Going First or Second Cards (Advanced Deck Building)

I often hear this talk at my local shop about trying to find particular going first or going second cards. However, the game doesn’t have any real explicit going first or going second cards. It’s not a keyword, so how exactly do you determine if you have a going first or second card? What should you even play during these early turns? It’s easy to just swing three times as it’s quite obvious starting around the minimum of your third and fourth turns to generate additional stock and etc.

Okay, I’m not entirely telling the truth here. There are some very rare cards that have literal turn one abilities. I’m not going deeper into these cards. If you really want to, you can research them yourselves.

Arguably, there’s a plethora of different options to play going first. The best cards, in my humble opinion, are those that generate you extra value or seek you cards to set-up your early game. Arguably, the toughest part of the game, and any card game in general, is preparing yourself for the later turns and assembling your pieces early. Spawners like Anna above are tremendously helpful and also give you a chance to provide yourself with additional board for the next turn. This can be difficult otherwise since the first two turns are usually a gamble in terms of getting hand and playable cards to put on field.

Large beaters like Stark have a good chance of sticking on the field, especially if they have a level gain on top of their generic power effect. Since many level zeros, especially utility zeros in the modern game, don’t have a lot of power and removal is usually through reversal, large bodies can be pretty decent cards to keep around.

Lastly, you can deploy a defensive threat of your own. Having a character with a reversal ability like Ushio here makes your opponent think twice on their turn if they really want to commit a card to go one-for-one, emptying a slot in their front row in the process of removing your character.

When you’re on the opposing side and the turn swaps, you now have your own cards that you can employ in response to your opponent’s plays. Level zero sinkers like Kanako are especially evil when used against me but fair when I use them. They can freely eliminate your opponent’s single card in the front row with no cost whatsoever, freeing their front row and giving you unblocked access to their clock. While they have a beater in the front, if you don’t want to sink their card, why not use a clean cut profile like Mai to save your other cards in preparation for your following turn?

There’s plenty of options to consider whether you are going first or second. However, I would be more selective in terms of ratios of what I would run. Spawners, while good during your first and second turns, are usually horrendous any other turn since they don’t offer any utility due to their strict field requirements and end up as low powered vanilla cards. Level zero sinkers only work if your opponent has a single card in their front row, which becomes null usually starting from turn three going forward. Fat beatsticks and runners are good to bully in the early game, but later on, they have no value outside of having raw power on stage.

You win some. You lose some. One last thing to keep in mind is that your early turns are more or less of a modified coinflip on what you start off with and how your deck/clock state end up. Don’t feel bad if you don’t end up drawing exactly the cards you need. It happens. Sometimes you may end up needing to field out your brainstorm at turn one just to get that little bit of stock to get your deck started. However, with this new information here, maybe you can adjust your deck to give yourself a bit more early game advantage or reconsider what you commit to the field early on.