Learning and Improving 8: Timing

 Hey Cardfighters!

This week I will close up the articles on game play by discussing Timing. Timing is a skill which is a culmination of all the other topics we have discussed so far and a lot of learning timing comes with practice.

Basics:
The basics of timing is to use your skills when they are most effective. A pretty obvious concept but learning the best timing for things is actually really hard.

Base Strategy:
I can't really give you a simple strategy to go on this time. So I will explain each of the concepts we talked about before applies to Timing.

• Guarding: You need to guard well so that you have the correct amount of damage and so that you haven't lost by the time your key abilities are useful.
• Trigger Placement: If you don't place your triggers well then you may not survive long enough to start doing your thing and you're opponent might not be at the ideal damage.
• Attack Patterns: This may be more relevant to your actual skills your trying to do than the set up. But in most cases it is similar to Trigger placement in wanting to get your opponent to the right damage.
• Memorization: Being able to remember the cards in your opponent's hand is the biggest influence of timing. Using Guard restrictions when they don't have enough to guard with or retiring key units that they don't have replacements for.
• Resource Management: This is important just because most skills use up counterblasts and if you've used them all up for other skills earlier then you might not have them to finish off your opponent. 
• Field Presence:  If you have kept a good amount of field presence throughout the game then your big skills will be more effective. Also if you have skills that give power field presence helps you take advantage of those most effectively.

More Advanced Ideas: 
Since this is pretty much the most advanced idea we can get at for gameplay mechanics so I will go over a very popular deck Shadow Paladin, Revengers (Revenger Phantom Blaster Abyss (RPBA), Mordred Phantom) and give concrete examples for the generic ideas I went over above.

•  Guarding: This is super super important for this deck since its main play is breakriding RPBA over Mordred which requires limit break. The game plan forces you to decide between taking damage to make you plays and guarding easy attacks.
• Trigger Placement: This is important to get your opponent to the right damage and to maximize your restanding vanguard.
• Attack Pattern: Attack patterns are important for RPBA's skill as it requires you to retire 3 rearguards so you will want to have attacked/boosted with them first.
• Memorization: Knowing the cards in their hand will let you go for your big plays when they don't have any perfect guards.
• Resource Management: Since Mordred requires a counter blast and RPBA requires 2 to restand you'll need 3 open counter blasts or a way to unflip damage easily to have 3 total available that turn.
• Field Presence: Maintaining field presence throughout the game is important so that your opponent won't have enough shield for your wombo combo and obviously its important when you "go off" so that you have enough units to retire.

Was this article useful to you? Is there anything that I can do to improve? Do you have any topics you would like me to write about? Please leave a comment and help me help you.

If you want to be updated on the latest information and be notified about new posts click the link below and like the Bambguard Facebook page. 

Thanks for reading,

~Bambi