We’re shaping up a bit. Because the set reviews are becoming some of our main content, we’re going to get a lot more concrete with our ratings of various cards. This will flesh out discussion and forcibly prevent us from being idiots and ignoring apparently-mediocre cards, which can be extremely confusing to new players. Don’t worry, we’ll still put out articles every now and then, but between my unreasonable hatred of incomplete deck techs and contentless hype articles, there really isn’t a huge amount to write about. Also, articles for new players are super hard. All suggestions for articles are welcome.

The rating system is as follows. It is somewhat similar to what Raging Mage and I have used in past text-based reviews.

Good – These cards go into deck skeletons at the very start. They are actively good cards that will get you ahead in games, and drawing them is almost always good. Some cards may only be good at a certain point in the game, such as runners or Level 3s, but they are good nonetheless.

Playable – A lot of these cards will go in your deck. They aren’t the best cards around, but they’re functional and play roles. Weiss Schwarz is a game where you need roleplayers, and cards that go into this category will be your roleplayers. These cards may be quite good in their own right, but are hardly gushworthy in comparison to the better cards of the set, and are often replaceable or merely have efficient, non-unique effects.

Niche – These cards are a subset of Playable. We’re very cautious about this particular label, because it means different things to different people. These cards might take a bit of building around or at least some playstyle modification to reach their full potential, but if they get there they can be really, really impressive in various situations. You can think of this as a sort of ‘keep your eye on these cards’ category.

Bad – These cards are not the sort of thing you put into an optimised deck. First, there are the actively bad c ards which help your opponent more than you and just don’t advance your gamestate. It takes a lot for a card to be actively bad, so the vast majority of cards in this category will just be outclassed by other cards in the majority of situations. There is no such thing as a card that is objectively better in every instance, but if a card is worse than competing cards in the majority of situations, it lands here.

Lastly, the Meta designation. This is a completely different label to the Good – Bad scale described above, and will instead be reserved for the cards that make you want to play that set from a competitive standpoint. For the purpose of this label, the entire idea of waifu decks or character love is ignored, or else almost any card could be described as the draw to a certain deck. Expect maybe 3 or 4 cards per set to get this designation.

Thanks for reading and/or watching, and all feedback is welcome in regards to this new organisation format.

This blogpost will be linked in every set review to reinforce the idea that we’re being systemic and organised.

(not really we’re still your friendly neighbourhood memelords)