I am more interested in Game Design and thus will be looking at the Vanguard from that stand point.
It's going to be a long one like usual so if you can't stand reading walls of text, skip to the bottom for a TLDR.
At the beginning Cardfight! Vanguard was, at least to me, a more fast paced and simple card game. No need for keeping track of Life Points or other variations thereof, no need to build up resources turn after turn and the best thing; Most decks had a decent chance of winning, even though there were still decks that were clearly favored by the majority. Draw, Ride, Call, Attack, the game is simple to understand but had its intricacies in terms of both gameplay and deck building. To me this made the game interesting and I wasn't forced to upgrade my deck every single set with staple cards that every deck needed to play. Yeah sure I still got cards almost every set, but that's because I liked the card effects and the art; I thoroughly enjoyed playing the game. (but that's beside the point)
After the release of BT05 Twin Sword Awakening the state of the game took its first major turn. With the release of Majesty Lord Blaster, Phantom Blaster Overlord and the notorious Dragonic Overlord The End, their three respective clans were clearly a cut above the rest and only few other clans had a decent chance of competing with them. Sure, no matter what clan you played at that time, if you had luck you could still win, just like before, but the balance was upset and skewed heavily on the side of the "Big 3": Considering equal skill, one needed quite a bit of luck to balance it out.
While disappointing, this is not an unfamiliar thing. Most card games have decks that are heavily favored over every other deck because they are simply the best. Something else changed too though: The pace of the game.
While it was always possible to build decks that slug it out for the ultra late game and indeed some clans were more specialized in that particular area than others, after BT05 it was almost guaranteed that the game would proceed into ultra late game if it involved 2 decks of the
"Big 3" and if you wanted to have a fighting chance, whatever deck you played need to have the ability to be able to switch into hardcore turtle mode. And most people were playing the three builds in question.
One of the reasons was cross rides' ability to sit on a static power above 11k, particularly 13k and in the case of Majesty Lord Blaster, 12k. And this was achieved relatively easily, the biggest culprit and the most consistent static 13k Vanguard being Phantom Blaster Overlord and his Shadow Paladins with their ability to combo pull necessary cards. Second place is taken by Majesty Lord Blaster, though he "only" sits at 12k at his best but he packs the devastating ability to gain a huge power and critical boost without the need of Counter Blast. Probably the most notorious of the three also happens to be the least consistent 13k Vanguard, probably an attempt by Bushiroad to balance his awesome ability. However Dragonic Overlord The End proved way stronger than Bushiroad expected and proceeded to become the most popular deck and swarmed the competitive scene, to compensate for the consistency issue players just played 4 copies of each Dragonic Overlord.
Another reason was the rise of 11k base power Vanguards as the norm and it was quite difficult for Rear Guards to effectively and consistently hit 11k and above Vanguards for a decent number of shields. Even though Grade 2s started to become stronger being able to achieve 12k power by themselves, forming 21k/22k/23k lines with Rear Guards was just too difficult without triggers, especially for the latter. So with careful hand management and intelligent blocking, it's possible to tank through double triggers until ultra late game.
Consequently, due to the 12k Grade 2s, 10k base power vanguards were bullied out and most people leaned towards clans that had solid 11k Vanguards.
So what did people do? If your opponent has a ton of cards in his hand and is only going to cost him 1 card at most and only if he cannot afford to take damage, you might as well attack his Rear Guards with your own Rear Guards. That way your opponent will be forced to either guard or play more cards from his hand next turn in order to attack you, this means you can puzzle out roughly what cards he has in his hand and he'll hopefully have less to guard with. You also guarantee your opponent loses at least 1 card even if he doesn't guard.
This was good because 99% of the players were using an 8 Critical 4 Draw 4 Heal trigger setup so you could always just rely on your Vanguard and Critical Triggers for damage while taking out your opponents Rear Guards to protect your self.
So as you could imagine, this resulted in the game shifting more towards slugfests and, borrowing MMO terms here, a competition of which was the tankiest deck.
So what's the solution? Enter BT06 and Limit Break.
Now keep in mind a lot of this is my opinion. The impression I get from Limit Break is it's supposed to be a game ender. An ability to prevent your opponent from stalling during the late game. Instead what seemed to happen is a lot of the abilities weren't all THAT strong or are too costly to be sustainable for a long time so players could comfortably sit on 4 damage and use Limit Break like a normal skill, or just guard through the Limit Break until the opponent ran out of resources to even use it. Also a lot of the popular Limit Break units didn't have "normal" none Limit Break abilities, usually the trade off for being 11k or at least having an ability that puts them at 11k. This means that the only threat before Limit Break are triggers and their unpredictable nature. Thus if your opponent didn't get a lot of triggers early, chances are that you'll have enough cards to survive his Limit Break.
There are some exceptions like Maelstrom and Spectral Duke, but generally the Limit Breaks tend to be a bit wonky. Ezel being a random call and not gaining critical coupled with the fact that Gold Paladins don't have a good way to get rid of bad calls when not playing Duke, Pellinore usually lost you more than your opponent if it didn't end the game and is usually played for the superior ride rather than his Limit Break, Cosmo Healer lost a card for 1 less damage which ended up usually being an even trade and didn't actually gain you any advantage, Dark Lord of the Abyss just got Amon's skill with restrictions, Dungaree had too many negatives to even use.
You might think "Well, you only listed the bad Limit Break units!", but in actuality the "good" ones weren't all that much better than older units without Limit Breaks, especially when compared to Dragonic Overlord The End. Quite a few of the Limit Break units were the "Generic" Limit Breakers which all had the ability to gain +5k when attacking the Vanguard while at 4 damage, however that wasn't a game ending ability and what made them good was the fact that they had abilities other than Limit Break and pretty decent abilities at that, mostly calling units in some way.
The other LB units that people actually use are the ones that, while they could somewhat compete with the "Big 3", couldn't change the pace of the game to what it was before Twin Sword Awakening.
In my opinion, this is what led Bushiroad to make the rather extreme restrictions on Dragonic Overlord The End, Majesty Lord Blaster and Goddess of the Full Moon Tsukuyomi. Besides the fact that they were immensely popular builds for their respective clans, they were also arguably the most "tanky" decks at the time, quite easily able to drag a game out to ultra late game with their high defense Vanguards or easy access to abilities that let the player draw extra cards.
This probably also led to the strength of the new Break Ride units introduced in TD08 and TD09 and featured in the latest booster set.
Some of the so called negatives I listed aren't even that bad, particularly having to play near max copies of these cards and having to wait out for Limit Break: All Break Rides so far have a solid 11k base power and gain +2k when attacking Vanguards. This makes them decent Vanguard units both in terms of offense and defense.
Other than Break Rides, the new Limit Breaks are also shifting in a slightly new direction, although I don't want to speculate too much about it because not too many cards have been revealed, but quite a few of the new Limit Break abilities are passive in nature and only require 4 damage to activate or have other none "Blast" related or discard costs. Battle Deity of the Moonlit Night, Artemis has the highest cost that I have seen so far with a Soul Blast of 3 but the few cards that have been revealed for the clan so far lets players Soul Charge a lot, and I really mean A LOT. Dark Irregulars style, maybe more so than Dark Irregulars in fact.
Other than Artemis, Eradicator Dragonic Descendant has a cost of discarding 3 Eradicators but his ability is quite similar to Spectral Duke Dragon in the sense that you only need to activate it once if done right.
Also a lot of cards tend to gain Criticals along with their high power increases.
TLDR;
All this leads me to think that Bushiroad is trying to fix their game. They intended Vanguard to be a more fast paced game, but they made a mistake with the release of BT05 and it become more late game oriented. The first attempt to patch it up with Limit Breaks didn't quite work out although it did add a bit more variety in terms of competitive clans. Now with the restriction of the 3 more popular deck builds and arguably the 3 best at stalling, they also introduce the Break Ride concept and stronger Limit Breaks.
How this affects the state of Vanguard I can't say for sure, but it is quite certain that the pace of the game will change again. Ultimately, like with every game, the players are usually more cunning than the developers and always find ways to make the best use of the things given to them whether it be making the best use of certain abilities or finding loopholes to exploit and whether the new abilities Bushiroad decided to introduce is good or bad, only time will tell.
And that's all I got for now. I'll probably look at Break Ride in more detail when BT10 releases and cover it's good and bad points then.
Another thing I might do in the future is take a look at different card games and their mechanics. As I mentioned at the start, I'm interested in Game Design and might eventually post my own concept for a card game, will have to see how it goes.
Until next time. I'll probably take a closer look at the new Jewel Knights for Royal Paladins. Even though I really like some of the art for the new Gold Paladins, their effects don't really appeal to me.
*All images taken from CFV wikia.
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