So I’ve discussed the game and the cards. Today I want to focus on PvP and my final thoughts on the game. I haven’t put near the amount of time some people have put into this game, so my theories may have some flaw to them, and I am far from a master at this game. This is really just a listing of what I’ve learned to do by being beat by the people I have played and using some of those tactics to beat other people.

Crystal Strategy

The first and simplest idea to winning is to just take out the other team’s arcane crystals. There are three of them on a PvP map and they are always in the same place. It seems simple enough but if their team enters the area of the crystal you are attacking, then you stop attacking it to focus on fighting them. This can, of course, slow you down, but if you have a stronger team it isn’t anything to worry about.

When I first started playing PvP, this is the only thought that came to my mind. My cards weren’t strong enough to be effective in battle, so I ran from crystal to crystal trying to lower their life bar before the enemy could take out my whole team. Now PvP match-ups are usually about four levels apart max, so at times I was playing people I had no chance of beating. This is how you can start to annoy the high level people.

As I stated last time, there are some monster cards that lower the power of arcane crystals much faster than any other cards. These are great to have on a team, and also terrible to have. They make your team slower than you could possibly imagine or want. Once you do get to a crystal, though, you’re set. There is a side strategy to using these cards and that is to take out the opponents search eye or shield generator which will give you some speed boosts, letting those slow but dangerous monsters get to the crystals much faster.

Opponent Destruction Strategy

This is the next simple-but-not-as-easy way to win the battle: if you fight and take out the other team completely, their life bar will go down a decent amount. You have to defeat the whole team, though, or this doesn’t do as much good. This really works well for people who have leveled up their cards a bit and have a team that is strong against that particular opponent. I have tried using this strat a few times but always seem to lose out in the end. There is something about this I’m doing wrong and I need to spend a bit more time figuring out how to perfect it.

What really gets me about this method of winning is the monster card’s strength and weakness to certain attacks. If, say, you do dark damage, you are usually weak to light damage. So obviously, if you’re team is solely dark damage monsters and the other is light, it could be a draw, but if they aren’t light then you’re damage won’t be as effective and theirs will work better. There are also cards that can either change your strength, damage, or your weakness thus causing you serious headaches.

“Lock Out” Strategy

This is something new I’m working on. It has not been used on me to its fullest yet in a match, but I used it on someone to achieve a sneaky victory. In the PvP field, there are three gates your team can come through if you lose all teammates or need a quick health recharge. If one is broken by the other team, it can’t be used until you spend time standing in front of it to fix it.

The idea is if you break all three gates down, and then proceed to either attack the other team or work on crystals, they will have no choice than to hurry and fix their gates, or try and take you out to get some time to repair their gates. The gates do repair themselves but very, very slowly. I have taken out all three gates on someone before and then went to the furthest crystal from them and cleaned house. This strat doesn’t work well if their team moves faster than yours, though, so it’s a bit tricky.

Conclusion

Well, that is about all there is to Lord of Vermilion so far. It’s a fun card game with some great card art. You don’t have to get every card in the whole game to have fun, and you don’t have to have many cards to start. If you are in Japan for a length of time and feel like trying it out, go for it — you really don’t need too high a Japanese language skill to play it, and even if you have trouble, the person sitting next to you may give you some simple tips for playing. I recently upgraded from the weak plastic card holders to stronger stuff because some of the more serious players rock their cards pretty hard while combating, and I think I’m almost at their level. We’ll see, though.

Tags: Arcade, card, collectible, Enix, game, Japan, lord, Square, vermilion

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