on the CB usage since most of the users was your RG.

Preparing your guarding means which attack you're going to let go and which one to guard.
Again, Alice already put on a comprehensive guide to guarding here.

After those 3 quick step,you are now ready to step out from a complete beginner and be a full-fledged players.
I know that this quick-guide i made must be not enough to completely answers all your questions.
Heck, I even wondering what does this article (or even this blog) going to be without Alice and her V-Mundi as my reference.
Thank you! Alice!

P.S. : While a lot of V-Mundi reference here, do note that I tried to write it as original as possible.