Cardfight!! Vanguard

A new collectible cardgame from Japan, Created by the guys behind Yu-Gi-Oh and Duel Masters and headed by Bushiroad.

From Japan with Love

Before you freak out and dismiss it, Vanguard actually manages to avoid the pitfalls of those games (so far). The game is built around a mixture of luck and skills that while it's not random, there is still a chance of a standard deck beating a pro deck if things go well. Vanguard also has an anime series, which is notable for being about a normal player learning the game with a reasonable win/loss record and nobody tarding out over children's card games.

Vanguard is hugely popular in Singapore and other Asian countries and is gaining popularity in card-gaming circles worldwide. One draw factor is the incredibly varied card art and menagerie of characters, though not all of them are translated to English as of yet.

The Game

Typical Vanguard card. Note the combination of cool robot with cool shaolin monk. This is common in Vanguard.

The basic premise of the trading card game, is that the two players represent astral spirits leading a small army and dueling on the planet Cray. The cards in players' decks, called "units", represent characters from Cray that players can summon. Each unit has a name, clan, power level, shield value, one or more skills, and "grade", which ranges from 0 to 3. Overall strength of units increases with grade, but a unit can only be summoned if the player's vanguard is of that grade or higher. A deck must contain exactly 50 cards and 16 Trigger units. There is otherwise no restriction on how many cards of a certain clan or grade must be used.

Vanguard is a very fast-paced game with the players only having six hitpoints, and the speed accelerates with the usage of Triggers. A Trigger card is marked with an icon in the top right corner, and when drawn when either attacking or taking damage, it'll let you power up a card for that turn as well as either healing a damage point, adding to a card's critical rating, letting you reactivate a card you already used, or drawing an extra card. This means you can pretty much turn a game around with a bit of luck and timing. However, the game also requires intelligent, balanced deck building, as even though Grade 3 cards are strongest, Grade 1 and 2 are needed for their unique abilities, attack boosting and intercepting respectively.

A good blog about Vanguard tactics and discussion