Concepts: Investments

Not this time, sadly

Hey hey. I know it's another concepts post, but I wanted to plant an idea in your head: investments. While, yes, a budget deck is something that costs around $100, there are other cheap ways to play Buddyfight, and that's what I wanted to talk about today. While I may be new to Buddyfight, I've played Vanguard since a little bit after its release. Throughout my time in both games, I've been able to see good purchases and bad ones. I've personally found that there are a few different criteria purchases can meet to evaluate whether they're worthwhile beyond just price.

In today's post, I'm going to go through the checklist I try to follow when deciding whether I want to buy a new deck or not. Throughout, I'll try to keep Ozons as an example, since that's the only thing you actually know that I own.


Side notes/disclaimers:

• This is just my approach. As always, you have no obligation to follow this as a gospel or anything. After all, I'm just some high schooler with a blog. Investments are entirely subjective. I'd just like to impart my decade of experience (give or take. Depends on what qualifies as experience and whether or not I remember when I started Yu-Gi-Oh!) in card games, regrets and satisfactions included.
• I'll likely be referencing Timmy, Johnny, and Spike a lot in this blog. These are terms from Magic: The Gathering that describe the various player types. Mark Rosewater himself wrote an excellent post on them, so I'd suggest reading it if you're not already familiar.
• This didn't really fit into any paragraph well. As you go through a checklist, make sure to juxtapose each point with the money side. I'm not going over that because that's a case-by-case basis. I'm sure this is obvious considering the setting of this post, but I figure it's never bad to clarify.

Ozons' only aesthetically
pleasing card

First off, I'd suggest figuring out what you're looking for in a deck. This varies from person to person, but I tend to try to find decks with nice aesthetics that can function at least decently, that I can enjoy the playstyle of, and can enjoy gameplay of with some of my closer friends (In other words, I'm a bit of all three, but mostly Johnny/Timmy). In my case, it means I tend to shy away from stun and turbo decks, as they're remarkably linear in their gameplay. In other people's cases, such as a Timmy/Spike, they might enjoy the looks on strangers' faces as they discard two cards to rest the whole board (looking at you, Zodiac). Still others might enjoy bad decks, as their only community consists of casual players that play Buddyfight for a good laugh every once in a while (I'd put this as a Johnny/Timmy, I suppose, just to keep up the comparison). Some people might enjoy winning a lot and decide to invest in a high-tier deck (Spike, obviously). The most important thing to gather from this point is that you need to evaluate what you're looking to get out of your deck. It's a cheaper endeavor to find fun decks, but asking yourself why you're buying it is always sound to begin with. For Ozons, I was looking for a cheap deck that I could use for teaching and casual games (the main thing I was concerned about was the aesthetic, but it was $20, so I wasn't so worried). Nothing expensive, nothing I could really hope to win consistently with. I knew what I was getting into.

Next, try to look at one of three things: applicability, flexibility, and longevity. These three can be in any order, but I personally prioritize flexibility. No point carries more weight than the others as a rule or anything, though. I'll go through each in its own paragraph.

When I say applicability, I'm talking about the issue of how often you'll play with your investment. If you have multiple communities and find yourself playing multiple times a week, desiring not to have to steal wins (Spike), you'll probably be able to justify spending a little bit more and going for something a little more competitive. If you're a casual who just wants to play with your other casual friends, maybe you'll just want some cards to improve a trial deck (Probably more Timmy than anything else, but this is more of a casual/competitive debate. Basically, just not Spike). For this point, you just need to figure out how often you yourself play and how often you'll play whatever you're buying. For Ozons, I knew that I could get a decent amount of use out of them considering that I only really play against school friends and one guy at my Vanguard locals, the former of which is rare. Weighted against the $20 investment fee, I was fine with knowing that.

Honestly the only
thing that led me
to SDW Soleil

Moving to flexibility, you need to ask yourself how many ways you can use your investment. This is less subjective than the rest of this post. Are you buying staples for your favorite world? Are you buying the Ozon package? It depends on the investment, but this is an objective point. In fact, it's the main reason I wrote this post. I recently purchased the Sun Dragon stuff from Solar Strife and have been having a blast with experimentation. It's usable under three different flags, which I already have the start decks for because I'm a DDD fanboy (read: I spent most of my Saturday playing janky SDW Soleil). See what I mean? It's a more minor point than the rest in my opinion, but an investment is undeniably better if you can use it in multiple ways. For the Ozon story, I knew that the only staples the deck my friend was selling me had were Shalsana, Cassiade, and maybe Reset Button, but I was paying for accessibility, helping improve my community, and a nice little teaching deck. I know I'm a budget writer, but I'm willing to admit that I'll pay a little bit extra sometimes. Not always, but sometimes.

Longevity is really, really simple, at least to explain. How long will your investment last? Will you need to update it a lot? Are those updates expensive? If no to both, is the deck good now? If so, how long will it be like that? As you can see, dear reader, this gets a little bit more complex when you scrutinize it. There are some decks in Buddyfight that stay playable at all times due to their mechanics. Some examples of these are Kaizerion for the various game mechanic interactions, Laevateinn for being almost completely weapon-based (in other words, all the weapon hate in the world can't effectively deal with that), and Executioners for being able to answer almost anything in the game and not needing to change the deck that much to do so (I'd like it if we had a spell negate, though). As for Ozons, I just knew they would always be bad, never really getting better or worse. That's the simple truth of the matter. Investing in a low-maintenance bad deck is perfectly acceptable, as long as you realize you'll always be sub-optimal.

Closing Remarks

I'm sorry if a lot of this stuff was obvious to you more experienced readers. I just really enjoy explaining stuff like this and I'll probably have something a little bit more your speed coming out at some point soon, maybe after another Concept or two (Purgatory Knights are in the works, at the moment). Anyway, I hope you enjoyed. If you've got any questions, I'm glad to answer them either in the comments or through Discord. Until next time, stay frosty.