Budgetfight - Money is your problem

We all know just how freaking expensive card games are. Future Card Buddyfight is no exception. You might think life's better since there aren't 4 Perfect Guards to run in every competitive deck. It isn't. Staples still exist, and with the market still unstable the prices are extremely volatile at the moment. Blue Shields go for $10. Dangerous Fuse is at $4. It's extremely difficult to get into the game and really budget your decisions.

We all have money issues

This article will go over the choices you as a budget player have. By choosing alternatives and avoiding high-maintenance decks, anybody can afford to play Buddyfight on a semi-competitive level. Trial Decks will be gone over in this other article, including their exclusive cards; I separated the two because it was getting too ridiculously long.

These two articles are probably the best articles to introduce newcomers to Buddyfight, so if you have any friends you want to get started on this game then send them over here.

Myth: Budget =/= Competitive

I say it's a myth because to be honest, it's relatively easy to create a competitive and budget deck in Buddyfight. With the way the game mechanics work, consistency is valued much more than any form of card quality or combination. Budget decks, while lacking in power or pizzazz, make up for their weaknesses by demonstrating solid vanilla consistency. If you can successfully recreate your winning image every game, it doesn't matter if it's somewhat weak - if it wins, it wins.

This is an important point to remember. When building a budget deck, you are trading potency for proficiency. You are basically admitting that your deck is not going to cover a lot of ground and has various holes here and there. But to make up for that, your deck is going to be lean, mean, and insanely good at doing what few things it can do right. This means that budget decks tend to be aggro decks, since long wars of attrition against decks with higher quality cards usually doesn't bode well. With this in mind, budget decks can be summed up in two words: fast and explosive.

Mezzoflation! Scorched Earth!

I feel like it's time to give some rebranding to the game. Bushiroad has been giving the English TCG some crap options up until now. For both Vanguard and Weiss Schwarz, it was either meta or casual. Budget wasn't much of a legitimate choice, and it generally lent towards noncompetitive play. You either built meta standards, or you didn't build to compete at all. But Buddyfight is different. Buddyfight has given us more than enough options in terms of Size 3 selection and overarching strategy that budget is no longer some cheap excuse for competition. Budget is viable - I wouldn't even call it budget anymore.

Since I come from a Pokemon TCG background, I'll bring over a word that we threw around back there: rogue. Rogue denotes the counter-meta, the decks that play exactly what the meta doesn't. Decks that perform exceptionally well, despite lower maintenance cost, by the use of ingenious strategies, precise deck building, and next-level player skills are worthy to be named rogue.

Don't let money dissuade you from trying out new ideas. Just because not everybody is playing it doesn't mean it doesn't have virtue. The importance of budgetfighting is to always experiment with new combinations and new ideas. Since you're not playing a standard meta deck, you have no expectations and are striving to become a major upset, a surprise. The challenge of building a rogue deck combined with the skill required to execute it to the dot is one of the many enjoyments of playing rogue.

The Rogue Mindset

The most important thing to do when building a rogue deck is to always ask yourself two questions:

Question 1: What are the cheap RR and RRR cards on the market currently that I can build a deck around?

Question 2: What C, U, and R cards can effectively substitute RR and RRR cards?

The answer to the first question comes from hours and hours of eBay scouring. You want to get a grasp of the current market price. You want to bid on all the good deals. Know when a card is going to be on the rise and when the prices are projected to fall. A good buyer will be always on the lookout and observing the trends. By doing so, it's not so difficult to snag a few deals. Prices may vary, but people rarely change. Cards will fall in expected price ranges and should not move out of said range unless they become completely outclassed or revamped.

Check yourself

The reason you have to do this, even with rogue decks, is because you're still going to need the staples. Rogue or not, every Dragon World deck is going to be running 8 shields. Rogue or not, every Magic World deck is going to have 4 Magical Goodbye and 4 Nice One!s (and 4 Chillax! and 4 Solomon Shield). There are certain cards you simply must have. Running Ninjas without Electron Ninja, Shiden is suicide. Playing Ancient World without Divine Dragon Creation is unthinkable. If you want to build decks for those worlds/archetypes, you need to get your hands on those cards. If you can't, your deck is no longer simply "rogue"; it's non-competitive. You can go into casual play fairly well, but at the moment I'm not writing for casual play.

The answer to the second question comes from knowing card advantage and utilizing it. Many uncommon cards actually have very good intrinsic advantage engines that are worthy investments of resources, not at all inferior to the double and triple rares in the game. You can't possibly make a deck out of rares alone. They may not take the glory position, but the meat of the deck is always in the commons and uncommon supports, with rares tucked in here and there.

God of Fire

Take Armorknight Ifrit. He's a Size 3 boss for Danger World, sporting 3 crit and Penetrate for the reasonable price of 2 gauge. Most Danger decks run Armorknight Demon because, well, 3-crit Double Attack is freaking scary. But Ifrit makes a suitable substitute and is situationally better. Why? Because most people will call monsters to the center. If there is a monster in the center, then Ifrit and Demon have the same damage potential - 3 damage. Ifrit does it in one attack, and Demon does it in two. Ifrit even has the advantage of denying your opponent the ability to use Dragon Shields, though Solomon Shields will devastate him more. The point is that Ifrit is a solid Size 3 and fits in most Danger World decks well, performing at Demon's level without costing nearly as much resources, both in-game and real life.

I have a cool hat

Magic World recently had a huge boost to their Size 3 line-up. I'm talking about Dragowizard, Tempest Wing. Thanks to an errata, Tempest Wing now performs as a 1-for-1 remover. You can discard a Wizard card to choose a monster on the field (either yours or your opponents) to put into the respective gauge. You do give your opponent +1 gauge, but the removal is more than worth it. Also, if you choose to use this ability on a monster with Soulguard, and your opponent uses Soulguard to keep the monster on the field, then he doesn't get the extra gauge. So the transaction is a perfect wash against Soulguard monsters. That's insanely good. To top it off, Tempest Wing has 7000 power and Double Attack for 2 gauge, making it one of the strongest Size 3 monsters for Magic World. I would even recommend him over Hearty for standard meta Wizard decks, simply for the incredible removal. And he's Uncommon, not Double-rare.

Doge 3

People underestimate cards like Tosa Hound, Cobalt. On first glance he seems very plain. Size 3 with Soulguard and Penetrate. When compared to all the fancy Double Attackers and weird abilities, Tosa Hound seems to be very dull. But then you do some math. Tosa Hound costs 2 gauge on-call, and gets a Soulguard if you have a Cobalt doge in the drop zone. 2 gauge pays for one Soulguard, which means that his Penetrate (usually 2 gauge) is free. Let's look at his stats. 3 crit? 7000/6000? That's fairly good for a Size 3 monster. With free Penetrate. Since you're going to be running 4 of the Size 0 doge in every Dungeon World deck, and the Size 1 doge is just a Thousand Rapier clone, giving Tosa Hound Soulguard is fairly easy. He's a very cost-effect Size 3 that puts a lot of pressure on the opponent while the Dungeon Engine is churning away in the background.

When deciding which world/archetype to build a deck for, it's important to consider these cheaper cards as possible substitutes. The more substitutes you can get, the more the cost of a deck goes down. Since Evil in Heart, Yamigitsune cannot be adequately substituted, you know that Skull Warriors will likely be a high-maintenance high-cost deck. On the other hand, Tempest Wing is now a suitable substitute for Hearty the Devastator and brings the cost of running Wizards down about $5-10, since you can afford to run more of him.

Here's a standing of the world/archetypes in terms of price. These are for the current meta decks, with respective Budget decks and their main remissions noted. I'll write about them in more detail the next time I update this article.

1. Hero World - Vanilla Wombo Rush (no Call! Super Machine)
2. Danger World - Armorknights (Budget, no Iblis/Cradle)
3. Dragon World - Dragon Knight (Budget, no Geronimo/Dragoanthem)
4. Dragon World - Armordragons (Budget, no Knuckle/Alt. Size 3/Halberd)
5. Katana World - Ninjas (Budget, no Tsukikage/Hades Fall)
6. Legend World - Wydar Sarkal
7. Dungeon World - Dungeon Enemies
8. Danger World - Duel Dragons
9. Magic World - Dragowizards
10. Ancient World - Wild Dragon

- updated to H-BT01 CP01, H-EB01, H-SD02, PP01 -

All images were used obtained from the official Bushiroad website and used here solely for reference purposes. Future Card Buddyfight!, logos, and respective content belong to Bushiroad. Large images belong to the Buddyfight! Wikia.