Plot: Aichi, Kamui and Misaki (And Morikawa) head to Card Shop Psy and meet the National Champion of Vanguard, Ren. Aichi experiences odd visions when Ren gets a weird glowing look in his eyes. Kourin challenges Ren to a match using identical decks, allowing the others to spectate. Is Ren really as good as his reputation suggests?
Breakdown: Aichi’s getting visions now? Okie dokie.
To my understanding, Ren is meant to be one of the main antagonists of season one, and I’m just not impressed. He’s a cocky guy in a long black coat. There’s just not a lot to him to make him stand out to me. Even the pirate guys had a gimmick to them, but he’s just very typical and bland. Hopefully that will change later when I actually see him fighting with his own deck.
Otherwise, this episode was….a Cardfight. Maybe I’m grumpy because I’m sick as of this writing, but yeah….it was a Cardfight.
I really feel like this show still has a bit of an issue not being easy enough to follow along if you don’t play the game. I know it’s been a while since I last watched the show, but I was still having a bit of trouble fully understanding why certain things were happening. Most notably, I have difficulty understanding guards and why you sometimes need several of them to block an attack. I get that it has something to do with the power discrepancies between attacker and target, but I haven’t quite grasped it yet. I even watched some videos about it, and it still sounds like gibberish to me.
One of the videos I watched showed the rules on screen, and the guard step section was literally over a page long. If someone can simplify it for my little pea brain, I’d appreciate it.
Next time, the team finds out Misaki has a eidetic memory and decide to apply it to Vanguard.
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The Anime Madhouse 
Not going to lie, I did try to play the game a few years ago and there was a game store not far from where I lived, but I got swamped with work and my blogging made me extra busy. I ended up selling my cards. Vanguard was a bit interesting at the time, but my focuses have been elsewhere especially this year.
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Yeah guarding’s definitely not very intuitive especially because while the show shows a lot of the duel, they don’t really go into specifics on it.
Think of it as every card tends to add defense power in 5K-10K increments. You can do a “Perfect Card” with specific grade 1s by sacrificing a grade 0 from your hand which is an infinite guard for that turn but your hand becomes weaker. Then if your defense is only 9000 higher than your opponent’s you’ll still lose to a double critical.
The glowing eyes era is definitely when the show started really going up for me so hopefully it ends up landing for you. It’ll make the tone of the series slightly less relaxed at least
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Thank you very much for explaining that to me! That’s a lot clearer than the sources I was using.
I’m happy to hear that it’s a good point in the show. I look forward to watching it. Thank you for commenting and liking! 🙂
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