Building Your First Deck

If you’re a new player, you’ve probably learned the rules of the game and upgraded your first deck a few times. But now you want to move to the next level: building your first deck. Of course, you can always netdeck a proven list. That might help you understand what’s good, but you might still find yourself drawing a blank when it comes time to make your own original deck. You might even be scared that you’re going to invest time into building something nonfunctional. That’s where this article comes in. The goal of this article is to give you the basic building blocks for building your own deck, walking you through the thought process behind what goes into a deck.

Where Do I Start?

Maybe you have an idea of a general strategy, maybe you have a combo you want to pull off. Regardless, you want to start with deciding your center LRIG. Because your LRIG is always on field, their effects will determine what strategy you build around. In addition, their color will determine what cards your deck is going to be focused around.

Let’s take Bang, Making a Miracle as an example. Bang’s first effect lets you Ener Charge every turn. Bang’s enter effect lets you push damage for free in the center lane. Finally, her Once Per Game gives a green SIGNI [S Lancer], which is best used for winning the game. So, given these effects, what can we say about how Bang’s playstyle?

Bang gets to Ener Charge every turn for 3 turns, so effects that want to see Ener Charging benefit greatly
The center lane is very important during your third turn, so you might want to reposition your opponent’s board to take advantage of Lancer
If we’re taking advantage of Lancer effects, we don’t have to give Ener during the Main Phase, which will make it harder for our opponent to defend.
The deck should focus on green cards because Bang is also green.

Given these traits, we can identify some key cards that can take advantage of Bang’s unique traits.

Osagitsune and Parajulis are both able to threaten damage on turns where you Ener charge, which means they can be part of the backbone of our strategy.

To take advantage of our center lane Lancer on turn 3, We can use SIGNI that gain bonuses in the center lane, or SIGNI that have abilities that trigger when it vanishes another SIGNI by battle. For example, Kiyosumi becomes a 12k SIGNI when in the center lane, and she can help us reposition SIGNI if there is nothing in the center lane.

Alternatively, Phalaris already mills the opponent by 10 when it vanishes something by battle, so why not also push damage by crushing a card with Lancer as well?

Because we identified some of our LRIG’s strengths, we were able to find some cards that can support our LRIG and give us a focus for our deck. We don’t have to use everything, but now we have somewhere to start.

How Are You Winning?

Now that we’ve identified our LRIG’s playstyle and found some cards that help us take advantage of that playstyle. However, we still need to ask the question: “How are we winning?”

In the hypothetical situation where both you and your opponent are pushing 3 damage every turn, and you both use your Assists to stop the same amount of damage, the winner is going to be whoever has the better bursts and finds more Guards.

That would be a pretty boring game right? You might as well roll a dice at that point to determine the winner. So how do we tip the scales in our favor? Wixoss at its core is a resource management game. Good players understand how to manage their resources efficiently. If you allow your opponent to keep all the resources in the world, they won’t have any trouble responding to you. Therefore, we need to stress resources somehow in addition to doing damage.

There are a couple of ways we can approach this:

Discard their hand
Burn or deny ener
Deal extra damage to their Life Cloth with refresh or effect-based damage
Build walls to buy time, or force the opponent to spend more resources

This is oversimplifying things a bit, but illustrates the win conditions of many decks. When you analyze top decks, you will notice that those decks will be able to do at least 2 of those things.

Let’s continue our example with Bang. Because we don’t have to give Ener during the Main Phase, we can use Ener burn effects to starve our opponent off of any Ener they might have, making it difficult for them to defend against us. Therefore, a PIECE like Death Beam Diva or Connect Spinning can burn off Ener while helping us threaten damage.

We can also use assists like Yuzuki Andesine or Ex Crossfire to add to our ener denial strategy.

With this, we’ve added another facet to our strategy that will give our deck more of an edge.

Balance

One of the most frequent questions new players ask is, “What are the ratios of SIGNI levels I should have in my deck?” The common answer to this question is:

14-16 non-Servant level 1s
4-6 Level 2s
The rest Level 3s and Spells

The reasoning is that for your level 1 count, you want to guarantee that you can field a full board of SIGNI every turn, especially during your first 2 turns. Since discard is always a threat, we want to guarantee that even if we get discarded, we can still find the cards we need. When I build decks, I am usually the most concerned with making sure my level 1 count meets this number.

Your level 2 slots are a bit more flexible, as some level 2s are quite useful, but might make some boards awkward depending on your limit.

Level 3 SIGNI, being the most powerful, make up the core of your deck. However, they are often dead in your hand for the first two turns, so you don’t want to play too many of them.

Spells are a mixed bag. Some decks might play as many as 11 spells, others may play none. The number of spells you play will be influenced by what kind of deck you are playing. Regardless, playing spells usually means cutting into your other main deck slots, so you will have to weigh how vital those spells are to your strategy.

It’s important to note that these ratios are not set in stone, and often fluctuate depending on the deck. For example, decks that don’t need to rely on level 1s, especially after turn 3 can drop to 12 level 1s. Some decks, like Endless Punchline Card Jockey decks, want as few level 1s as possible, and may even play as few as 9 level 1s.

Ratios, or How Many Copies Do I Put In?

Another question you might ask is, “How many copies of each card should I add?” Naturally, the more copies of a card you put in, the more consistent it will be, but we don’t need to max out on every card. Here are general rules to follow:

Run 4 copies if a card is integral to your strategy
Run 3-4 copies of cards you want to see consistently
Run 2 copies if it’s a useful tool, but you don’t want to see it all the time
Run 1 copy if you only plan to use it once

The Fun-Of One-Of

In most card games, running a card at 1 is usually something you only do if it is easily searchable, or it is powerful but limited by a ban list. Because you go through a deck so quickly in Wixoss, it is a lot easier to find the single copy of a card in your deck. In addition, there are Pieces and abilities that make finding one-of cards much easier than other games. Decks that can toolbox their trash or ener to fetch singleton cards can also benefit greatly from running a selection of one-of cards they can grab at any time. Case in point, this deck that topped the 3rd GP was running a staggering 14 singleton cards!

Choosing Your Assists

Back when our main deck colors were restricted to matching the colors of our LRIGs, your assist selection was very important, since it would influence what you could and couldn’t play. Nowadays, since you are able to play any color of card in your main deck, your main concern becomes a) what your assists do for you and b) what colors you need for all of their effects. We will save a more detailed discussion of assists and what to consider when picking them for another time. For now, a good rule of thumb is to play two level 2 assists with Attack Phase timing. These will be your lifeline when defending, so many players will run a cheap level 2 assist that stops 1 damage (e.g. Ex Crossfire, Machina Smash, etc), and a level 2 assist that can stop 2 or 3 damage (eg. Remember Prophecy, Mel Invisible, etc).

Conclusion

This article is meant to be a general guide for new players. None of these rules should be held as set in stone. There comes a time when we have to break the rules to innovate. But we should know what rules we are breaking so that we can justify WHY we are breaking them.

The most important rule of all is to have fun when building a deck. Wixoss allows for a lot of player expression in how you play, and what you put in your deck. While there are some intended archetypes, any card can be played in a deck, and unexpected combinations can sometimes turn games in your favor. Part of the fun is seeing what wacky things people come up with, so feel free to experiment with various ideas.

For those curious, here is a screenshot of the Bang deck in question, it was made for the CP01 format without color restriction, so it is a little outdated. However, I had a lot of fun building and playing it.