LogFAQs > #936565052

Alright 9 more days til Vanguard Zero launch, and I played about 20-30 ranked matches with the following tier list:

T1: Kagero

T2: Nova Grappler, Royal Paladin

T3: Oracle Think Tank

Now Vanguard is a game where if you just luck sack like crazy, you can technically win any match up. Even OTT have a lot of good parts to them that could give them a win over Kagero, but it's like 70-30 in favor of Kagero, even with the luck factor. I just think overall Kageros have the higher chance of winning. But from playing with the trial decks and seeing what people are running in ranked, I have the following analysis:

Kagero: Aleph combo is broken, and Dragonic Overlord is one of the best g3 in the game that doesn't need a whole lot to work. Aleph when Kageros are going first gives you 2 whole freaking turns of grade 3 vs your opponent not at grade 3. On top of the base advantages of going g3 earlier than any other deck atm, if you get the full combo, you get to reset your damage counters once, which is broken in general, and his self buff 5000/1 crit effect is not once per turn. You can literally end the game from your opponent being 1-2 damage if you have the right board for it. Not everybody has 4 perfect guards, so this shit gets really annoying. Dragonic Overlord is also basically a better Buster Blade, but Kageros have their own Buster Blade g2 as well. I think it's a bit of a waste to use the counter blasts for that guy though, so there's that I guess?

Nova Grapplers: The clan that benefits the most from trigger luck sacking. They get huge turns if you draw the right triggers or basically do nothing. But their biggest edge is Brutal Jack, which is a 11000 g2. Strong g2s are just ridiculous in this format because you absolutely have to attack the front row g2s b4 you can attack the vanguard. You have to get rid of its restraint once using a counter blast, but if you get rid of it once, you get to keep using it as restraint only activates once it's placed on the field. Otherwise you have a bunch of guys that stand if you draw a g3 trigger. Beating them is literally just hoping their vanguard doesn't pull a trigger more or less

Royal Paladins: I'm currently running this deck, and I'll just say the card requirement to play this deck optimally is by far the most expensive, and what you get out of it is a middling, but at least consistent, deck. You have 3 really powerful boss g3s, which is good because you get to change your plan on the fly based on which boss mon you draw.

First off, the grade 0 is usually the RRR one, who can summon, not from the deck, 2 monsters per turn by sacrificing 2 triggers from the deck, either Stand or Crit trigger. Then you need a single damage to use counter blast 1, skip your g2 ride phase, use Llew that you summon off the grade 0's ability, and ride Blaster Blade from your deck. This accomplishes a few things, one is consistency since the only reason you can't pull this off is if the opponent doesn't attack you, or you lost all your crit or stand trigger, which is rare even if you run 1 of each, which then you just ride a grade 2. The other is souls. You put those 3 units into the vanguard to activate the effect which gives you 4 souls by the time you ride some of the boss monsters.

If you plan to ride Soul Saver Dragon, you pretty much need to do this or do a much dirtier alternative like using that grade 1 to put a card in your hand into your soul. Otherwise SSD is just a beatstick. If you ride Alfred, you might want to just keep Barcgal you summon off the g0, and the said g0 on the field because Alfred can't be boosted. If you plan to ride Alfred Early, you wanna do this since he summons Blaster Blade from your soul and you rode BB as the g2 vanguard with the g0's effect. You don't want to ride Gancelot usually, but he also benefits from this since you can only activate his +5000/crit buff with BB in the soul. Gancelot is usually the last ditch high risk high reward play. You literally only do this if you know you've already lost without riding Gancelot, and you only win if he has 0 sentinel in his hand and doesn't sack into a heal trigger. However you run 3-4 of him because he searches BB.

Anyways, their problem is that they simply don't have enough counter blasts to run the whole team at its full power all the time. They have a pretty bad match up against Kagero but can usually survive Nova Grappler's meme turns

OTT: There's only 1 build for OTT or it's unusable. That can get expensive lol. But they can do the big boy unguardable damage with Silent Tom schnanigans still, and they can do the deck stacking, though imo it's far less reliable in Zero since duels rarely last long enough to recycle through the whole deck. Their best g3 Amaterasu also just kinda sucks. Her draw 5 desperation skill was amazing in the main game, but drawing 5 doesn't have as nearly as many uses in Zero format. You might end up drawing all your triggers away, which sucks because they don't double as guards in this game.

Anyways, nobody's gonna read this probably, but I guess I may post it on a Vanguard Zero board if that exists lul. It'll definitely help people who are rerolling once the game actually comes out. I'd really recommend Kagero. You might wanna pull into 2-3 Dragonic Overlords and 4 Alephs, but the rest of the core is really easy to come by and not RRR. Aleph isn't even RRR

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