Cardfight! Vanguard – Ride 4: Assault! Twin Drive!

Suggested Title: Card Advantage 101

Summary:

Aichi comes to Card Capital, but finds no one there to play with. Well, no one his own age anyway. This is a children’s card gameafter all. He talks to the Nitta, the store’s manager, then shows him his Royal Paladin deck. After some contemplative noises, Nitta tells Aichi to come back to the store tomorrow, because “something nice” will be waiting for him.

Pictured here is the target audience of the game, who we shall summarily ignored for the rest of the series.

 

Aichi returns as instructed, with Morikawa and Izaki in tow. Nitta says Aichi must have a cardfight! before he can have his nice thing, which sounds increasingly like a euphemism for something unpleasant. Nitta says he was going to fight Aichi himself, but he’s late for a very important meeting and suggests that Misaki, the shopkeeper who claims never to have played a cardfight! before, be his opponent.

After Misaki delivers a line so shallow I can only hope to assume its purpose was to confirm that she’s the token female of the show (with anime art styles it’s often hard to tell), the pair shuffle up for their cardfight!

Once the cardfight! is completed, Nitta returns as if on cue and asks what he learned from the battle. He says that he still has a lot to learn about Cardfight! Vanguard. Nitta says that was what he wanted to show Aichi, that the world of Cardfight! Vanguard is vast and exciting and blah blah blah, buy more cards.

Cardfight! Summary:

As I mentioned back in my What is Cardfight! Vanguard? post, Misaki uses an Oracle Think Tank deck, which means a lot of psychic creatures, sorcerers and some just plain weird crap. Misaki starts with a mage known as Lozenge, so I assume her powers include mitigating cold symptoms. She quickly trades “up” to a monster that is made up of two creepy dolls.

Aichi makes the karate bookman his Vanguard and summons some dogs to the rear guard. His attack introduces a new type of trigger: the Draw Trigger! When you hit a draw trigger…well, you draw a card. Plus you can boost a unit’s attack power for one round.

On her turn, Misaki rides some  scantily clad girl carrying a scale and calls two Silent Toms, my favorite Unit in the game. She

Silent Tom is a gangster mummy, haunted by the spirit of a hot chick whose finger is also a gun. How is this not the greatest thing you’ve ever seen?

attacks with the Silent Toms, whose ability keeps Grade 0 units from blocking them. Aichi rides Blaster Blade, uses its ability to get rid of one Silent Tom, then introduces the ability to attack units in the rear guard by attacking and retiring the other one. Jerk.

Misaki calls a Grade 3 Feudal Japanese priestess by the name of CEO Amaterasu. What is she CEO of? I don’t know, cardfights maybe? Whatever her business model, she introduces yet another new rule for the episode: the Twin Drive. Grade 3 units check twice for a drive trigger on each attack, thus allowing you to draw two cards as well. This lets the CEO get in for some extra damage.

Aichi’s attack in unsuccessful in finishing off Misaki, so she achieves vengeance for the fallen Toms by moving a card from the top of her deck to the bottom, but then leaving a Critical trigger on top, dealing Aichi his final damage and his first loss.

Reactions:

To be honest, as ridiculous as this whole show is, I actually find this to be a really good episode. It’s one of my favorites in a lot of ways. For one, it introduces the Oracle Think Tank deck, which I find more interesting to watch than most, though that’s obviously a personal preference. While Cardfight! Vanguard does have some episodes that are more about character and/or plot, this is definitely a cardfight!-centric episode and that’s ultimately where it must succeed or fail. And this episode’s card fight feels a lot more genuine than most, like a game you could actually have with a human being sporting a sensible haircut.

How not to write.

In a show that’s about a game, it can be difficult to explain the rules without making the characters seem like they’re reading from an instruction manual rather than a script. But even though this episode has more new rules than any other since the pilot, they all come up fairly organically. They’re explained only when the situation arises and only as much as they need to be explained. This is a far cry from the Yu-Gi-Oh! School of “I played a card, now let me explain every possible use for it in a five minute monologue”.

It also manages to have a few really good dramatic moments (for a show about a card game), that don’t feel overwrought for once. When Aichi realizes he can’t use his hand full of grade 0 monsters to block the Silent Toms he realizes that he is suddenly very far behind, and when the Twin Drive check comes up, it’s the first time he’s seen something like that and it utterly rains on his parade. Looking at all the elements, you can genuinely see where he progressively learns the lesson that there’s a lot more to cardfighting than he currently understands, rather than simply having Nitta explain it. This episode gets its point across without having to bludgeon us with it and I appreciate that fact.

Picture it in your mind: a restraining order that I got signed by a judge.

Now I’ve poked a little fun at Aichi’s obsessive relationship with Kai, but this episode genuinely takes an odd step with it. It opens with Aichi entering card capital and spotting Kai. He rushes over to see him, but it turns out that it’s just someone who’s  like cosplaying Kai or something. It’s way too similar to be just a coincidence. Then a disappointed Aichi has a conversation with store manager Nitta, who asks him what’s wrong. He says, “before you seemed oddly dejected. Like you’d been stood up by your girlfriend”. This observation is followed immediately by a sly look from substitute manager the cat.

From what I’ve seen of the series there isn’t a lot of evidence that the two are meant to have a romantic relationship, and yet they do play Aichi’s obsession with Kai to a ridiculous degree. He dreams about Kai on a somewhat regular basis, he does get genuinely upset when Kai’s not around and he frequently seeks validation from Kai like he’s got daddy issues.

Having forgotten this moment from the first time I watched the episode, I was making the relationship jokes because of how silly the whole codependency thing was, but come to think of it there are some more gay jokes coming up, so maybe it’s just a really bizarre instance of fanservice for the inevitable Kai/Aichi slash fiction. Good lord, their names even combine easily into Kaichi! Now I’m downright concerned.

Getting back to the episode at hand, Misaki is the second character to play the game and win with supposedly no prior experience playing. I like that Aichi loses a game here early on, both because his lack of experience means he probably should lose and because it demonstrates that he’s a very atypical protagonist. However it feels really weird to use this same plot device more than once to demonstrate a player’s potential. Each time it happens it makes it seem less special, plus it just seems odd for multiple people to win when they only vaguely know what’s going on.

Oh, and of course they’re not even remotely subtle about it either. Anytime during the cardfight! that we cut away from the action to see what the peanut gallery is thinking, someone says a variation of “Misaki’s never played before, but she know how to handle her cards”. No joke, every time. So it happens like three or four separate times in the course of the episode, which is completely unnecessary. I don’t know if all the successful novices are meant to be audience analogs, convincing kids watching that they can be successful at the game too, but even so that already feels overplayed. I think having Aichi as the central character should be enough since he subverts the typical competition anime trope of the infallible protagonist and makes the game seem accessible by example.

And remember, kids, as great as Grade 3 units and their Twin Drive check are you must use them sparingly. Otherwise you’ll be Morikawa, and nobody wants that.

I want there to be a sign that says "do not haggle with cat".

One More Thing!

We do actually get to see the substitute manager in action. Good rule of thumb: if something I mention is so bizarre that you think I must be making it up, you’re wrong.

What Is Cardfight! Vanguard?

Picture it in your mind. An anime series based around what is quite possibly the most generic card game of all time. A protagonist who’s so weak he is routinely defeated by a loud-mouthed middle schooler. A title with absolutely no concept of proper grammar.

At least the Japanese understand that nobody wants to watch a show that's literally just about card games..

Welcome to Cardfight! Vanguard. This is the most recent of all the terrible series that I’ve become enamored with. It is the story of

a boy (Aichi Sendou) who is so unpopular, so socially awkward that learning to play a children’s card game actually increases his social standing in high school.

This is his journey of discovery about how to play and how to believe in himself. His main motivation is to get close to the one who got him interested in the game in the first place, Toshiki Kai. Aichi’s main problem is that Kai is a serious loner and generally refuses to play against anyone who isn’t a pro at Cardfight! Vanguard. Well, strictly speaking his problem is that he’s new to the game and not very good and so Kai ignores him so hard it probably leaves him with a burning sensation.

Now, you may asking why I have chosen to start my journey through bad television with CF!V (Note: I assume that the exclamation point must be very important since it is misplaced, so even as an acronym I’ll labor to include it).

Well, for one, it is the series I’ve been watching most recently so it’s already fresh in my mind and a little bit easier to write about. Secondly, Cardfight! Vanguard has an interesting structure. It handles basic concepts of playing card games on an episode by episode basis, making it a handy educational tool for anyone reading this who hopes one day to graduate to understanding a game like Yu-Gi-Oh!

Don’t worry dear readers, there WILL be Yu-Gi-Oh!

But that’s a matter for another day. The card game du jour is Cardfight! Vanguard! Now the CF!V pilot spends a lot of time straight-up explaining the rules of the game, since the protagonist doesn’t actually know the rules of the game in the beginning. I’d rather not devote too much space to explaining the rules along with the episode, since I’m not trying to write the great American Cardfight! novel. As a result, I’m going to go over the basics of the game here, and hopefully you’ll be able to follow along starting from the very first episode.

Here’s basically how it works: You get six circles to put your monsters in (though they call them “units”). The blue one in the middle’s for your vanguard, that one represents you, the other five are your “rear guard”. Seriously, you put your units in the rear guard. Who picks the names? You’re limited in what units you can play by how impressive your current vanguard is, but you can play any number from your hand on your turn.

Clearly a circle is the best shape to place your rectangular playing cards on!

Unlike most card games, there is only one type of card: Units. Of course they do come in different shapes and sizes with different abilities, but you’re not going to get a lot of variety here. Units (both in your hand and on the table) are the chief resource of the game, though there’s also the soul and your damage cards, but I’m sure I’ll touch on those in more detail when some character pulls them out of their…um…deck box.

Ultimately, your goal is to successfully attack their Vanguard six times, which normally means six unlocked attacks. However, when you attack you check the top card of your deck for a driver trigger, in its upper right hand corner, then add it to your hand. Drive Triggers can make your attack more powerful and speed up this process.

I don’t want to delve too far into spoiler territory, since some of the main characters don’t really get involved for a few episodes, but since the title sequence freezes on a shot of the four main protagonists, I think I’m in the clear about discussing them.

Sendou Aichi – As I’ve already mentioned, Aichi is the protagonist of the series, and as protagonists go….he’s pretty poor. He gets picked on openly by his classmates, and arguably his teachers, plus he doesn’t even have enough courage to play a card game. On that note, this series is, somewhat predictably, all about the game Cardfight! Vanguard, and at the start of the series he’s never even played a game of it! The only reason he has a deck at all is because the single greatest moment of his life is when a guy who hates

Just out of frame is Aichi's notebook, where he's written "Toshiki Kai" dozens of times surrounded by hearts.

him gave him a card.

And that card he was given changed his whole life! It gave him an outlet to forget about the relentless bullying, it decided what type of Cardfight! Vanguard deck he would play, and I’m pretty sure it’s his best friend. Speaking of his deck, Aichi plays with the Royal Paladin strategy, it consists mostly of generic fantasy knights who have a slight focus on calling out units from your deck to fill your field (aka the power of friendship).

Toshiki Kai – Kai is the rival of just about every other character on the show. The fact that he’s forsaken almost all social contact in the name of Cardfight! Vanguard has made him unreasonably good at the game, and everyone seems to resent him for it. He’s also a master of the fake out redemption, which is one of my favorite parts of his character. When someone needs a pep-talk really badly, sometimes he will step in and make that character realize just how little he respects them and then simply walk off.

Kai’s weapon of choice is his Kagerō deck (I had to copy and paste that accent, so don’t expect me to ever use it again). Basically the Kagero theme is to use a bunch of dragons, dragon-like creatures and things that like dragons to destroy all of your opponent’s rear guard. So he uses generic fantasy dragons to destroy all of your friends in the rear guard (aka the power of sociopathology).

Kamui Katuragi – Kamui is an arrogant middle school kid who has somehow amassed a posse. Granted, it’s a posse of two people, and half their purpose is to explain what’s happening in the cardfight! to anyone who doesn’t understand, but it’s still baffling.

It should also be noted that the other half of the posse’s purpose (more specifically, the purpose of one of the two posse members, whose name I don’t care to remember) is to talk like a crappy rapper and try excessively hard to make acronyms out of everything that someone else just said. I don’t know who thought that would be funny, but I hate them.

With that aside…aside, I should mention that Kamui’s deck of choice is the Nova Grapplers. The Nova Grapplers aren’t very interesting, since they don’t seem to have a cohesive idea to them like pretty much all of the other deck types. They’re everything from dragons to superheroes to robots and everything in between. They do have some of the best names though, but we’ll get to that later.

Misaki Tokura – Misaki has a peculiar backstory that I enjoy for some morbid reason, but I don’t want to spoil it here since it gets pretty much an entire episode at one point. Basically she’s the cashier at the card shop where much of the show takes place, and she doesn’t like to socialize. Working in a card store has given her essentially perfect recall for all existing cards and their effects but she, like Aichi, hasn’t really played when the series begins.

The protagonists of Cardfight! Vanguard playing Hollywood Triangles or something.

Her deck’s theme is the Oracle Think Tank, which not only has the best name of any that I’ve covered so far, but also contains all of

my favorite cards, but again we’ll get to that later. Oracle Think Tank’s general strategy is to manipulate the cards of your deck to get what you need on top of your deck or onto the table. They’re good at drawing cards, getting rid of bad cards and they give you bonuses for having several cards in hand.

Well that should cover it for our heroes…and Kai, hopefully you’ve learned a little something about this world where punctuation and social skills don’t mean anything. More importantly, though I hope you join me next week as I delve deeper into this nonsense.

Stand up, Vanguard!