Weiss & Ramblings

  I’ve been on a crusade for a long time now, since the moment I realized the error of my own ways not a few short years ago. Not all holy wars are worth waging, but for this one I will die crucified upon my hill, flayed open for all to see. It is today I finally put pen to paper in hopes to draw you to my ranks, to fight against the horrors of convoluted Weiss terminology, and hopefully make the community a better place for all players, new and old.  For the love of Christ in cancels above, will you please stop calling this climax “Gate”? You all know what it does. It’s the red climax trigger that salvages a character when revealed off a trigger check. Its been a staple of the game since its inception, appearing in even the earliest sets like DC, P3, and Little Busters. Its official name is “Comeback”, and unless your name is Connor Pelham, that word has never once left your lips in the context of this game. Instead, it’s been colloquially referred to by the community by not ...

At Springfest in Houston this year, I sat down across from my good friend Kevin in finals. I was on Rushia, he's on 8 SB MTI; a pretty expected meta matchup for the season between two players practiced in it, we're both expecting a pretty tough, albeit good game with a decent amount of back-and-forth. Unfortunately, I proceed to draw 1 playable and 5 climaxes over my first two turns. I claw it back as best as I can, but I unfortunately can never recover from my second turn, where I was forced to pass without any playables, flooded with climaxes and 3s. This put me at 7-2 on the day for my personal record, and although it sucked to get hit by variance right at the end of the run, I left the venue happy with my performance. You can't win 'em all, as they say. Many drinks were had by Kevin and myself afterwards, with the only salt in the air coming from rimmed margarita glasses and tequila shots.  If you’ve played any TCG for an extended period of time, you’ve undoubtedl...

For me, one of the most defining features of Weiss Schwarz is the importance of being able to mill your own deck. It plays directly into one of the game’s most unique qualities when compared to other TCGs: when you deck out, you shuffle up your discard pile and call it your new, second deck. No longer is throwing mountains of cards away from the top of your deck a terrifying scenario, but a regular and expected part of usual play. Anyone who’s played the game more than a handful of times knows that this is a major part of what constitutes strong deck manipulation. At this point, that’s become a bit of a community catch-all term for tools that allow players to command their gamestate, but today I’d like to focus in on self-mill. And mostly how I think a lot of people do it wrong. “Up to” This little preposition appears on countless Weiss cards, and more often than not, it has to do with mill. For just two words, the modifier holds a lot of power; it allows you to look at cards in seque...

NOTE : This post assumed the old refresh rule, I've given it a scan to update it but some things might be out of place. The analog still works though. Sup y'all, back again with something a little different this time. My teammate Dan won’t stop bugging me to put pen to paper on this, so it’s finally time to get off my ass and explain what I like to call “The Bucket” . shut the fuck up carmen you idiot you dont know anything about weiss sch- Shhhhhh, I promise I'm going somewhere with this. It’s a sort of companion, visual-mechanical aid to go with other great resources related to the topic. I’ll start with laying out the simplest game state that illustrates why we need to talk about this at all: you can click on these to zoom in btw Here we have the classic situation of opposing, power-tied “bombs”: if we front attack our Howzer into our opponent’s Wildberry Princess over there, how exactly does this resolve? We’ll ignore everything other than the Battle Step for th...