Fundamentals: Playing a Bad Hand

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25 Min Read

Yahallo lads and ladettes, its me its your best friend its CanYouSayG, and youre reading the CanYouSayBlog, where we learn how to be a better cardfighter.

Today we are continuing our series on fundamentals, where we go over some of the core concepts in Vanguard. For veterans of the game you may know many of the concepts we are discussing, but it is always beneficial to review your fundamentals!

For those who don’t know blog article progress has been slowed during the pandemic due to treating Covid.

Today we will be discussing some concepts to think about when you play a bad hand.

Sometimes you draw badly, and sometimes you draw worse, and that's just how variance goes, but one of the reasons more experienced players can win more is that they have more experience and have had time to learn how to win with a bad hand.

Some days those hands don't have the correct ride, sometimes you can ride but don't have any parts for your deck to move. Other days your hand is absolutely lacking in guard value and even more days you draw all your orders and can only perform one action a turn. What defines a bad hand varies wildly from deck to player to matchup, but a good player can take a bad hand and find how to win with it.

Not every time you get a bad hand you will be able to pull a turnaround, and not every time you will be able to win, but keeping these concepts in mind while placing it together with your hand and situation will allow the path to victory, no matter how slim, to open up.

It's very easy to blame your losses on bad hands or luck, and it's not easy to be in a losing situation and still have to admit your play was what really cost you the game, but doing so, taking charge and responsibility of your mistakes is a step towards improving as a player, and in many ways a person.

Always be confident that you can win.

Our first concept to remember is the most important of all: remembering that you can win. Will win is a different story, but remembering that victory, no matter how slim, is a possibility will determine if you can continue to search for your route to victory, or give up and lose. Often times a possible victory is lost to feeling like you have no hope, so it's always important to think about how you can possibly pull a win from the situation.



In Vanguard, the game progresses and the game state is shifted by the luck of the draw, triggers, decisions by players, and card effects. With the correct triggers and draws, the possibility of victory is present, as long as you pursue that road victory may present itself before you.



However, if you lose sight of how you can create a win out of the situation, lose sight of what plays to make or make wrong decisions because of poor planning, you will be further behind, easily losing the game. Losing hope of victory is the first step of losing sight of what to do or what needs to come up for you to win. Though it is difficult to see a win, by always believing in the Muteki Time of Victory, you have the first step towards winning.

Imagine your road to victory.

Identify what you need to create a win out of this situation you are in. Although the parts are not in front of you, that's why your hand is a bad one, you need to always identify what parts and what cards you need to create a winning situation. For example, if you don’t have a grade 2 and grade 3, you would obviously identify that you would want to get those in your hand as part of your game plan (or maybe not). If you need to ride specific units, would they be worth G Assisting into? If your G Assist showed multiple of the next grade which one of those would you ride into? If you draw into the next grade but its not what you need to ride into, would riding into it cause you to lose and thus consider throwing it to guard, and g assisting for the correct ride next turn?

When thinking about what cards you need to get to win, forget about the full combo at maximum combo output when you have all of your parts available to you, and focus only on the bare minimum plays that you need to stabilize. You cannot plan to draw into five different cards to execute your game winning combo when you have none of them. Instead, focus on the two card play that will bring you back slowly from your behind position.

If I draw into this card, what other cards do I need to make full use of it? Do I want to put out this card early when I get it, or do I have enough time to hold onto it long enough to use in a combo?

In addition to being aware what cards you need to draw, you need to have a clear game plan with what is available to you and what you can hope to draw into. What will you plan to attack? Do you plan to drag the game out or be aggressive?

Because of your behind position due to having a bad hand, you need to play increasingly carefully, making sure your plays are towards your desired outcome for each turn, whether they be to slow down the game or accelerate it. Have an idea of how much damage you want to deal to the opponent each turn, and think hard about what you want to achieve every turn. How do I gain card advantage? How do I turn this situation around? If I were to win, what triggers need to come up in this drive check? Can I win If the opponent doesn't open a trigger here?

When you are behind, your game plan should aim to take advantage of every small bit of advantage you can find, whether it be triggers, lucky draws, opponent unable to guard, opponent unable to do ideal plays. This is why when you have a bad hand, you have to have a very clear image of the path to victory, followed by taking small steps towards it.

Hard aggression or Hard Defense: Limit what the opponent can do to you

When you are far behind and with a bad hand, one of the key goals is to limit the opponent and put them out of their comfort zone, making them divert from their main plan when playing against you. Not only will this force the opponent to have the correct response to win, either in play or in cards, but it doing so you are able to make the opponent play a game that they potentially did not plan to. If they expected much counterblast, then you can deny them this.

If they expected for your deck to be slow and the cards in their hand to be fairly protected by triggers in their hand, you can upset this by taking a different pace of game and being aggressive.

One of the options available to you is to take an extremely aggressive playstyle for the game, focusing all attacks at the opponents vanguard and trying to push as much damage as possible, forcing the opponent to guard with their key parts, denying them said parts to make a come back.

Not only will you be calling down most of your hand, calling triggers to be 5k units or boost on the board must also be on the table for your options.

While highly risky, the opponent having a traditionally “good” hand with multiple grade 2s and 3s are countered by this sort of play style, as most attacks will go through, pushing the opponent to high damage, and making them guard with key parts earlier in the game.

On top of calling down multiple triggers, units and having most columns easily shut down by triggers, by calling down most of your grade 1s and 0s you are sacrificing much shield value in the hand, meaning that a lot of this playstyle is gambling on the early game triggesr you open and tempo you generate being enough for force the opponent onto the back foot, keeping them from full output long enough for your deck to come through for you and you to assemble back a better hand of options, or perhaps for you to just win outright.

Retire type clans do stand a better chance against these such strategies, so be sure to consider this an option more against clans with few or no retire options, where the opponents only option against the aggressive strategy is to spend attacks against the rear guards.

The other option, playing a very defensive game and aiming to stall the game out is another potential option, one that you see more players taking when in a losing situation.

To play defensively, your focus should not only be on limiting the opponents movement through counterblast control, but also on card advantage: using your effects to gain hand and card advantage while attacking the opponents rear guards in order to reduce their card advantage, being very careful to pick what attacks to point at the opponents vanguard as to force the opponent to drop guard on every attack.



You can often see this kind of playstyle in decks that like to control the game to their pace, utilizing the drop in opponents speed to slowly build towards your own victory. While your deck may not be entirely suited towards this kind of playstytle, when you are behind slowing down the game gives you more time to plan and make your counterattack, as well as having less risk of the game ending before you can stabilize.

This playstyle focuses very hard on every small amount of card advantage, and as such you should aim to guard very effectively.

As the turns go by, the individual impact of every trigger and every card’s effect on the game as a whole is lessened. That’s why triggers in the early game feel very impactful and triggers in the mid game feel less so: Its impacted a bigger fraction of the game than the other. Additionally, the longer a game goes on the more chances the player has to open triggers and turn the situation around. While the impact on the game as a whole individually is lessened as the turn count goes on, the total impact of multiple triggers can swing games in or against your favor.

While the longer the game goes, especially when playing defensively does allow your opponent to build up hand, being alive puts you in a significantly better situation to win the match than being dead.

When you are behind and have a bad hand, both going hard on offense or defense are both options for game plan, especially when going your regular route will lead to you being easily destroyed by the opponent’s full power. Focus on putting the opponent in a situation that they are not used to: either by being extremely offensive or defensive, with the goal of restricting what the opponent can and cannot do. Use this time to slowly move towards victory and slowly assemble your hand.

Believe your existence.

Believing in your triggers, believe in your deck giving you what you need. When planning without the available parts, its important to think into what your deck has, what you can potentially draw into. While there is no guarantee that you will be able to draw into those cards, having a plan of action according to what you can potentially draw is important. In order to make this play to keep myself alive, I need to draw this card, and when I draw this other card I would make this other play. When you don’t have any of the parts you need, think about how you would get them right as you need them. If you don’t have your Grade 3, think about how you will work towards getting that card, and believe that your deck will let you draw into it.

If you don’t have the card in your hand, believe in your deck’s possibility of you drawing into it, and play according being able to draw into those needed cards over turns.

Of course it is no guarantee that you will be able to draw those cards or at the point that you need it, believing in what you need to draw or drive check allows you to make a game plan that allows you to win by heading in the winning direction, thus improving your ability to win in a bad situation. If you need to draw your specific grade 3 to win, then don’t play according to not drawing it, play according to drawing it eventually. This puts you on the slow path to the turn around or towards victory, instead of you starting the turn you finally draw your key unit.

In Vanguard, between stand and draw and drive checks, each player moves a minimum of three cards per turn into their hand, which allows you to assemble your key parts easier. This also means that the longer the game goes, no only will the individual impact of each turn be less on the overall game, you having more chances to open heal triggers, as well as more chances to draw into the key parts you need to make small moves towards turning the situation around.

When you drive check, are you aware of what triggers you want to be opening in order to stabilize and what triggers you need to make yourself win? Believing in your deck to give you triggers is not only a turn to turn occurrence, it is a process that takes several turns. How many turns or damage checks do you need to open that critical trigger? If I need this heal trigger, but it doesn't come for me this turn, can it come for me next turn? If I know I need one heal trigger over three turns, how do I keep myself alive for that long? What would I do if it doesn't come up on turn one?

These are the sort of questions you should be asking yourself and thinking about when you formulate your game plan around triggers coming up for you.

Each trigger is a small step at turning the game around, so its important that you play according to making each and every single trigger count as much as it can. The small chance that you open triggers and the opponent does not may seem unrealistic, but if it is the only path to victory you should go down it.

Gamble hard to win big

When you are in a losing situation, banking on damage triggers to help each turns defense is crucial. While in a normal game you would guard the first attack of every turn, and often would not take chances as much, when you are behind and have a bad hand, you have to capitalize on the luck aspect of every Vanguard fight.

Considering how the guard value of each attack in the turn would change according to which attack a damage trigger was opened on, budgeting when you want to guard can turn out to provide you with much saved guard value, enough to keep you from losing too many resources and having enough to pull through and make your comeback. Plan where you want to open damage triggers and play according to that increased guard value. Be ready to depend heavily on your damage triggers.

Another place you can gamble for high returns is when you are at four damage, or whatever damage number you have to be for the opponent have one critical to win. In a normal game, and indeed against most opponents, this is an extremely high risk attack to no guard, to the point that most players take full advantage of this to force guard from the opponents hand. In a normal game, taking the risk of no guarding and the opponent opening a critical trigger is far greater than the payout, as it stakes losing the game against a few extra cards in hand, and that's to say nothing about the second attack that will threaten lethal with a critical trigger if you guard the Vanguard. As such, most players have worked into their gameplay this factor, and will often attack you with their vanguard when they are threatening a critical trigger to win to maximize take advantage of the advantage loss from the guarding side.

This creates a great opportunity for the player with a bad hand and far behind to steal tempo back by no guarding the vanguard attack. Though the risk is great, there is little point in playing safe if it would only result in you staying behind in the game. Instead be brave and take the risk to move ahead!

Similarly on taking chances, another key point to keep in mind when playing a bad hand is to capitalize on two to pass attacks when on the offensive. Just like guarding when you are at four damage, giving two triggers to pass is another play that has such good cost effectiveness that is has become so commonplace most players default to doing so without thinking much about the play or risks involved. As such, if you are behind and have a bad hand, one of the points to capitalize on is in fact making the most of your opponent giving you two to pass, placing all trigger effects to the vanguard when your first drive check opens a trigger.

Betting on a two to pass in a normal game often has poor payout, hence why you would rarely do so in a game where most of your necessary parts have been assembled and you are at low risk, but when you have a bad hand and will not be ahead playing normally, the payout of coming back into the game or perhaps even turning it around is worth the risk. At worst, if your opponent will read that you are gambling on the two to pass, and increase the amount of guard against your vanguard attack to a no pass, or perhaps use perfect guards against you. This increased amount of guard every turn may shut you out of using your luck to win, but it also does mean your opponent using up more resources every turn, something that can be capitalized on in several turns time if you force your opponent into spending cards every turn.

Factor in opponent having bad draws or bad plays

Have you had one of those games that you think victory is unattainable, what seems like you having to g assist twice in a game, and not even being able to ride into your main Grade 3, yet when you think all is lost, your opponent reveals their hand for G Assist, and reveals their hand to be just as bad?

Often when you are playing Vanguard, and even more so with a bad hand, you tunnel vision yourself into either thinking you will lose or too much about your own play and hand that you forget to factor in that there is an opponent, and more so, that they are human and capable of mistakes and bad draws as well. Its often easy to chase “the ideal” plays or “the ideal hand”, but people do not always see or take the correct play every single game. While you may see the opponents ideal play, the opponent may not always see their win. As such, you have to consider the opponents bad play in your potential path to victory.

Will they guard unnecessarily against this three critical attack, despite being at only one damage? If they no guard this attack because they are greedy for counterblast, how do I capitalize on that? What if they guard with that key grade 1 this turn so they cannot use it against me two turns from now?

If they don’t play ideally, will that open up a path to victory?

When you plan for your path to victory and consider playing around the opponents response to your strategy, also do consider the opponent not having the cards necessary to respond, and if needed, gamble on it. Maybe they don’t have enough triggers to guard, maybe they don’t have the key removal skill they need to break your strategy. Maybe after seven or eight turns they just never got their second perfect guard. Maybe their hand is all grade 3s that cant be used to guard. Maybe.

When you don’t have much to work with and are going up against an opponent, gambling on the opponent just not having the cards is sometimes enough to pull you to the win.

Triggers: Not If, but When

In a losing situation, heal triggers are the most impactful trigger on the flow of a game. They can turn a losing situation into an equal one and an equal situation into a winning one. The important thing is to always be aware of your triggers and maximizing the opportunities for them to come up. This is done not only by keeping yourself at equal or more damage than the opponent, fairly easy when you’re on the losing side of things, but also by maximizing your drive and damage checks, by both increasing your drive checks as well as increasing the number of turns that go by.

Of note denying this out is one of the reasons why you see a lot of veteran players placing the critical on the rear guard, not the vanguard, when their opponent is at 3 damage (and going to 4), because it keeps the opponent at less damage while forcing the same amount of guard, while reducing the number of damage checks the opponent gets, and potentially keeping your own heal triggers live.

By extending the game and slowing the pace of the game down with your playing, you can capitalize on the other side of opening triggers: Not if, but When.

In vanguard both players only have 16 triggers in a 49 card deck, meaning that at any point, you can calculate the probability of any trigger coming up. While every turn goes by and whether or not specific triggers come up at each point is indeed up to the luck of your draw, the more turns that go by not only do you have more opportunities to open the triggers, but the deck will continue to get smaller and smaller, leaving less and less cards behind. If the game is to be decided in one or two turns, there’s little opportunity to open the triggers as you would only go through six to ten cards in your deck, but if you were to extend the game, to make both players go through almost all of their decks, then both players will more likely than not open almost all of their triggers.

When you are losing, by playing very defensive and extending the game, you are aiming to move through more of your deck, thus moving through more of your triggers, each one building towards turning the game around. More chances for you to open those heal triggers and get yourself back in the fight. Triggers are not if, but when.

Is it really a bad hand?

Sometimes you encounter these kind of players, they complain that their hand was bad and they lost because of it, yet during the match they ride up grades with no issue, have all of their ideal G1 and G2 and G3 ride, have all their combos by the first turn they can use it, and their triggers flowed at a decent rate. Not all hands are necessarily bad, only whether or not you know how to play it out.

Similarly, when playing your deck, don’t blame the deck for not giving you a good hand or blame the opponent for drawing well, always look back on the game and think how you could have optimized playing that hand or situation, and embrace the difficulty handling the situation. As you progress and build more and more experience with your deck, what qualifies as a “bad” hand slowly will shift towards weaker and weaker hands, and you will notice that hands you open with that you would have considered unplayable weeks ago suddenly show you paths to winning.

Whether or not a hand is “bad” in your eyes is entirely subjective indeed, but the difference between a player whom complains their hand is “bad” and a veteran whom takes what hand they are dealt and maximizes the chances of winning through play, calculated risk taking, and staying optimistic about winning is evident: the veteran is the one who won the fight.

Claiming that you need a good hand to win is refusing to embrace the full potential of your deck.

Sometimes you lose, and that's okay.

Some days you win, some days you lose, and that’s okay. Whats most important is enjoying each fight. Even with experience and game knowledge, fantastic plays when behind, you can and will still lose some of the fights you open with bad hands, and that's okay.

You cannot win every battle, and you have to accept that after you have done everything in your power to try to win. If you play just for fun, then accept each win or loss after the game with grace and be sure to enjoy each and every fight and the new meetings and interactions they bring with it. On the other hand if you are trying to improve as a player or are already a tournament player, then if you lose due to a bad hand, reflect back on what you did during the game and if there is another potential option you could have taken, or potential options the opponent could have taken that would have allowed you to win. There is not much you can do after the game, so for tournament players whom wish to aim for the top, optimizing your play during the game is everything. After all, its about pushing your win rate to as high as it can go, then hoping those high percentages line up for you in a tournament. Though you may not win every fight with a bad hand, by thinking about your game plan and strategy for each and every game, you can increase that win percentage, if even by 0.1%.

Be Confident you can win.

Wasn’t this the first point on the list?

Yes indeed it was, but its so important that we will repeat it twice. When you are behind and have a bad hand, don’t despair and always look to how you are going to win. When you give up mentally you will not make the correct plays to maximize your already small chance of winning, and end up losing.

There are good days and bad days but they are both just days. You make the most of what you have, but know that no matter what, victory is possible, you just have to find it.

Conclusion

Today we went over several concepts to think about and consider when in a losing position in a game and when playing a bad hand, in order to optimize your win rate.

Confidence in victory, having a clear gameplan and path to victory, restricting the opponents response by your play, planning around and believing in the cards and triggers your deck will give you, being aware of how triggers truly work, finding incremental advantage in each calculated gamble, assessing what truly is a difficult hand to play and what isn't, and finally trying your best and accepting loss.

Of these many concepts, some are difficult to put into words and may seem alien to less experienced players, but be sure to re visit these ideas and think back about how you won those games that you had very bad hands and review again how you managed to pull a win out of it. Perhaps you have other tricks and tips you managed to put into words to help others understand how to win when behind.

Draw this card, guard that attack, lucky trigger here, and top deck there. There is no guarantee that your units and cards will come through for you, but unless you lead the way, there will be no road to victory.

That’s all for today folks I hope you enjoyed the read. Be sure to join us back later this week as we discuss how to interpret and use data in planning for a tournament.

If youre new to the blog and want to read more about some of the fundamental concepts of Vanguard, be sure to click here for our series on Fundamentals.