“70% luck 30% cards”. “A player’s skill doesn’t matter”. “Whoever sacks the most, wins”. “It doesn’t take skill to win”. “You only won because of that trigger”.

It’s a disheartening trend that’s been creeping up lately. Perhaps you’re on the losing side of the table, constantly aggravated by your opponent’s ability to constantly get what they need by the time they need it. Perhaps you’re on the winning side of the table, confused as to why your opponent dismisses your carefully-tuned deck and play style, and attributes your victories solely to luck. Perhaps you’re on the sidelines, concerned as to whether or not you should continue working on your Angel Feather deck, or scrap it and aim for a clan that’s objectively considered to be ‘better’. I think that it’s time to discuss just how luck and skill factor into this game, and to dispel some common misconceptions regarding how people go about playing Cardfight!! Vanguard.

Let’s take a look at one of the units from the ‘over-powered’ Gold Paladin clan: ‘White Hare in the Moon’s Shadow, Pellinore”. It’s a Grade 3 unit, 10k power, with an effect that allows you to place it on your VG circle if it’s called to an RG circle directly from your deck. Pellinore shows up infrequently in Gold Paladin decks, and has even seen play in high-level championship games. The one and only strength of Pellinore is that if you can call it in the middle of your battle phase, after attacking with your previous Vanguard, you can perform a second attack with your new Pellinore Vanguard, granting you an extra two Drive checks for that turn. Without that, it’s a generic 10k attacker that cannot intercept. It’s a card that’s useless from the moment it hits your hand, but is a godsend when you call it from the deck.

I’ve often considered Pellinore to be the card that epitomizes how many players think about the game. If you’re using Pellinore, and you end up getting it in your hand at any point in the game, then it’s usually a dead draw. It might end up being your only choice for your normal G3 ride, and it’s far from your ideal choice in just about any GP deck. On the other hand, if you’re able to pull off Pellinore’s effect (with Spring Breeze Messenger or something), and pull off that second VG attack in a turn, then it shows that you were able to avoid both the odds of getting that Pellinore in your hand, and beat the odds of not finding it after checking the top X cards of your deck.

Now, let’s look at Pellinore from the opponent’s point of view. If you see your opponent drive/damage check a Pellinore, then you’ll likely be happy about it. The Pellinore player now has a much lower chance of using Pellinore’s effect. That’s not usually the case, as it’s much more likely that they’ll draw into Pellinore on their own turn. But, as the opponent, you wouldn’t know that. All you know is that they still have most/all of their Pellinores in their deck. Even if that player did happen to have a Pelllinore in their hand, you wouldn’t know it. But, if the Pellinore player can pull off that effect and get Pellinore onto that VG circle, then you’re definitely going to notice.

When many players talk about an opponent’s luck, they can only really refer to the luck that they openly witness. Even if a player has only 3 units on the field and nothing but Draw triggers in their hand, if that player manages to drive check two critical triggers in a row, then that player is considered lucky. If a player has already lost a Pellinore to a damage check, but still manages to superior call it mid-battle, then they’re also considered lucky.

It’s not entirely wrong to consider the two mini-examples above ‘luck’, but it’s not entirely right, either. If you place Pellinore into a deck that lacks units like Spring Breeze Messenger and Viviane, then no amount of luck will let you make any use of Pellinore. If you only run a single copy of Spring Breeze Messenger, then it’s extremely unlikely that you’ll ever use Pellinore’s effect. And, if you run multiple copies of Spring Breeze, maximum numbers of Viviane, a draw-heavy trigger distribution to move cards around faster, cards like Lop Ear Shooter and Garmore to thin the deck of non-Pellinore units (and non-triggers!), and the self-damaging units to shuffle Pellinores back into the deck (especially after previously moving mistimed Pellinores to the bottom of the deck), then getting Pellinore’s effect off suddenly doesn’t seem to be that daunting of a task. If a player built a deck akin to that last example, would it be considered ‘luck’ if they managed to use Pellinore’s effect at least once or twice in a 3-game match?

Cardfight!! Vanguard allows players to build decks that revolve heavily around luck. The Ezel superior ride is a decent example, as are the ride chains that require you to have the G1 element of the chain in your opening hand + draw (to a lesser extent, at least). If the Ezel superior ride fails, then your Starting Vanguard won’t have much use, and likely need to get replaced by a more powerful boosting unit. If you don’t get that Blaster Javelin on your first turn, then you’re stuck knowing that 4 cards in your deck are just 6k non-effect boosters. If you ‘get lucky’, then you’ll be able to make up for the loss of power / card advantage through whatever machinations those cards offer you.

What’s important to remember is that these cards and combinations don’t exist in a vacuum. A Vanguard deck consists of 50 cards. Other than having a Grade 0 Vanguard and having 16 trigger units in the deck, you are free to include any unit you want. You can combine what you pulled from a box of Set 4 and make a hybrid Megacolony / Shadow Paladin / Dimension Police deck. Now, why isn’t a deck like that going to pack the same punch as a mono clan deck? It’s because those cards don’t work together. There’s little point in having Enigman Storm as a Vanguard when you have virtually no way to increase its attack. That’s why people include cards like ‘Cosmo Beak’, ‘Glory Maker’, and ‘Masked Police, Grander’ in decks that use the Enigman ride chain.

The way that you construct a deck will alter your luck. It sounds silly to say, but if you think back to that idea of running a single copy of Spring Breeze Messenger and no other way to superior-call Pellinore during your battle phase, you’re severely limiting your chance to use that effect. In other words, you’re making yourself ‘unlucky’. But, when you build a deck to give you a near-maximum number of chances to use that effect, it can reach the point where using such an effect is almost guaranteed. Or, simply, you’re ‘making yourself luckier’. The same is true for triggers. Getting a Critical trigger in your twin drive isn’t all that surprising if you run 12-16 critical triggers, and managing to get a trigger on your first damage check of a turn isn’t surprising if you’ve already thinned the deck (or stacked it via OTT shenanigans).

To the players who grow tired of an opponent’s luck, consider how you’ve built your own deck. There are always the general questions like ‘can it apply enough pressure to keep your opponent’s resources low?” and “are you able to maintain field presence?”. If you find yourself getting swamped by an opponent’s offense or are unable to meet their defense, then you should consider rebuilding your deck to fulfill those demands. You always have to consider your current trigger distribution, as well. If you have an offensive trigger distribution, do you have enough of an offensive force to make it count? There’s little point in running 8+ critical triggers if you end up starving yourself of a field in the process.

However, there’s another question that needs to be asked, that’s often hard to ask. “How well does the deck support itself?” You can’t just look at grade distributions and your trigger lineup to determine that. This is when you have to ‘visualize your winning image’. Or, to avoid the corniness of the anime, when you have to start thinking about how you’re going to set yourself up to win. Are you aiming for that Pellinore ride to surpass an opponent’s temporary defenses? Will you take advantage of an opponent’s deck layout and cripple their own key units? Do you want to turtle behind a draw-heavy deck and poke a less advantage-inclined opponent to death with small attacks that they can’t afford to guard? There are a lot of ways to build a deck, and a lot of units to build a deck around. Even though ‘Dragonic Overlord – The End’ is a frightening card, it’s the support system behind it that made it strong enough to get limited in Japanese play.

Many Cardfighters were formerly players of other games, such as Magic the Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh, that left for various reasons to enjoy playing a new game. Some people came to play CFV simply because it was a new game. Some were attracted by the card art, and some people found flaws in the game that they were playing that weren’t present in Vanguard. Regardless of their reasons, it’s commonly understood that a person playing Vanguard isn’t new to trading card games. They bring with them the knowledge and experience that they earned from the previous games that they took part in, as well as the mindsets that they developed while playing them.

Now, I have no qualms when it comes to any claims that Vanguard is an easy game to learn and play. I caught on to it quite quickly, and found myself stomping other players with a deck that I had just built the week prior, after only having played 3 or so games with a completely different deck. There aren’t many card-specific rulings, the mechanics of the game are pretty simple, and you don’t need pen/paper/calculator/coins/dice to actually play the game. With Yu-Gi-Oh, you have to know about effect timing, how to properly resolve a chain of effects, when you’re able to activate specific cards, and how specific cards interact with each other. It can be a daunting game to get into. Though I don’t have much experience with Magic the Gathering, my brief stint into the game has also shown me similar things (Living Death brings those back, but their effect can’t activate because of something I brought back that ties to a ruling that I had no knowledge of? Okay).

So, yeah, Vanguard has a ‘lower requirement’ to get into the game than either of those two games, I can concede that. However, it doesn’t mean that you don’t need as much skill to play Vanguard over those other games. Anyone who’s played Yu-Gi-Oh recently should be familiar with the concept of an FTK (First Turn Kill) or an OTK (One Turn Kill). These are strategies that aim to completely defeat an opponent in a single turn, while often preventing the opponent from doing anything to stop it. Rather than focusing on what the opponent can do in response, these strategies rely solely on getting certain cards into your hand / on the field at a certain point in the game. Once those conditions are met, it’s near impossible for the opponent to not lose. Personally, I think that they’re hilarious, but they don’t showcase skill at all. Rather, they’re built to prevent any sort of skill from manifesting. It’s this sort of play that drove a lot of former Yu-Gi-Oh players away from the game, and what CFV players are still fearing.

Fortunately, it’s not a pressing concern here. The game is built in part to avoid that sort of play, and instead offers players a variety of ways to use their cards. A 7k boosting unit can either be kept in the hand to guard with, or placed on an empty backrow slot to boost with, or placed over a weaker backrow unit to help the front-row unit it’d be boosting to reach better numbers, or even placed in the front-row itself to deliver another attack. Those decisions are entirely up to you, and are reflective of your skills and experiences as a player. Even if they end up being less-than-optimal decisions in the end, they still were influenced by your skill, and not your luck.

Not only does skill manifest in small decisions like where to place a 7k unit, but also in the long run. Deciding which attacks to guard and what to guard with is an excellent test of your skill and understanding of both your deck and your opponent’s deck. You have to consider that taking more damage generally equates to losing the game faster, so you might want to guard an attack. But, if it’s the first attack of the turn, and they have two more coming, then getting an early trigger would be beneficial. But, if you’re running mostly critical triggers, and one of those triggers has an effect that you’d like to use next turn, then you might not want to take that damage. But, you have a unit in your hand that you don’t mind losing anyway that can guard the attack with minimal shield loss. But, you want to replace your front-row unit with something else. But, if you take enough damage this turn, then you can use the effect of a card on your next turn. But, one of their units gets to use their effect if they land an attack.

Even with such a simple question as ‘do you want to guard this attack?’, there are many aspects of the game that you have to consider. Your current hand, your best guess as to what’s at the top of your deck, your field, your opponent’s field, the resources that you and your opponent have available, current damage totals, how much of that damage is usable, how many units in your deck could benefit from making a decision one way or another… it goes on. Even if you decide to no-guard, and get the Draw Trigger that easily allows you to guard against the other attacks that turn, that wasn’t because of sheer luck. And even at that point, you still have to consider the likelihood of the opponent getting their own trigger in their drive check.

Now, I can’t say that everyone plays the game like I do. I can’t say that no one just plays cards as they see them, following some script that they saw online and relying solely on luck. What I can say is that there is a definite distinction between a lucky player and a skilled player. Luck can win the occasional local tournament. Skill will ensure that that sort of luck happens often enough that people can’t help but to blame the luck itself.