Tabletop Game / Cardfight!! Vanguard

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Cardfight!! Vanguard is a Japanese Trading Card Game developed and published by Bushiroad as the centerpiece of its Cardfight!! Vanguard multi-media franchise. The game was first released in 2010, alongside the manga and anime components of the franchise.

The rough premise of the game is that Cardfight!! Vanguard's cards depict beings from the planet of Cray, and the two players are astral spirits who call upon these fighters from Cray to battle for them. These cards are known as Units, and the act of placing them onto the field to let them do battle is known as Calling.^NoteIt used to be that all cards in the game were Units, but a new card type known as Orders were introduced in 2020.

The central gameplay involves calling units onto the field, letting them battle the opponent's cards, and eventually defeat the opponent by dealing a total of six damage to the Vanguard unit, a specific unit that represents the player. Units have two key values: a grade that determines its difficulty of being called, and a power value that determines its strength when battling.

The playmat includes one Vanguard Circle where the player's Vanguard is placed, and five Rear-guard Circles where other units can be called. At the start of the game, a grade 0 unit is placed in the Vanguard Circle as the First Vanguard. At the start of every turn, the turn player can "Ride" a new Vanguard by placing a new unit with a grade one higher or equal to the current Vanguard on top of the current Vanguard. During the main phase, the turn player can call units onto the field with grades equal to or lower than the Vanguard, and use the abilities of the cards on the field. There are two common types of ability costs: Soul Blast, which requires removing a number of cards under the Vanguard, and Counter Blast, which requires flipping a number of cards in the damage zone (placed face-up when the player is damaged; see below) face down.

During the Battle Phase, the units on the front row (the vanguard and the two rear guards beside it) can attack the opponent's front row units. The power values of the battling cards are compared, with a whole host of effects and mechanics that augment them. If the attacker's power is greater or equal to the attacked unit's power, the attack is considered to have hit. If the hit card was a rear guard, it's retired and removed from the field. If it was the vanguard, then one (or more) damage is dealt.

Additionally, when the Vanguard attacks or is hit, the game performs an additional trigger check (known respectively as "drive check" and "damage check"), where the top card from the deck is flipped up and its listed trigger effects would apply. A deck must contain exactly sixteen trigger cards, with a maximum limit of 4 heal trigger cards, which heal 1 damage when triggered, and 1 over trigger card, which grants an extremely powerful effect that varies by card.

The Cardfight!! Vanguard card game was "rebooted" twice alongside the Cardfight!! Vanguard (V Series) anime reboot and the Cardfight!! Vanguard overDress anime soft reboot. Cards would either have a D icon, a V icon, or no icon on their bottom left corner next to the card ID. Each time the game was rebooted, a new format exclusively using the post-reboot cards would be created. Currently, there are three formats: a D Standard, a V Standard, and a Premium Standard where all cards can be used.

The storyline and lore within the cards themselves is strongly integrated with the story of the anime and the franchise at large. As such, additional info on the card stories can be found on these pages and their associated subpages.

Tropes

• Attack! Attack! Attack!: The MyGO!!!!! archetype aims to assemble its five band members - Tomori, Anon, Rana, Soyo, and Taki - and bumrush the opponent by overwhelming them with damage and card advantage while exploiting its ability to thin the deck by Binding units using cards like "Hitoshizuku" to increase the chances of hitting Triggers. The tradeoff is that the deck runs out of gas very quickly if they can't get the kill fast enough, as it burns resources to commit to plays without ways to recover them.
• Card Cycling: Before the game starts, each player gets one chance to return as many cards in their hand as they wish back into the deck, and then draw the same number.
• Console Cameo: "Mushiking: King of the Beetles Machine" is a Crest that depicts a "Mushiking: King of the Beetles" arcade machine.
• Constructed World: The world of Cray, which is populated by a large amount of nations and clans, and have their own storylines told across card releases.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Outside of "Lake Maiden, Lien" and "Barcgal" from the very first booster set, there are very few units whose skills require you to exhaust the unit to activate them.
• First-Player Advantage Mitigation: The player going first cannot attack on the first turn. This means you miss out on your drive check which cold net you an extra card at worse. As the game went on, starting Vanguard units would also include extra advantages for going second, such as an extra draw or an extra shield card. Zig-zagged depending on format and mechanics. First player gets to establish their Imaginary Gifts and of course gets to twin drive first. However, many cards have effects that only trigger if the opposing Vanguard is Grade 3, which the second turn player benefits from first.
• Flavor Text: A large amount of cards in Cardfight!! Vanguard have a short line of flavor text above their card effect description box.
• Limit Break: Cards with the Limit Break keyword have abilities that can only be used when the player is sufficiently damaged.
• Loophole Abuse: There is a very abuseable rulings quirk where if a card effect that is activated cannot be fully resolved after going on the stack, it resolves as much as possible before continuing to the next card on the stack (if possible). This gets funky with cards that have simultaneous activation timings with other cards, and if one of those effects does not have an "If you do" clause or requires a certain condition to resolve the remainder of the effect, it is possible to force the stack to resolve in such a way that it produces unintended consequences.
  • Possibly the most famous interaction due to this ruling is the "Steam Maiden, Melem" and "Tick Tock Worker" combo. "Melem" is a Grade 1 unit who has an effect that, after battling a Vanguard, allows her to shuffle herself into the deck to Call a Grade 0 unit from your Deck in Rest. "Tick Tock Worker" is a Grade 0 unit whose effect triggers at the end of a battle and allows the user to time leap a chosen unit. If you place "Melem" on the stack first and then place "Tick Tock Worker" on second, "Tick Tock Worker" resolves first and time leaps "Melem", Binding "Melem" to summon a Grade 2 unit from your Deck. "Melem"'s effect then resolves, but because she is no longer in the location where she activated the effect, she cannot shuffle herself back, but the game still resolves the rest of the effect since "Melem" shuffling herself back is not a cost to apply the tutoring effect. This allows you to get a Grade 2 and any Grade 0 of your choice from your Deck simultaneously just by exploiting a rulings quirk.
  • A similar exploit exists with "Formation of a Common Destiny, Sakiko Togawa" and "Time of Tranquility, Mutsumi Wakaba" with "Scene that lies Beyond Advancing without Escaping, Anon Chihaya". The former two are CRYCHIC cards who have the shared effect to place themselves in Soul and make the player draw a card if the player ever Calls a non-CRYCHIC unit to the Rear-Guard. "Anon" is a MyGO!!! card whose effect allows her to Counter Blast 1 to look at the top 5 cards of the deck and Call a MyGO!!! unit to your Rear-Guard. If you Call "Anno" while "Sakiko"/"Mutsumi" is on the field, you can put "Anno" on the stack after "Sakiko"/"Mutsumi", and if "Anno" hits a valid target with her effect, you can put "Sakiko"/"Mutsumi" on the stack twice with the same effect. The first time the effect resolves, the unit goes to Soul and you draw 1, and the second time it resolves, "Sakiko"/"Mutsumi" is already in Soul, so that half of the effect whiffs, but you still get the draw 1. This makes them an extremely potent draw engine for the MyGO!!! deck, capable of recharging the hand with cards constantly if you can get the combo going to the point where it is very possible to lose by deck out if abused too much.
• Luck Manipulation Mechanic: Due to the Trigger mechanic present in the game, luck can be a deciding factor in the outcome of a fight, more so than in other card games. As such, there exists ways in the game to mitigate or control it, usually though rearraging the top cards of the deck or other forms of deck manipulation. One of the clans, Oracle Think Tank even has this as one of its core mechanics.
• Mechanically Unusual Fighter:
  • The Mushiking: The King of Beetles cards are unique in that they are formatted exactly like the old Mushiking cards, complete with double side printed barcode and beetle stats (with the Grade and ability icons being moved to accommodate the barcodes). Furthermore, the beetles themselves do not have any abilities whatsoever, but their associated Order cards call upon the printed stats (Skill, Finishing Attack, and Super Finishing Attack) on the beetles to use their effects.
  • The Like a Dragon deck has a unique gimmick where instead of Riding during the Ride Phase, the deck's Grade 0 Vanguard, "Dragon of Dojima, Kazuma Kiryu", has an effect to Soul Charge a unit from the Ride Deck at the start of the Main Phase, and gets +1 Grade and +2000 Power for each "Like a Dragon" card in Soul or Drop that was in the Ride Deck at the start of the game. Once he Soul Charges for the third time in the game this way, he can automatically fetch his Grade 3 Ride Unit from the Deck and Ride it, becoming "Kazuma Kiryu".
• Mythology Gag:
  • Fittingly, the cards introduced with overDress seem to have playstyles and artwork that resemble the clans their respective nations used to have, with decks featured in the anime including Tomari's, which resembles Dimension Police, Zakusa's, which resembles Link Joker and Shinobu's, which resembles Dark Irregulars.
  • Harmonics Messiah's Balance Buff gives it three skills virtually identical to the Balance Buffs given to it in the mobile game Cardfight!! Vanguard ZERO, although due to the differences between the two games, its third skill creates a Guardian Shield ticket for the player who goes second, not first.^note In ZERO, the player going second had a major advantage due to being able to attack and Stride first, so the Heal Guardian was given to the player going first. In Vanguard's V Premium format, however, the prevalence of Imaginary Gifts gives the player going first the advantage since they start accumulating gifts sooner, and they can use ride-down measures to prevent the player who goes second from Striding first, so the Guardian Shield is given to the player going second.
• Planet of Hats: While the planet Cray is diverse as a whole, its nations and clans tend to have hats.
  • Nations:
    • Magallanica is the sea nation.
    • Zoo is the animals-plants-insects/nature nation.
    • Star Gate is the space-themed nation.
    • Dark Zone is the dark-themed nation.
    • Dragon Empire is what it sounds like.
    • Averted with United Sanctuary, which has 3 kinds of knights, 2 corporations and a nursing organisation.
  • Clans:
    • Royal Paladins and Gold Paladins are heroic knights.
    • Shadow Paladins are dark knights and later antiheroes.
    • Angel Feather consists of angels in nurse outfits.
    • Kagero are fire dragons.
    • Narukami are thunder dragons.
    • Tachikaze are prehistoric-themed.
    • Nubatama and Murakum are ninjas.
    • Nova Grapplers are prizefighters.
    • Dimension Police are mecha and superheroes.
    • Link Joker are alien invaders.
    • Great Nature is an uplifted animal university.
    • Megacolony is the insect mafia.
    • Neo Nectar are plant/farming-themed.
    • Aqua Force are a well-intentioned extremist navy.
    • Bemuda Triangle is composed of mermaid pop stars.
    • Granblue is composed of zombie pirates.
    • Spike Brothers is a violent American Football team.
    • Pale Moon is a circus as a front for assassins.
    • Dark Irregulars are movie-monster-themed.
• Promotional Powerless Piece of Garbage: Averted with the BanG Dream! units released in Dimensional Transcendence and Dragonsoul Resonance. They are vanillas with Triggers and no effects, similar to many other promo cards, but because the band member's names are inscribed in their card titles they can fulfill card conditions for their decks that require having units with certain names on the field, making them strictly superior compared to normal promo cards.
• Time Skip: There is a time skip of 3000 years in between the original/V Series and the overDress series, where the political situation on Cray has dramatically shifted.
• Token Card Summon: Token units are pseudo-units generated from a card's ability and can't be put in decks. It can be used to like other units in the rear-guard circle. Since tokens are not a part of any clan or nation, units with the Lord keyword cannot declare an attack as long as you have a token in play. When Token Units leave the field they disappear from the game.
• Vanilla Unit:
  • In the original version of the game, Units (cards) of each grade have a maximum power stat, which is reduced accordingly depending on the Unit's skills. In other words, a grade 2 Unit with no skills always has 10000 power, and grade 2 units with skills can have 9000 at the highest. Basically, it boils down to Unskilled, but Strong versus Weak, but Skilled. Most clans have at least one Vanilla unit per grade, but it's exceptionally rare to see grade 3 Vanilla Units, and grade 4 doesn't have any.
  • In the V Series iteration of the game, Vanilla Units distinguish themselves from units with skills in other ways. One might have increased power but no shield (for example, a grade 2 unit with 12000 power), increased shield but lowered power (a grade 1 unit with 7000 power and 15000 shield, as opposed to the norm of 8000 power and 10000 shield), or even units with only 3000 power but start with 2 critical.
  • Mushi units from the Mushiking series have the gimmick of being comprised entirely of vanillas. To make up for this, their signature Crest, "Mushiking: King of the Beetles Machine", allows them to use unique Attack Orders that pump up their numbers and give them powerful offense.