Saturday 30 June 2018

Cardfight!! Vanguard V - Episode 9 Review

Hey look kids!  It's the best deck vs the most RNG deck!

This was easily the best fight of the show so far.  I have to hand it to the team here as the choreography was right out of how people actually play Vanguard and on a competitive level at that.  The episode focuses entirely on the fight between Kai and Koutei which was something that we never actually got to see out of the original series in this manner (the two did do some playtesting during Asia Circuit's beach episode in which Kai won the majority of their matches) and with the episode being called "Kai loses!!" I was expecting some form of bullshit to occur from Koutei given how rarely Kai jobs to people in the franchise.

Okay so maybe not as RNG if they continue the Burst like gimmick.

Koutei rushes Kai which is a questionable tactic against Kagero in Standard and gets sort of punished when Kai responds by riding Berserk Dragon and mounting a counter rush including swinging at a Rearguard with a trigger powered unit which confuses Morikawa but Koutei goes out of his way to guard since he needs the extra units for his next turn.  He rides Daiyusha and buffs it up to a point that he won't get its bonus crit without a trigger as he doesn't have a booster behind it and swings into a no guard while flipping a crit but doesn't give it to his VG.  People again are confused as he puts the crit on his rearguard but as Kai and Koutei's thoughts tell you it made no difference.  Pushing Kai to 5 was really no different than pushing him to 4 when the RG lane would be lethal regardless.  This way just happens to damage deny Kai a little more and he guy winds up drawing a Heal for turn that would have gone off had Koutei played differently.  Kai remarks that his opponent has been dictating the pace of the game up until this point which makes sense as Koutei is a national level player and the "Solitary Fighter" has yet to make any appearances at the Pro level.

"Kagero is too reliant on its pieces and Waterfall to win its games."

He decides to mount another counterattack with Dragonic Overlord and stacking buffs on it through Force + his Soul Blast skill and charges ahead which Koutei no guards and gets punished for it by Kai flipping a crit to put him to 4.  Kai uses Overlord's ability to restand and swing again which is met by a Perfect Guard to once again the surprise of many of the people watching but Gouki explains something that I've told some other people in the past: using Overlord's restand makes you go -1 in total card economy and against Dimension Police you want to have as many cards in hand as possible.  By risking the Double Crit Koutei was able to bait Kai into reducing his defenses for his major push turn with Great Daiyusha who is by all intents a Raging Form Dragon.

Taking bets on this guy's requirements.  VG at 50k and doesn't hit to get the Superior Ride?

Koutei rerides in battle phase after Kai's Perfect Guard while putting both of his front row attackers to 40k+ with a crit on one of them.  Kai no guards the VG attack (which had Twin Drive btw) and hits a defensive trigger which through the rest of the cards in his hand is enough to barely survive the push.  Kai rips a Nehalem off the top and uses it to make all of his lanes able to hit and swings for 33 with Overlord (imagine if it was a Waterfall he ripped) and breaks Koutei's one to pass with a crit for the win.  Kai wins!

Even the anime thinks DifferentFight's assessment of Kagero is full of shit.

Well played writing team.  The title is one of the older tricks out there as it's meant to make you want to see just how it is that the character it mentions loses/gets killed/etc and I honestly thought Kai was going to lose this one but the man's Plot Armour clearly wasn't going to have any of that.  Still seeing that there was a good amount of competitive technical play in here is a thing of the original series that was sorely lacking in later seasons/G and I hope it continues here.  That all said after the battle is over and the two vow to fight again it's time for the final fight as Team Q4 is up 2-1 and it's Aichi vs Leon.  Brace yourselves people as next week we get to see the Kidani Boner on full display.

No comments:

Post a Comment