Meta Speculation, a Few Questions, and an Apology

First off, I'd like to apologize for my previous post. I took a hasty look at the game rules, took a split-second impression, and posted it to the internet. I doubt it was helpful for anyone and was the opposite instead. I especially apologize to the developers for any harm that I caused to them. While I do think the prize pool mechanic is suboptimal, that post was not the right way to phrase my critique at all, and I'm glad they have changed the rules to make it optional.

Now that I've taken some time to take a close look at the rules and cards available, I have assembled a deck list that I think may be good. Of course, I haven't played a single game of VCard, and so everything I say here is speculation based on my experience with other TCGs. Without further ado, here's the decklist:

4x cyanide-chan

4x happiness-chan

4x work-life balance

4x double down

4x reaper

4x CottontailVA 10

4x CottontailVA 8

4x Lucy Pyre 10

4x Lucy Pyre 8

4x Fluffer

4x Demonite

4x Guildie

2x Potat

I'll go through and break down why I chose the cards that I did one by one, but first I want to address the number of cards in the deck. The rules state that the minimum deck size is 50 and the maximum deck size is infinite. If you want to play optimally, the second of those rules is false. Having less cards in your deck makes you more likely to draw the cards that you want during any given round, so there is also an effective deck maximum of 50. The rules also state that you can only play up to four copies of a card in your deck. Here's where one of my first questions for the devs comes in: do different power levels of the same VTuber constitute different cards? For the purposes of this deck, I'm assuming that they are different because they have separate listings on the website, but if my assumption turns out to be wrong, the whole deck needs to be redone.

Now for the card-by-card analysis starting with the supports. First up is Cyanide-chan and Happiness-chan. These are the only sources of card advantage in VCard (unless you want to count Work-Life Balance), and one unifying principle of TCGs is that drawing cards is generally pretty good. The other reason why I think these are good is because they subvert the one-support-per-turn rule. Many busted cards from other TCGs are busted because they circumvent some restriction in the game engine (e.g., playing multiple lands a turn in Magic or evolving your Pokemon ahead of schedule in Pokemon). I'll have another question for these cards later on.

Work-Life Balance is how we turn the cards we draw with Happiness-chan into power. Drawing cards is good, but the power of drawing cards is gated by the fact that your opponent can end the round before you have a chance to play them. Work-Life Balance gives us an out for those cards because we can just discard our entire hand to get a huge +7 or so boost.

Double Down does a similar thing to Work-Life Balance, but the floor is lower and the ceiling is higher. If all goes to plan, we can dump out somewhere around 10-12 cards in one round, but the other side is that our opponent plays fast enough that we never get more than 3 or so.

The final support card is Reaper. Interactive cards are generally pretty good in TCGs, so this is a natural inclusion. Reaper can either stop our opponent from doing powerful things, or negate their Reapers (I think) to allow us to do broken things.

Next we have the power level cards. The element you choose here doesn't really matter, so I chose the one with the VTubers that I know. What does matter is the Power-Level-8 card's abilities. I think Quick Glance and Small Bargain are the best abilities on these cards in general. Both abilities give you card selection, another mechanic that is generally pretty good in other TCGs. If we have a mascot of the wrong type, we can discard it to hopefully get a more useful mascot or support card. Quick Glance lets you set up your next draw from Happiness-chan.

Obviously, the Power-Level-10 cards are better than the Power-Level-8 cards, but it isn't so clear with the Power-Level 9 cards. I think that the extra card selection you get from PL8 cards is better than the extra point of power you get from PL9 cards, but this is basically just a complete guess.

The other point to consider is how many PL cards should be in a deck. You can only play one PL card per round which makes redundant copies of them in your hand worthless. But if you have no PL cards in your opening hand, you lose the first round. With 16 PL cards in a 50-card deck, you have around a 1.3% chance of losing the first round due to not having any PL cards. This seems small enough for me. This is an aspect of the game engine that I enjoy very much! The push and pull between playing more and fewer PL cards is a very interesting deck construction challenge that doesn't have an obvious solution. I just chose 16 cause it seemed vaguely correct for some reason. Wish I could give you a better line of logic for that.

Finally we have the mascot cards. Ideally, you want to play one mascot card every turn of the round. So having more mascots than PL cards seems correct to me. I chose all of my mascots to be electric type because I know Cottontail, Lucy Pyre, and Shoto, but as I said before, the exact type doesn't matter. What does matter is that you only play one type. As far as I can tell, I see no reason to play multiple types if you want to make your deck as competitive as possible. Yes, you will be weak to one particular type, but I think that weakness is made up for in consistency.

I'll finish my post with some questions that I have about the game rules that hopefully someone from either the community or GG can answer.

-Are different PL cards of the same VTuber considered the same or different cards for deckbuilding?

-If I play a Happiness-chan while I don't have a Cyanide-chan, but I draw a Cyanide-chan as one of my two cards, can I play that Cyanide-chan?

-Which support cards can the Reaper cancel? Can she cancel a Battle Cry or Happiness-chan? Some of the supports seem difficult to cancel like Exposed, but others seem easier.

-Do canceled support cards remain on the field?

-If during any round after the first I don't draw any PL cards during my maintenance phase, what happens? Do I mulligan? Do I lose the round?

-If I take a mulligan during the Setup phase, do I have to show my hand to my opponent like in Pokemon?

-If I don't play any cards during my turn (assuming I've played at least one card earlier in the round), does the battle phase end immediately or does my opponent get another turn?

-Can I choose not to play any cards (again assuming I've played at least one) during one of my turns to end the round even if I could play a card? Or do I have to have no mascot or support cards in hand to end the round?