The Four Horsemen of the New Player's Plateau

It’s undeniable that Weiss has changed a lot in recent years. While power creep is inevitable in any card game, general utility has had an exponential uptick in quality with every few set releases. This has culminated in eldritch horrors of value beyond human comprehension: selective Rikis that activate at 2 timings on the same turn, drop-searchers that let you do whatever you want with your top deck, assists that are also plussing engines while manipulating your level zone, or even cards that just play your whole finisher turn for you. Experienced players can identify these profiles, harness those interactions, and take them to their farthest point, ushering in the era of unparalleled power and consistency to the game that we’ve seen in recent formats. However, cards like these are so individually powerful that they can regularly cover up even the most glaring missteps and misplays, dragging players through the game on their own merits rather than those of the pilot. Whether this increase in speed and strength is a positive for the game overall is a discussion for another time, but today, I want to discuss one of the most affected victims of this cycle’s collateral damage- the newer player. While my all caps bit has been polling well recently, this article will be performed in my normal prose, as it’s a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot after being entrenched in a newer community of players over the past few years. Identifying what holds a player back is the first step in helping them progress to the next level, so after extensive observation, I’ve boiled the list down to just 4 cards/profiles that make it exceedingly difficult for newer players to develop good Weiss fundamentals:

PESTILENCE

THE EARTH BELOW IS YOUR CELL
THE AIR YOU BREATHE FORMS YOUR CHAINS
THE ONLY PATH TO FREEDOM LIES IN TAKING DAMAGE

While there are many on-death, potential +2’s in the modern game, Yamada Hermione herself is the most infectious plague among newer players by a wide margin. At common rarity, Aqua quickly infested even otherwise unmodified Hololive trial decks, and for good reason. She’s a 0 that has the potential to go +3 (or more) if she lives, and at a 3500 oversized statline the chances of her sticking around are fairly high. Her blight against the newer player’s development is multifaceted, so we’ll start at her first line of text- By only being at her maximum statline in the center position of the stage, she removes any impetus for players to consider neither their own board positioning nor their opponent’s. If your first thought is that this isn’t that big of a deal, you’ve likely started playing the game after this profile became commonplace. It used to be common knowledge that the center lane was the easiest lane in the game to clear at any level- frontal assists double up, center-only buffs exist, and so on, and that you would typically avoid placing your 0s in center if possible to hedge on a greater chance of them living back to your turn, regardless of matchup. Furthermore, since she’ll likely also fulfill the “beater” slot in most 0 lineups she’s in, it’s likely that players will struggle to clear their opponent’s cards in the side lanes and be forced to side out with smaller utility cards, forcefully handing their opponents some free plusses. Aqua not only doesn’t afford players the option to consider these things, she incorrectly reinforces that they don’t matter- so long as she’s in the center, just plop on down any other cards in the wing lanes and side out if you can’t clear. Her toxic raw value of the on-death +2 will “cover up” any gains an opponent gets from plusses in the side lanes.

A single copy of Aqua is enough to make go-second, first-turn trifields seem like they’re no big deal. We’ve talked about this before, so I won’t dig into it too much here, but if just one Aqua hits both cards off the top, a player will have a full grip of 8 after draw-clock even if they puked out their whole hand to the front row on their first turn. It’s a lot harder to see why a play pattern would be wrong when you don’t get punished for it often, and with early game misplays being hard enough for newer players to identify already, Aqua reinforcing that dumping hand like this is acceptable isn’t helping. There’s also another hidden safety net hidden in her cost text- the ability for her to set color in clock. Since she can reactively set a color from the waiting room into a player’s clock before they go into their next turn, she removes the need for a player to think ahead when considering what they’ll level for color or experience. Running dual-color level 1 strategies is something that even in this era of modern Weiss is regarded with some amount of risk when deckbuilding, but access to clock-setting removes a lot of that risk. While this isn’t an issue for decks with this effect, not every set is so lucky; new players can find themselves stranded if they’ve built with “easy” dual-color in mind but are stuck at 1-0. 

While a lot of these smaller things I’ve brought up about Aqua might not seem like that big of deal for newer players, the one at the core is her raw plussing power. Unlike other clock plusses, she isn’t selective; while the two cards players stand to gain from her effect are random, it is (potentially) still double the expected value for an effect with this cost. With modern overloaded utility profiles, we all know how easily players can simply convert random chaff off the top into exactly the card they need. Like any troublesome disease, complications arising from an infection of Aqua extend to the rest of the plateau pantheon, the first of which is…

WAR

NOW IS THE TIME FOR ACTION
NOW IS THE TIME FOR CHAOS
NOW IS THE TIME FOR ONE AGE TO END
AND A NEGGING ERA TO BEGIN

On-play Riko. My beloved. The most premium of premium costless filter profiles. For no stock at all, players can get any kind of unplayable card out of their hand, and spin the topdeck wheel for salvage. The wheel is rigged though- at the very worst, players can always fish back a level 0 to play. While this sort of powerful filter effect isn’t an issue for newer players in and of itself, problems arise with how I’ve seen it used. The correct way to use a card like this is to always expect to reveal 0- anything otherwise gives you an opportunity to pivot to something potentially better, but the intended line of play should be to pick up a 0 that is already seen in the waiting room. Instead, I see this profile run at unfathomably high counts slammed turn after turn with the intent to sculpt heavy cards, with no backup plan at the ready to answer the board when the wheel comes up bust. Since Rikos and level 0s are typically pretty low power, it’s understood that being forced to field such a card has the opportunity cost of likely not being able to answer the board that turn without going down quite a bit of hand. This would usually discourage this kind of play since crashing board turn after turn is a great way to eat damage and die early, but with Aqua vomiting a bunch of unplayable extra cards to hand and Bushiroad’s penchant for printing additional ridiculous effects on this profile (like Reine above), it’s a lot harder for newer players to see how this play pattern can be deleterious.

Even worse, this cycle continues as the game progresses. More and more Riko are slammed, the wheel is spun- sometimes it hits and sometimes it whiffs, but players will only ever remember the hits. Confirmation bias grows, and players start to accept that spinning Riko all the time isn’t just acceptable as a general strategy (it isn’t), but that it’s “how you sculpt” (it’s not). This is already the tallest wall for any TCG player to climb over, and is another thing I’ve already written about at length, so a built-in bias loop that springboards off of a card profile that is nearly an auto-include in any set it’s printed in, in any deck, isn’t doing newer players any favors. This is also where experienced players can be to blame too- we’ve all found ourselves in terrible situations where a Riko hitting a level 3 is our only out. We make that calculated risk, sometimes it pays off and we snag a win from the ether, but more regularly we crash and burn. However, newer players are only going to remember those instances and stories of the Rikos that saved the game; we should probably be a bit better about explaining that this is one of those classic “it depends” special cases rather than how the profile should be typically used.

Even though Riko’s crimes are simpler than Aqua’s, they still compound when combined with…

FAMINE

IDOLS AND MEN BECOME SLAG
BENEATH THE ALTAR TO THE NEW OBJECT OF WORSHIP:
LORD KANATA, THE GREAT DISSOLUTION

Helmet is another undoubtedly powerful profile. Again for no stock, this lets us pick up any character from the waiting room, no matter how heavy, at the cost of expending an extra card. You probably see where I’m going with this- with all the extra junk from Aqua and the ability to rip this card back to our hand guaranteed with Riko, players have the ability and the gas to just go grab whatever they want for “cheap”. When all these cards work in tandem, they do create a powerful strategy that anyone who played during Kanata/Marine’s heyday should be intimately familiar with, but an important thing to remember is that this line of play itself still resulted in a massive hand cost. Riko > Helmet > (Card) still costs you 2 cards, effectively 3 if the Riko isn’t going to attack, and that’s one hell of a steep cost for just one sculpt. Rampant over-use of Helmet reinforces to players that not only is such ridiculous hand-negging acceptable, but that it’s normal. The true benefit of Helmet is that the sculpt is on-demand for a high cost, rather than the slow process of sculpting combo pieces throughout a game, but the latter is harder to execute and less intuitive to understand.

This is where the combination of all 3 of these profiles comes to a head; I’ve seen truly insane “crackhead” lines get played out because of them. Riko for a Helmet, play over an Aqua just to fish for an extra card to pitch to Helmet- hell, I’ve even seen Helmet for Riko just to get enough attackers to board simply because Aqua has filled a player’s hand with so much unplayable junk. Having the ability to be this fast and loose with hand resources should be viewed as a privilege of the sets that have access to them, rather than the norm. I’ve seen newer players write off sets that are more “traditional” as unplayable simply because they don’t have the ability to execute these kinds of ridiculous lines. Even worse, I’ve seen players kneecap their decks to include these kinds of tools where they are unneeded, simply because they assume that all “good” decks should be able to do such things. 

DEATH

MAKE THEM KILL

Our last horsemen stands alone on her own merits- Marine is a zero-sculpt finisher that costs next to nothing, and for that, her crimes against the new player are multiple. Just a single copy ripped off a clock-draw will regularly turn into triple combo alongside her climax, without any need to hold any single piece in hand at any point. With no need to think ahead in a meaningful amount about their finishing turns, players are free to just spin around and play off the top turn after turn until it’s time to go for the throat. Combine that with her unbelievably cheap cost and an overabundance of on-demand sculpting tools (yes, like Helmet), and I will hazard to claim that Marine teaches players absolutely nothing about how to play for an endgame. Questions arising in nearly any other deck simply do not exist when Marine is in play; there’s no need to think about stock thresholds, weighing holding a climax over refresh instead of sending it back for better compression, or managing opportunity cost of holding extra finisher copies vs. playable cards if you don’t manage to hit level 3. She is simply automatic.

This isn’t to say that there’s no possible finesse to using Marine. Her cheap cost and auto-sculpting allows players to use her to maintain better compression by always throwing back their climax, as checking 12 cards with 3 copies plus clock-draw is more than enough to get into at least one copy of her door. Taking pressure off holding copies of Marine lets skilled players use that flex to sculpt other dangerous threats that greatly increase her lethality, like Botan shuffleback or Matsuri stockswap, and her cheap cost leaves them plenty of resources to pay for their effects. However, these aren’t things that newer players are typically considering- they are just trying to get the biggest finishing turn that they can, with the most copies of that finisher on the board with the associated climax, and Marine does that completely for free more often than not. We can go even further by considering our other horsemen; sacrificing an Aqua to Marine’s come-in-play cost gives players even more gas to pitch for her combo, Helmet plays around revealing multiple Marines off a single instance of her check 3 effect, and Riko enables ripping back either card when necessary. With all four of these cards in play, it’s nearly inevitable that triple Marine will hit the board, no matter how poorly or well the game has gone, what decisions were made, or what the opponent has done. If that’s the typical case, how is any new player supposed to figure out how to improve? Their deck seems to “always work”, after all.

APOCALYPSE

Choosing only Hololive printings of these profiles was completely intentional. While I don’t think that Hololive is broken or unfair or anything stupid like that, I do think that it’s directly responsible for a plateau that many newer players in our community have been stuck on. This effect has been made a lot worse by the fact that HOL gave us the greatest injection of new players that Weiss in the west has ever seen, and while that’s absolutely an amazing and good thing, someone’s got to bring up the negatives. Even outside of the cards on this small list, HOL has plenty of cards that allow players to run fast and loose with resources of any type. Furthermore, they’re typically at the cost of their hand, and with hand being the resource that is the easiest to windfall into more of in this game, it makes for quite a hurdle for newer players to get over when trying to improve. This isn’t to say that HOL alone is the cause of this problem- plenty of sets contain all 4 of these profiles, or others that might even be more egregious in some combination, that lead to similar thinking and poor or repressed development of fundamentals. Hololive is not only extremely popular, but most builds of the set encourage leaning into these kinds of play patterns, and quite a few of those builds have been endlessly copy/pasted meta decks that have held steadfast in the meta for as long as the set has existed.

So, now that we’ve acknowledged the problem, what are poor new players to do about moving past this plateau? The easiest way that I know of is to simply look back into Weiss’ storied history and play some decks from say, 2020 and older into one another. Decks from this time period were still powerful, and contained quite a bit of utility, but simply did not vomit resources at the same rate and speed. Thinking ahead multiple turns was a lot more necessary as on-demand sculpting tools (like Helmet) were a lot rarer and lower quality. Playing with endgame sculpting in mind as early as your first level 1 turns was also a necessity for the same reasons. Now, this isn’t completely necessary. Any plateau can be busted through by continued effort and passion to improve, but by playing in an environment where these modern tools are a bit more curbed can give players a different perspective and supercharge the development of fundamentals. Even back when I started in 2018, I went from playing Kasumi/Yukina BD all the way back to playing exclusively Nisekoi for a while. Old decks and formats have a lot to teach. If you’re someone struggling with being stuck on a plateau like this, grab a friend, spin up that simulator, and play some 2020 format. It might seem a bit dated at first, but there’s a lot about this game to learn from taking the turbochargers off for a while.

- Carmen