Cardfight Pro is a 24-hour daily news site that covers the Standard format Cardfight!! Vanguard trading card game. First started in December 2011, our objectives are to promote communication and understanding between cardfighters from around the world, assist the game's growth, and enhance the prestige of professional play. We provide news articles, player profiles, interviews, and histories of the game and its community.
We have been SPJ-compliant since March 2013.
What is Standard?
The Standard format encompasses all cards released after April 28th, 2018. It is one of three formats of the Vanguard TCG, the others being Premium Standard (all cards ever released) and G Standard. (Only cards from before April 28th.) It represents a hard reset designed to rebalance the game, reduce the cost of deckbuilding, and make it more approachable to newcomers.
What does Vanguard have that other TCGs don't?
- Balance. Cardfight!! Vanguard has never been a perfectly balanced game, but it is much better designed than Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and many others. In other TCGs, there are generally two or three top decks and nothing worth playing outside of those; in Vanguard you pick your aesthetic and go from there. Historically all 24 clans have had competitive decks by the end of each support block, and whether or not they were represented has been up to player preference. After Standard format finishes reintroducing each clan in its first year, this will once again be the norm.
- Player interaction. There are an innumerable number of other TCGs that at their highest level turn into alternating games of solitaire, in which you can effectively ignore your opponent as you carry out your combos. Vanguard is not in the business of doing that; actively defending against the opponent's attacks is part of the core gameplay.
- Deck diversity, and other kinds of diversity too. Within each clan there tend to be multiple viable decks, so if you main Royal Paladin, you may find yourself playing Alfred while others within the same clan are running Majesty or Altmile. Vanguard tends to draw in people that have never touched a TCG before, and playing the game you will meet many different kinds of players beyond the depressive ogre nightmare man stereotype.
Premium may sound better because of the bigger card pool, but the game was reset for good reason. Many of the card interactions in the old game had gotten out of control, introducing multiple accidental infinite loops, one-turn-kills, and rules exploits that eliminated much of the interaction the game was known for. A game that had started out as carefully-crafted and balanced had become managed largely through an extensive restriction list that was never supposed to be a primary means of regulating play. Standard represents a return to Vanguard's classical era, but with the conveniences of modern set design and everything Bushiroad's Research & Development team learned from the past seven years.
The inevitable destiny for Premium is to go the way of Unlimited in Pokémon, where cards that were never designed to interact with one another introduce deeply destabilizing combos that render the game incoherent. From the moment the new mechanics were revealed, one such interaction was pointed out between an obscure single Rare and one of the new Trial Deck boss cards that lets fighters rack up multiple instances of the Force Gift on their first ride. Combine that with the right finisher, and you have the basic skeleton of a deck that doesn't have to pay much attention to its opponent at all.
Standard format is the future of the game itself, and the format for which the new sets are being designed; it is therefore the focus of Cardfight Pro.
The 2018 Cardfight Pro style guide
Names are presented with respect to the original naming order of their native language; e.g. "Itou Akira" as opposed to "Akira Itou." Exceptions are made when referring to an individual by a pen name or web handle.
Titles of individual works like the Cardfight!! Vanguard anime and manga are italicized, as is the TCG except in passing or colloquial use. Individual Booster Sets, Extra Boosters, and Trial Decks are referred to as Booster Set ##: Title, e.g. Booster Set 01: UNITE! TEAM Q4! or BT01: UNITE! TEAM Q4!
Triggers are referred to as proper nouns for clarity except when used as a verb or colloquially; "Heal Trigger," "Critical Trigger," as opposed to "he healed," "she double crit him for game."
