Initially in its first printing, standby was considered by players to be rather strange as a sort of trigger. There wasn’t much support for standby, and some people considered the effect to be weak. However, as time passed, more support was released and players learned how to better utilise the effect, standby quickly rose to be a go to standard in many decks. In fact, standby itself became so powerful that certain decks even ran eight standbys with no combo purely to abuse its ability to spawn “free” advantage.
So what’s wrong with standby? Well fundamentally, standby breaks one key rule in the game. Yes, I know, that rule has been broken by other mechanics, especially the keyword, “CHANGE”, but the things is mechanics such as CHANGE have costs that must be paid. Standby lets you summon a card that is higher than your level while mitigating the costs of playing the card from hand. Not to mention, standby ignores colour restriction as well, letting you cheat cards in that would normally require some commitment of colour inside the clock or level. Standby’s utility allows you to essentially play over reversed cards as well, replacing them on the field without any stock or hand investment.
Furthermore, support for standby effects such as backrows that bounce themselves back to hand ensure that there is added efficiency to the combo. Change effects have always existed in Weiss Schwarz. There has always been the trouble of fighting over larger sized cards, but the prominent issue with a lot of the standby targets lie in the face that they are oversized and they have built in protection. Standby also strives usually to pull out level 2 or 3 targets making it near impossible for cards to side attack and deal soul damage at the same time. The fact that the level 2 character summoned on the field are so overwhelmingly large make it hard for many reverse combos to persist. Match-ups feel poor and often one-sided if one is reliant on a reverse combo at level 1 to maintain hand. Aside from just reverse combos, it can be quite hard for any deck without standby to maintain field against standby. Even while gaining hand advantage, players may be forced to crash, thus opening themselves to direct soul damage.
Now the other issue is even if one were to overcome and beat down the opposing enemy character, many of the standby targets have build in protection as stated before. Meaning that they usually have cheap encore effects that mitigate the opposing effort to beat them. This resorts in cards having to be specialized to deal with these targets with hard removal, usually pushing them into the deck or into the stock at the cost of reversing themselves and opening a lane. Now that’s fine and all, but it doesn’t feel great for the player since many ways to deal with standby targets cost them some form of advantage to take down their target while the standby target was spawned for free essentially. The fact is the opposing player to standby is forced to make a negative trade since they have to pay costs to deal with something the opponent brought out for free.
The question always boils down to whether or not it is worth the investment into playing alternative cards just to deal with those annoying standby targets. Personally, I usually find the answer to be “yes”, if my set gives the opportunity to do so, but alternatively if you do not draw or gain those answers, its really whatever. Stock in the early game can be quite punishing, especially in the second or third turn since your hand isn’t always at its best, or you may still need to get the rest of your combo pieces or whatever. Having these “answer” cards takes up additional slots that could be better used to advance your combos.
The bottom line is standby is annoying. Summoning an over-size that is very hard to remove, not to mention having to deal with its built-in protection if it has any may not be worth the effort. One can run anti-early play backups or sport bounce climaxes, but they’re all rather expensive options and the latter gives the opponent back some hand advantage.
It is now a core part of the game, so it can’t be ignored whether you like or dislike this kind of effect. All you can do is adapt to it. We never really know what might happen in the future. Maybe Bushiroad will print some cheaper, better answers? Maybe standby may be revoked somehow (unlikely)? Just build appropriately with standby in mind and hope for the best.