Hello, everybody! Tonight I’m bringing a topic that is a lot more broad than what I would probably see myself doing in the future.

Vanguard G is slowly reaching it’s 5th season with Zeta, and the by the end of this year in Japan, we will have reached actual support for every clan (with Megacolony being last in terms of timing). This brings up a very simple question for Bushiroad and Cardfight!! Vanguard as a whole: What’s next?

This is a time where all the main clans will have finally caught up in terms of basic support: Keywords (unless Link Joker doesn’t get one), Generation Break 8, and more than likely, secondary Grade 3’s. Hell, even Claret Sword Dragon is getting a second Grade 3, which we thought he was all but forgotten after Luard came along. This is a very unique time where the stars are all aligned for the game to expand in some way, shape or form. The question is, how?

I won’t pretend to know how they will add to the game, or even if they will add anything new, but I’ll talk about where they have gone before and where they have the ability to adjust things in the game right now. But for now, let’s look at the past. For every season in OG Vanguard, something new was brought to the table; and it seemed like it was going to go a similar direction in Vanguard G, but something changed over time…

Limit Break Era

During the first few sets of the game, all support was pretty basic as they were still getting their footing. It experimented with mechanics such as Megablasts and Persona Blasts, but nothing like what came to be in BT-06 and it’s accompanying Trial Decks.

Limit Break was a simple mechanic, allowing for your vanguards to become more powerful as you hit a certain damage threshold. The very mechanic made things more interesting, as normally you wouldn’t want to take too much damage too early on. But now, you wanted to hit those sweet, Limit Break skills to push the odds into your favor.

The biggest, yet simplest thing that Limit Break did, was still manage to not change up the rules of the game too much. Rules-wise, it was just a skill that went off only when you were at 4 or more damage (or 5 later on). It didn’t do anything to knock the formula around, which complexity-wise, was really nice.

Break Ride era

I know, this basically still falls under Limit Break, but it’s too important to not take note of this era.

As season 2 of Vanguard came to a close, it became a question of if they could improve on Limit Break even further; and they did with Break Rides. This mechanic, although still technically just a Limit Break skill, increased the power output of the game by a large margin. It allowed for more ridiculous skills to be placed on cards while still having hoops to jump through, while not fundamentally changing or adding a mechanic to the game. Keeps the complexity level relatively similar while still changing up gameplay/strategies. The complexity shift came to be more when they added in Link Joker and the “Lock” mechanic, but even then it was pretty simple.

At this point, Bushiroad was on a roll when it came to game mechanics. Unfortunately…Legion happened next.

Legion era

This was the shortest era to exist in vanguard, only being accompanied by 2 main booster sets, 2 extra boosters, a few decks, and a movie booster (in Japan), but it was for good reason.

First, let me say that I loved a lot of what Legion brought to the table. Mainly the sub-clans and archetypes; the unique styles and strategies, as well as improving other strategies. But unfortunately, Legion was a bit of a nightmare of a mechanic. It caused for you to have two Vanguards, it reset your deck a bit, and it only required your opponent to be at grade 3 as well (as opposed to Limit Break’s damage requirement). If your clan had Legion support and you fought against a Limit Break deck, you had a very clear advantage.

On top of that, I can imagine it was a bit trickier for newbies to try and figure out Legion over Limit Break. Questions like, is the vanguard always at 20k? Can I attack your other vanguard to deal damage? Albeit a bit simpler to understand now that time has passed, it still had many issues, including some obvious lack of foresight with stuff like Cat Raizer existing.

It was clear that Bushiroad wasn’t too keen on keeping this mechanic going, especially with a general disdain for the 4th Season of Vanguard compared to the previous seasons. This was the time to start off with a clean slate.

Thus came Vanguard G, and the beginning of the G Era.

G Era

The G Era introduced several new mechanics to the game, including some literal game changers. The introduction of Strides and the G-Zone not only added new mechanics to the game, but new phases and general actions that could be done as well, such as the Stride Phase or G-Assists.

Although it did a lot of rules changing and added new stuff to the game, Stride added a new layer that not only increased the power output of the game, but due to it’s generic nature, it was able to give every clan a little something to work with. It wasn’t like Legion, where it limited your deck-building options, it actually added an entire layer to the deck to be able to play around with.

Bushiroad seems to have realized that Stride was a mechanic that was worth keeping around, as to even now, it’s mainstay that hasn’t completely been changed in some way. In fact, in the second season of Vanguard G, they started a more personalized approach to mechanics by introducing keyword mechanics.

Keywords, Keywords, Keywords

This is where things started changing from the direction of, “constantly upping the ante” to, “smoothing things out” (or making them more broken in some cases). When the second Gear Chronicle and first Pale Moon trial decks dropped, they surprisingly didn’t have a new kind of general mechanic for all clans to play with. Instead, they each had their own individual keyword mechanics to base their decks around.

Ever since these decks and the sets following forward, Bushiroad started adding mechanics to each clan to personalize their play style a bit more. Whether it was something like Magia or Wave that did similar things to what the clan did before, or mechanics like Time Leap and Thunderstrike that added new layers to the clan’s identities; every clan (except Link Joker to this day) got something over time. Not necessarily in the time of just the second season, (Shadow Paladin’s didn’t get theirs till G Next) but overtime yes.

Although it did add a lot of variety, each keyword was more-so just a shorthand to either an action or a state, and you could still technically write out each skill word for word as to what they did. Being keyworded allows for the player to know that this card can do something specifically, or is active during a certain period of time by just seeing the keyword at the beginning of said skill (Also being keyworded allowed for more search opportunities). This made playing the game a bit more beginner friendly, as each of these cards had similar requirements or a similar ability.

Of course, this wasn’t where Bushiroad ran out of ideas to change up the game. In fact, they realized with all these crazy offensive skills, they needed to offset that by adding more defensive options. This is where G-Guardians came to play.

G-Guardians

G-Guardians became Bushiroad’s first new defensive mechanic since the Quintet Wall (which in all fairness, wasn’t the best mechanic). To compensate for increasingly powerful offensive capabilities, they needed something else besides Perfect Guards to defend with, especially when Glory skills (and Diablo) were a thing too. G-Guardians were not only a fix to this dilemma, but it added new strategies/layers to the game in a relatively simple manner.

Out of all the mainstay mechanic additions, this one had the weirdest timing as it started at the end of Season 2 of Vanguard G, as opposed to the beginning of Season 3; although I technically count this as the Season 3 mechanic given that late timing and how the mechanic got improved with time.

And that….was the last general mechanic that came to be so far. So what did G Next get?

“The Balance Patch”

As opposed to previous seasons of the show, G Next, instead of adding a new mechanic or layer to the game, expanded upon the G mechanics we have now and improved them.

Clans that didn’t have a grade 3 centric to their keyword now/will now have a keyword-based grade 3 (although not necessarily the same person, such as Luard and Amaruda), and all previous grade 3 bosses now/will have a second one. Mechanics have been smoothed out to be more functional in certain builds (while some may need work, there is still time though). Every clan got a taste of a new finisher with Generation Break 8, and the first Generation Break 1 G-Guardians (that flip things) in the last Fighter’s Collection. As the season comes to a close, the only clan to receive anything different so far is Gear Chronicle’s first Generation Break 4.

The way I see it, the last few boosters of this year will be used as an opportunity to balance the rest of the clans out. The secondary grade 3’s for Link Joker, Angel Feather, Aqua Force, Spike Brothers, and Megacolony, as well as any additional support to keep them more in line of what we have for other clans (with success varying from clan to clan). This is why I call the G Next from start to finish, “The Balance Patch”, even if some clans are clearly more powerful than others still *cough*Gears*cough*. But it does bring me to my next subject…

Where to go from here?

As 2018 is on the horizon, a new year of Vanguard begins. With all the clans being all caught up by then, Bushiroad can take various routes as to how to improve upon their game. Some simple, some more complex. The simplest answer is for them to stay the course, and keep balancing for now.

Staying the Course

Right now, Vanguard has several mechanics already under its belt and many things they can do just with that alone. Stride and the Generation Break mechanics are pretty simplistic in the fact they can be escalated to higher levels as they create more cards. Chronodragon Gear Next is, unfortunately for me, a decent example with this with it being the first official Generation Break 4 card.

(I only say unfortunately due to my own personal disdain for the Chronojet deck, but the card at least has the merit of progress.)

What does this mean they can do with future cards? On a simple scale, other clans can get access to GB4 on their strides as well. This can also mean we can get higher GB counts on our G-Guardians as well, with skills that get progressively stronger as the game continues. Maybe they can work their way back up to GB8, so every clan has options for every point in the game.

Also, this means instead of just working up, they can work down a bit too, with more potential early game support, keyword support, and even subclan support for stuff that hasn’t received the golden treatment yet (I’m looking at you, Raizers…).

Although this is the simplest idea, it also may cause things to go a bit stale, at least from a sales point of view. Personally, I feel if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but I can see the need to spice things up a bit. The second idea has been tackled a little bit one main clan in particular, and could maybe add more to others.

Adding Secondary Keywords

Out of the main clans, there is a clan right now with two keywords, with that being Nubatama (I say main cuz I’m not counting Touken Ranbu for this). Each keyword, Afterimage and Dominate, has their own, completely different play style. However, who said that they had to be the only ones with 2 keywords?

As time goes forward, clans will get various support that are different from what we are used to, and can potentially evolve from that. To symbolize this, new keywords can be put in place that either allow you to add new layers to your deck as is, or even build an entirely new deck from.

It’s a safe bet that even if we don’t get new keywords for clans, we will get new ways to play with the clans we love, or ways to play clans we hated before but can grow to love. However, there is something else that hasn’t been done in a long while since the beginning of the G-Era.

Introduction of a New Clan

This isn’t very likely in my opinion, but I wanted to take all ideas into consideration. Ever since the creation of Gear Chronicle, there hasn’t been a new clan to exist. It has been almost 3 years since that point; even the gap between and Link Joker was surprisingly much smaller than this.

The main issue I see right now is the fact that when it comes to introducing new base mechanics and interactions, they have been using existing clans to do that (such as Dominate being completely new but using an older clan like Nubatama), so the need of a new clan is not really in demand right now.

There is only one way they could potentially drop a new clan, and that is if they add a new, literal game changing mechanic. Which brings me to my final option…

Adding a New, Literal Game Changing Mechanic

This could be something simple using the tools they have to add a new mechanical layer to cards in the main deck, or expanding upon the G Zone to add a new type of cards. If they were to go anywhere with a new mechanic, my bet would be on the latter.

I’m not even going to begin to speculate on what kind of game changing mechanic could come to be if Bushiroad dropped something, but if you, the reader, have any cool ideas, feel free to comment/share them.

My biggest concern is if Bushi does something along these lines, they need to tread very carefully with these mechanics. Although I can’t see them going to the same level of Power Creep that Yu-Gi-Oh! has been known for in the past, it’s still better to be safe than sorry.

My Wishes and Conclusion

Out of all the potential options I see Bushiroad going towards next year for Vanguard, I would honestly like my first two options the most; Staying the Course and potentially adding Secondary Keywords. I feel like they are just hitting that sweet spot with the game and have mechanics/clans with tons of untapped potential. I really see no point in trying to push forward with some crazy new clan or game mechanic unnecessarily, or else it ends up like the Legion Era all over again. Slow and steady wins the race sometimes.

If they are to add some new mechanic sometime next year, I would want it to be like how they dropped G-Guardians the first time; In a Fighter’s Collection for everyone to have at the same time. This way, no clan is left behind (at first). Winter or Summer would be best for this kind of release specifically, and they can continue on from there on out.

Anyway, no one knows for sure what Bushiroad will do for the future for Vanguard. I don’t even know how they will handle the rest of the year’s support right now and if anything nuts will come from there. For now though, I can keep speculating and most importantly; keep playing the game. That’s all for tonight, next predictions will be much smaller in scale, focused more on specific sets and clans. Until next time!

-Dax