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Introduction

What I'm going to talk about here are the new mechanics and the impact that they're going to have on the game, but I'm going to do something a little different to what might normally be expected on this Wiki: I'm going to look at them from a game design perspective. This means that rather than focussing how I think the game will be played in the context of what cards or decks might rise or fall in effectiveness or popularity, I want to focus on what happens to the game as a whole going foward.

Why do I want to talk about this? I've noticed a few users putting up some resistance to the relatively large number of changes that will be introduced to the game. I want to explain why these changes are objectively a good thing; they will be healthy for the longevity and fun of the game in the long run. For everyone else, perhaps this might give you a different perspective on what you might want to look out for.

To begin, I'm going to briefly break down the changes for those who might not be fully familiar with them, before moving onto the discussion.





Break Down of Changes: G Assist Phase & Stride Phase

The G Assist Phase and Stride Phase are two new phases during a player's turn.

The new turn structure looks like this:

Stand Phase

Draw Phase

G Assist Phase (Use G Assist when you don't have a card to Ride to the next Grade!)

Ride Phase

Stride Phase (Stride a G Unit from the Generation Zone to the Vanguard Circle!)

Main Phase

Battle Phase

End Phase (A G Unit that performed Stride leaves!)





Break Down of Changes: Generation Zone, G Units, Stride & Heart

The Generation Zone is a new card zone on the playmat, which exists as a two card wide, vertically oriented space above the Damage Zone. It is where G Units are placed face-down at the beginning of a game, and it is where a G Unit which has been used to perform Stride returns face-up at the end of its player's turn. The Generation Zone can hold up to 8 G Unit cards. It is comparable to the Extra Deck in Yu-Gi-Oh!.

G Units are Grade 4 cards with Triple Drive!!, which are a new catagory of card alongside the pre-existing Normal Units and Trigger Units, and which are placed in the Generation Zone. Like Normal and Trigger units, you may have a maximum of 4 copies of a card of the same name in your Generation Zone. Face-down G Units can Stride to the Vanguard Circle, but return to the Generation Zone face-up at the end of its player's turn, which means each G Unit card can only Stride once per game. G Units are also used to pay the cost of G Assist, at which point they are removed from the game and cannot be used or counted by any card text. Face-up G Units are counted by and are a prerequisite to use Generation Break.

Stride brings a face-down G Unit from the Generation Zone to the Vanguard Circle during the Stride Phase. Stride is not considered a Ride, so Break Ride skills or "When you ride a Vanguard..." skills will not activate. When both players have a Grade 3 or higher Vanguard, once per turn, during your Stride Phase, you can discard cards with a total Grade of 3 or more (e.g. one Grade 3 card, or one Grade 1 and one Grade 2 card, or two Grade 2 cards) to perform Stride. Your current Vanguards become the Heart(s) of the G Unit you Strode to, and are no longer considered the Vanguards. When you Stride, choose one of your Hearts, and the G Unit gains only that Heart's printed name in addition to its own and it adds its printed Power to its own. Nothing else attributed to the Heart - including printed skills, given skills and given power - is transferred. At the end of the turn you performed Stride, the G Unit that Strode returns to the Generation Zone face-up, and all Hearts return to being the Vanguards; at this time, Hearts which were in Legion return to being in Legion, but they do not "perform Legion" again.

Note the following:

During a turn where a player attacks with a Grade 3 Vanguard, they gain 3 cards; 1 for their normal draw and 2 for Twin Drive!!. This makes +3 cards per turn the baseline for +-0 card advantage.

When discarding 1 card for Stride, you then gain 3 cards for Triple Drive!!. This appears to be a wash (+-0 card advantage). However, a G Unit Vanguard can now attack for 3 stages of Guard (3 times 5000 equals 15000 to guard for one-to-pass) unboosted, instead of the usual 1 stage. The G Unit will also have other skills to be used. While the increased Power might be irrelevant if the opponent did not intend to guard against the Vanguard anyway, it can close off that option or make it more costly in other cases. With this opportunity gain in mind, Stride can be said to be +>0 card advantage, because the practical value of increased Power may or may not exist on a case-by-case basis.

When discarding 2 cards for Stride, this is -1 card advantage at face value, but as noted above, it should be considered >-1 card advantage.

Because Stride requires both players to be at Grade 3, the player who went second will be able to Stride first, on their turn 3. During the first player's turn 3, the second player's Vanguard will still be Grade 2, except when they have used skills to Superior Ride.





Break Down of Changes: G Assist

G Assist is a new action that can be taken once per turn during the G Assist Phase, when a player has at least 2 G Units in their Generation Zone (to pay the cost), their Vanguard is Grade 2 or lower, and they do not have a card in their hand which is one Grade higher than their current Vanguard (also known as being Grade-locked, Grade-stuck, or having a "Ride problem" esp. in Japanese), they can use G Assist to attempt to obtain a card of that Grade. The player reveals their hand to their opponent, then checks the top five cards of their deck for a card of the required Grade.

If a correct card is found, they add it to their hand, shuffle the remaining cards into their deck, and then they remove 2 cards in their hand and 2 G Units from their Generation Zone from the game. These cards are not sent to the Drop Zone, and they cannot be used or counted by any card text. Then proceed to the Ride Phase.

If a correct card is not found, shuffle the checked cards into the deck, then proceed to the Ride Phase. In this case, the cost of removing cards from the game does not need to be paid.

Note the following:

If a player is Grade-locked for 1 turn, they begin using Twin Drive!! one turn later. This causes them to lose 1 card advanatage.

If a player uses G Assist successfully, they gain the correct Grade card (+1), then remove two cards from their hand from the game (-2), for a result of -1. They are, however, now back on-track to begin using Twin Drive!! as soon as possible. In this case, the -1 has been moved from a later turn to the current turn.

If a player uses G Assist unsuccessfully, it should be noted that this means if they had not used G Assist, they would likely have been without a unit to ride during their next one or two turns.





Break Down of Changes: Generation Break

Generation Break is a new type of skill, which requires X number of G Units to be face-up in your Vanguard Circle and the Generation Zone combined. It is abbreviated to GBX. Currently, the only way to change G Units in the Generation Zone to a face-up position is by using them to Stride. It is a limiter on skill activation, the similar to Limit Break.

Note the following:

As noted above, the player who went second can use Stride first, on their turn 3. This also means that they are also able to activate Generation Break first.

Rear-guard GB1 skills can potentially be active from the first player's turn 4, and the second player's turn 3. This makes them early game skills.

Rear-guard GB2 skills can potentially be active from the first player's turn 5, and the second player's turn 4. This makes them early-mid game skills.

Vanguard GB1 skills can potentially be active from the first player's turn 5, and the second player's turn 4. This makes them early-mid game skills.

Vanguard GB2 skills can potentially be active from the first player's turn 6, and the second player's turn 5. This makes them mid-late game skills.





Fixing Vanguard's Design

Here begins the discussion. Vanguard G's new mechanics don't just bring a truckload of cool to the table - every part of these changes is linked to a way to improve the design of the game. It is entirely correct of Bushiroad to undergo an overhaul of the game's branding to tie in with these changes, because Vanguard G is a very different, and much better designed beast. To understand why, we need to bear in mind that the primary goal of good game design is to make a fun thing. For something to be fun, the player must feel they are succeeding to take actions which are rewarding and feel good, resulting in what we'll call "cool moments". A game designer wants to feed the player as many well-timed cool moments as possible, even while losing. Also, if the player loses or fails, they must not under any circumstances feel that the game system itself has caused this to happen.

While it might be a very cut-down description of how to do good game design, let's see how these rules relate to Vanguard and the changes. Starting the last point, an obvious failure of the game system is being Grade-locked. This is an unavoidable aspect of the game's current design, and feeling you've been cheated by a bad hand is something that is part of most trading card games. It is not fun, and from a game design perspective, it is not something that should ever happen in light of our design goals. This makes a mechanic which can circumvent being Grade-locked a very good design choice indeed.

However, the question then becomes: why G Assist? Why this mechanic in its current form? Why can't we have something that doesn't cause us to lose card advantage? Why can't we have something that 100% guarantees our Ride, instead of something that will fail? As a player, those are good questions. As a designer, the answer to those questions can be found elsewhere in the design framework of Vanguard. The loss of advantage (or rather, the maintaining the loss of advantage incurred from being Grade-locked) plays a very important role in continuing to disincentivize being Grade-locked. It might sound ludicrous at first, because why would we ever want to be Grade-locked? However, this disincentivizes the abuse of the mechanic as well, maintaining the general deckbuilding framework that currently exists. While decks with rogue deck ratios certainly exist are are in some cases rewarded, preventing abuse also plays a role in regulating Stride, which is most optimally paid for with Grade 3's. It also stymies any enormous, unforseen upheaval in how the game is played, should the designers fail to foresee a loophole.

Then we have the second question, of why it isn't guaranteed. For this, we need to look at the unspoken design philosophy behind Vanguard and Bushiroad's other games, bearing in mind that this contains some speculation on my part. Trigger checks and adding multiple cards to your hand per turn are a common factor, which leads me to believe that Bushiroad likes creating cool moments out of revealing unknown cards. There is certainly elements of gambling, unpredictability and surprise which make revealing unknown cards fun; the existance of that excitement is fact. By limiting G Assist to the top 5 cards of the deck, it becomes another cool moment. You are quite likely to fix your hand in this way. Even if you fail the first time, the odds of failing G Assist a second time is, in practice, tiny. Further on the practical side of things, the lost card advantage is maintained, and it serves as a further deterrant to G Assist abuse, but you still Ride Grade 3 much earlier than you otherwise could, allowing you to reach the point where you can start getting to other cool moments. This uncertainty is in line with Bushiroad's apparent love of revealing unknown cards, as well as the goal of giving cool moments even a player who is losing.





Tuning First Move Advantage

First move advantage is a concept of game imbalance in turn-based games, brought about by one player going first. This is a proven issue that is most easily demonstrated by games such as chess and go, where both players have perfect knowledge and otherwise symmetrical circumstances. On a professional level, these games tune for this imbalance by using points in a league system, as such the goal with this approach is to achieve balance over many matches. This is impractical in trading card games, where the closest analogous attempt to fix this issue is by having players play best-of-multiple game sets to determine a final outcome. However, unlike games of perfect knowledge and symmetry, trading card games can potentially balance for this issue within a single instance of a game, by compensating the second player with some kind of advantage, or penalising the first player. Very simply, this is why the first player cannot attack in Vanguard.

However, first move advantage is a problem that is very difficult to balance for. TCG developers will have internally used scales on which they balance various aspects of the game, including things like resources and their value in relation to the win condition, which determine the value and power of certain resources, as well as the pacing of the game as it proceeds to its end. The most basic unit in such a scale will be the value of a single card, which gives rise to the concept of card advantage, or wanting to be holding more cards than the other guy. This is also the greatest flaw of TCGs, in that in order to tune game balance more granularly than in single card units, alternate resources or special conditions - of which a single unit is worth less than that of a single card - need to be baked into the basic game system from the very beginning.

In Vanguard, the only alternate resource which is universally recognised by all decks is unflipped damage. Unfortunately, unflipped damage is not quite granular enough to be used as a balancing tool for a problem which requires such fine-tuning. The changing value of unflipped damage throughout the evolution of the game is testament to that. Compare Blaster Blade and Blaster Blade Seeker; though Seeker is more limited, it is by far the more practical of the two. Blaster Blade would very much like to cost CB1.5, but such a thing is not an option. In addition, though its usage is universal, unflipped damage is much more valuable in some decks than others, making it an inappropriate tool with which to balance a mechanics-level issue. In fact, the Counterblast mechanic serves an entirely different purpose; it is a comeback mechanic, much like Limit Break. As such, it operates on entirely the wrong level of design and is ill-suited to be used as a tool to balance the game's underlying mechanics.

This is where Stride and Generation Break shine. They are both available to the second player first, which is an obvious advantage, but how much advantage is it? If you take a look at the break down of Stride above, you can see that I value it generally as +>0 card advantage when paying with one card, and >-1 when paying with two cards. My reasoning is that the raw value of the G Unit's additional Power is situational, and that the G Unit opens up new opportunities. The potential additional advantage from that point is determined by on-Stride skills and the G Unit's skills. However, it can be said that this potential opportunity is certainly an advantage for the second player, as it allows them to generate momentum and influence the pace of the following turns.

Generation Break is similar to Stride in that it can both generate momentum and create opportunities, but it does it differently depending on whether the skills is on a rear-guard or Vanguard, and how high the Generation Break is. Stride can only performed at a set pace, even if it is performed every turn, and this strictly dictates when in a fight Generation Break can become active. The fastest activation timings for GB1 and GB2 for both rear-guards and Vanguards are listed above in the break down. What's important here, is that fast GB timings are optimal for creating momentum, while late GB timing are optimal for creating additional options or opportunities. In both cases the second player benefits from reaching these milestones first.

Now, from the way I've gone on, it might seem that the second player might be favoured too much. However, in both cases, I've only talked about unspecified measures of momentum, and unspecified opportunities. This might seem like a given, since at the time of writing, we have no information on the effects of any G Units, and we only have information on two Generation Break units. That isn't why I'm talking about those unspecified quantities. By implementing those unspecified quantities that aid the second player, Bushiroad has installed a new lever with which they can balance for first move advantage. The quality and raw advantages of all types generated by these types of cards are now Bushiroad's way of giving the second player a leg up, and at this point, they have had several years of experience in balancing for this game.

Whether or not it is immediately obvious to the average player, they have put in place a very powerful balancing tool for one of the single most complex problems which plagues competitive turn-based games, which easily matches the efforts of other leading card games.





More Cool Moments

This is the bit where I point fingers, accuse Bushiroad of ripping off Yu-Gi-Oh!, and then congratulate them for doing to. I am, of course refering to Stride and the Generation Zone, which are without a doubt influenced in part by Yu-Gi-Oh!'s Extra Deck.

Prior to the introduction of Synchro Summoning in Yu-Gi-Oh!, the game boiled down to this: you have the correct cards to pull off a cool moment appropriate to the situation, or you didn't have the correct cards to do so, despite all the draw power and tutoring you've built into your deck. This goes back to the issue of simply getting the wrong cards at the wrong time. Synchro Summoning attacking this by increasing the number of plays you could make with any given hand. Yes, there were still plenty of ways your hand could go wrong, but Synchro Summoning definitely heralded an increase in consistency. Xyz Summoning does this one better, and makes it even easier to access the cards you need to pull off your cool moments.

Taking a step back from the mindset of a competitive Vanguard player, who will try to analyze these new mechanics for their optimal usages, Striding enables more cool moments, and it increases the consistency of cool moments. The result of this is very simple: more cool moments means more fun, excitement and enjoyment, and that is a good thing, both for old and new players.





Fun & Longevity

This final topic is slightly detached from discussions of game balance, and is typically more of a corporate concern than an immediate player concern, but please bear with me. Unlike the other discussions which are largely objective game design theory, this is going to involve areas which I'm far less familiar with, so I'm going to end up speaking more subjectively.

Along with the rebranding and deep game design fixes, Bushiroad is doing something which I believe is extremely important: they're lowering the cost of entry into the game by increasing the quality of trial decks (game-wise). This also has the nasty side-effect of effectively lowering trial deck sales among their existing customer base, which would in turn lower the profitability of the game. That's exactly why all of the design changes are so significant. G Assist reduced the negativity of being Grade-locked, both Stride and Generation Break are a step towards fine tuning the game's balance, and Stride provides cool moments on demand.

There are some sales tactics to attempt to counterbalance this effect, though. The new format of the booster sets which includes support for older cards is a move geared towards playing off the secondary market. Also, with the implementation of the Generation Zone, which is more than large enough for a single game, I would wager that this is where a large number of the new, must-have power cards or utility cards will be headed, playing off the competitive advantage of being able to toolbox into those various cards, just like in Yu-Gi-Oh!.

Finally, the obvious advantage of making the game cheaper to get into, is that it will be cheaper to get into. Less players will be turned away by the very sizable average price of a complete deck. I also believe that all existing Vanguard players have an important role to play in this as well. The profitability of the game is directly linked to the lifespan of the game, and the quality of the official play support we as a worldwide community get. When February 27th rolls around, and the English editions of G trial decks 1 & 2 are released, that is the time all local communities should look to recruit new players and grow. If Vanguard is ever going to make it on the scale of Yu-Gi-Oh! and MTG, this is an opportunity that really needs to be taken by the player base. As a player, I'd really love to see local communities taking this into their own hands, and February is going to be a really good time for it.





That's All

If you're read this all the way through, thank you. If there are typos all over the place, I apologize, I wrote this all in one sitting. If you were unsure about why we suddenly got a barrage of drastic changes, I hope this has cleared up some of your doubts. If you're unfamiliar with game design, I hope this cursory glance at why the new mechanics were implemented will help you improve your game once the Stride era arrives. If you'd like to discuss anything I've gone over, or if you think I've missed anything, please comment below, and I'll try to reply when I'm available to do so. If you found reading this ramble a positive experience and you want to ask me about something else related to Vanguard, please also feel free to comment.