The (Dis)Advantage of Early Plays

In the days of old, having an early play was an inherent luxury. Cards are gated by their level requirements, and Weiss has this system where the closer you are to losing, the more powerful your cards become. Early plays circumvent that logic by relying upon other requirements to give you powerful cards earlier. However, in this day and age, that sentiment has changed to some extent.

Back in the earlier days of Weiss Schwarz, early plays were powerful characters on board that your opponent needed specialty tech to deal with. Otherwise, they could sit there and accumulate damage on your opponent freely. Even with the tech such as anti-change counters and Adachi profiles, they were a consideration at best mainly due to their prohibitive costs.

While these tech cards were nice, they would come at the cost of heavily hindering your game plan or opening board, giving your opponent further advantages. However, as time had passed, early plays have become to lose more and more value due to other reasons. Simply to put it, as the end game has become more powerful, the question for the player has been: do I bother with an early play or do I just save up the resource to just end my opponent the next turn?

As of now, early plays sit in this weird space where they serve as luxury pieces to pay out stock or tempo plays to signal to your opponent that you are in privileged spot. Alternatively, they are just a way to stave off one damage so hopefully, by the grace of Weiss’ goddess, you magically survive your opponent’s endgame.

What is the solution? Early plays now need to change and perform in different ways. Early plays must be able to cheat themselves onto the board for reduced costs. Uzuki and Sumi above perfectly reflect this as they can be changed into from other cards. Furthermore, their advantage needs to be built into the card for immediate value, and this is for reasons which will be explained afterwards. Early plays just need to make advantage beyond just healing the turn they enter the battlefield. Perpetual value aside, the assumption for most early plays now are that they will more than likely be removed on the following turn. Alternatively, you have cards like Kana on the right which effectively have no cost and give you a free ability, essentially a 2/0 but marked as a 3/2.

And the reason why early plays need immediate value is because the answers have become much better and cheaper to deploy. Kotone is a double Adachi profile, an evolution of the old Adachi profile that now gives its ability to two characters, letting you remove multiple early plays for a single card. Meguru is an advanced anti-change counter that gives your opponent a free stock but lets you deploy her at a lowered cost. Cards like Labyrista are rampant in the game, sometimes as an alarm trigger, letting you level down characters without wasting a single stock. The point is, many modern anti-early game cards exist and are more than ready to answer early plays.

The deployment of many of these cards can be found as early as level one. There have been some older answers in the forms of level three killers or even the rare level zero that matches a level three like Frieren. Ruby is probably the newest form of Adachi which costs zero stock if you have full field, letting you get over the early prohibitive cost of the original Adachi. You can hand encore her as well, turning extra hand back into a board presence. Anti-change also exists at level one as well, meaning your opponent can’t just wait or stall until you’re level two to try and bait out the counter. These cards have also changed the zones which they kick the early play too which can be the bottom of your opponent’s deck or even memory permanently such as in Aru. The bottom line is: your early plays are not safe.

Don’t think tucking away your early plays in the back is somehow a safe bet. There are already long existing and more answers being put into the game that are able to affect cards in multiple areas on stage. These answers are very much here and ready for your early plays and more.

One new method for handling early plays as found by new series and sets is in these new level two or higher killers. While they only technically beat over a single early play, the modality of beating simply any level two or higher gives them additional flexibility compared to the usual level three killer. The power of this new profile is that it answers two targets as, the moment you reverse one card, you have the option to bounce another of your opponent’s back to hand. This secondary removal is temporary and technically provides your opponent additional resources, but, depending on how they played, they may not have the resources to redeploy the same early play or it won’t be worth it from their point of view with other factors in mind.

I’ll put it like this. Decks that are hard-leaning on early plays are at a constant impasse with that of modern answers to their cards. You have to remain even more vigilant about the options that your opponents play when it comes to their responses to your early-play threats. You may want to keep your cards hidden from sight (concealed in hand) or maybe even skip early playing entirely to just employ your combo at level three if need be. Not all threats are immediately a death sentence such as an Adachi profile (you can still encore level-downed cards). Maybe consider running backups to overpower and defend your cards from the likes of Himmel and Centi. Perhaps consider putting yourself at 2/5 so, when your opponent swings, if they hit a soul icon and level you up, you can completely nullify Adachi’s effect. The battlefield is a rough place in today’s day and age, and you’ve got to be prepared to duke it out if need be.