Get it? painful choice? Name of the article..? OK ill stop with the bad jokes now.

Hello again everyone, and for those who are new to my site welcome to the weiss and chill blog. Today, I will be writing an article regarding some recent discussions on the Weiss Schwarz foreign community (which Ironically I was banned from when my friend baited me into posting a picture of food on the group) about casual vs competitive play.

For some context, I highly recommend you read the toptiertears blog posts about the subject. You may find that here:

http://toptiertears.org/2016/01/05/five-big-obstacles-that-weiss-schwarz-is-facing/

http://toptiertears.org/2016/01/07/responding-to-feedback-on-my-almost-buzzfeed-article/

I do want to say that the blog does have a plethora of information about the game and I would highly recommend visiting it whenever you have the time (assuming you haven’t already).

Anyways, lets get back to what I wanted to say starting with a little bit of personal history. The Weiss Schwarz community has always been a bit of a strange one to me, simply because it was the first card game community that completely defied everything that I thought I knew about card game communities in general. I first started card gaming in high school, back in 2011 with yugioh. Back then, the idea that playing the best cards that were available to you and optimizing your deck was one of the most thrilling parts of the game; it appealed to people that had a competitive mindset and to people like myself who enjoyed problem-solving and analyzing gameplay interactions it was even more appealing. My experience with card games since then has been mostly competitive, with some exceptions here and there (I will never forget the 2 weeks I spent trolling everyone i knew with an exodia deck) and almost all of the players I have come across since starting the game shared a similar mindset. We all had this desire to win, and make our decks as good as they can be.

However, I stepped away from the yugioh community and the game for a number of reasons- the meta was changing too often and too quickly for me and my wallet to keep up and the decks that I enjoyed playing were simply not competitively viable anymore. I considered playing casually (goat/plant/tele-dad/dragon mirrors weeee) but I decided to try my hand at weiss schwarz.

When I started playing Weiss Schwarz, it was a relatively new game not just to me but to everyone I knew. Some of them didn’t even know what I was. But it fascinated me. The idea that I could play the series I wanted to and the idea of getting signed cards was just that appealing. In that sense, lychee’s blog post is definitely correct. The game just naturally appeals to anime fans, and the anime community is quite different from any other community I have immersed myself in.

However, over time I began to see my competitive roots take in and I wanted to play better cards. To me, it wasn’t just about playing “my waifu”, it was about playing my favorite characters AND doing so competitively. My first deck was love live (playing english), but I didn’t like nico. Did I have to play a billion nico cards to have a good deck? Nope. I played 3 nico cards in my 50 card deck, and I was perfectly ok with that. My favorite characters were umi, maki, and eli. Did my deck consist purely of those characters? no, but a good chunk of my deck did- 1/0 elis and umi brainstormers were in the deck.

This is what sets weiss schwarz apart from any other card game I have participated in. You can play your favorite series / characters / etc, or just play a set just because you like the art and more often than not it can still have some competitive value. You can have your cake AND eat it too.

and to make it even better, half of the time every set that is released offers many gameplay options and decision trees in the deckbuilding and gameplay process so that a single build is not always the most optimal build. There is always room for tech, always room for different ratios and even different card choices.

So what does this all have to do with you and why I’m even writing this article? The answer is simple: Despite the somewhat popular notion that “weiss is just a luck based waifu war”, there is a large amount of competitive value to be found when you actually made the decision to build and play competitively.

does this mean that “waifu” decks are to be frowned upon? Lord no. Take a look at love live, which has some of the strongest waifu decks I have seen to date. Remember what I said about having your cake and eating it too? This can even apply to waifu decks. A deck that is properly built and executed correctly has a surprisingly high amount of competitive value in this game, regardless of the theme of the deck itself.

With all this said, This means that as a community, we have to decide on whether or not we want this game to allow competitive players to have a home here. It comes down to making that choice. This is not about whether or not weiss is a competitive game- rather, weiss has a huge amount of competitive potential but rather it is up to the players if they want to allow the competitive players to have a home in this community. This is one of the reasons why I have been so reluctant to write and post my articles in the various groups, simply because I have this fear that my time is always going to be wasted and my name be tarnished and ridiculed under the premise that “he’s just a tryhard”.

Does this mean that casual players should not have a home here? Absolutely not. There is no reason to reject casual play, rather it should be welcomed and the players should not be judged for their decision to want to play strictly for casual entertainment. Rather, i would love to see casual and competitive players engage in discussions about who the better waifu is or what series and card effects are better in “x” format. But the worst thing we can do is reject each other and choose not to co-exist.

However, that does not mean that the weiss schwarz community should reject its competitive playerbase either. We shouldn’t be telling ourselves that this game is skillless and that any one who tries is a joke to be laughed at; rather we should be encouraging each other to do better, to respect one another regardless of what kind of player you are. Weiss Schwarz, as a game needs to have both kinds of players.

I would like to have a special shoutout for triple crown games- While I have not been able to attend the tournaments due to my work schedule, I have seen the things that TCG and its affiliates have done for the weiss players in the southern California area and it is definitely praiseworthy. The tournaments there create a home for both casual and competitive players alike, and the playerbase is friendly and helpful for the most part. This is what a good community should do. It should encourage people to play- competitive or casual, and encourage them to do better rather than berate them and shut them down for trying. We can make memes about leafa counters all day but at some point we should be able to sit down and talk about how effective the card actually is too.

Weiss Schwarz has a ton of potential to be a competitive game and have a home for both competitive and casual gamers alike, but the current community as a whole struggles to accept and embrace that and chooses to make memes of people who try instead. It doesn’t have to be this way.

anyways, I hope you enjoyed my article and have a wonderful day. I have been rather busy with work as of late but I will be continue to write and hopefully finish my next informative article soon. I will be continuing my “applying MTG concepts to WS” articles starting next week, so I apologize if you have been waiting for more content and I haven’t delivered.