Hello,

I am very new to this game. I have bought the following starters Sagat, Rock, Hamoru x2, Sakura, and Akuma. I bought about 20 packs of SF Domination set and some King of Fighters set I forgot the name of. What should I go out and buy? What sets are important? What characters should I go out and get? I've noticed that speed seems to matter a lot. I like regen characters and card control. I like my Sagat deck because I can get lots of speed on just about all my attacks with ok amount of card control. Sorry if this breaks the flow of the forum but I'm hard pressed to find a forum that is up to date on the game.

To be honest, the meta is pretty location dependable on availibility of cards. In my town, a lot of people run pure control decks, Boxers, No memories, program malfunc, etc etc., but when a group of them went to a regionals they were smoked by an all aggro deck. Then we tried to rebuild around it and got smoked elsewhere playing counter-control. So I suppose you jus thave to be prepared for anything and get lucky! But play the character you want, sagat starter deck is amazing for beginners and aggro, I know I used it! =D

I'm going through some deck list and I'm seeing a lot of cards that do control and lockdown. Rejection is one card a friend of mine has that I see is very common in decks. I'm just a bit frustrated because I see all of these previous cards out there and some really tough cardlist. I'm new so can you break down the acroynms for me. YOu mention agro, what does that all include.

Agrro is just a type of playstyle, aggressive and pretty much knocking out people quickly. Control is more deny them to do what they want to do while you chip away. Now the more complex stuff is when you expect people to run control and you counter-control them. Those decks are pretty advance and even I can't play them correctly. Easiest decks to play are the more aggressive "beat-down" types. You can kind of just play cards to build foundation, then attack. Sagat's starter deck was pretty good at this because of Tiger's Fury and Sagats character enhance. It also came with decent cards to staple in a fire deck.

Basically, you can decide what playstyle to run, I started off as aggro beat-down style and it sucked at first then I fine tuned it to work to my liking and I have gotten 2nd a few times at local and even stolen a first place. Not that they are big or anything, but its kind of nice to win! =D

I am now working on a different more advance (and expensive!! T_T) deck for regionals, but I playtested it and it wsa rough for me to remember a lot of combos and card chain-links, etc. But with practice you can eventually get it down! Good luck!

Honestly it really depends on whatever you want to do. I'm a big fan of the two newest sets, the Soul Calibur 4: Tower of Souls set and ShadoWar set, a much harder to find set would be Realm of Midnight, the darkstalkers set. Most people agree the SC4 set had better chase rares than ShadoWar, and the sets really brought back some very good attacks. Another thing to consider is that the two newest sets have five point shurken watermarks on them, as opposed to the 4 point shurikens on all of the other currently standard legal cards; this means that once rotation hits in a year, the 5 point shuriken cards will still be legal.

http://www.twoheadeddragon.com/ufs/index.html is a very good card database that you may want to look at for what interests you.

To break down the symbols a little bit:

Fire - Mostly a pure aggro symbol; there are a few control pieces in this, such as manifest destiny, which allows you to tap out a few important cards that your opponent controls, No Memories, and the such. Traditionally it's a very aggressive symbol that can go off very quickly.

Water - Water is very interesting right now, it has a lot of control suprisingly, but at high difficulty foundations; these include Chinese Boxing, Program Malfunction, Chester's Backing, as well as a good amount of card draw, fluidity, etc. It also has one of the best attacks in the game, Feline Spike. Also has Defender, which is sickening for looping attacks.

Earth - Heavy damage reduction and has grown to have anti-control in it. It's a symbol that kind of creeps under the radar, and people don't pay a lot of attention to it.

Air - One of the most popular symbols now, it fronts characters like Andrew Olexa, Chun Li, and Mignon has suprised a few people. There are several other very good characters for it as well. It has some of the best attacks in the game, including Ira Spinta, Feline Spike, Heel Snipe, etc. It also shares a lot of control with Water, in Chinese Boxing, Chester's Backing, and some others.

Life - A very weird symbol right now that isn't seeing as much solidification as it used to. Before, it was about very hard very fast attacks, and life gain. Now it has access to some multiples from Tira's support in soul calibur 4: tower of souls, and works in characters like Ivy, but it's not seeing that much play.

Death - A very heavy control symbol that recently just got a whole slew of amazing attacks in the most recent set. These include Midnight Launcher, Knight Breaker, Shredding Vibrato, Menuette Dance, and from an earlier set, Ichi no Tachi.

Void - A bit of another undefined symbol, again, and my personal favorite, but it's not seen in competitive play much. It shares Soiree support with air and water, things that ready other foundations, it has some interesting control options with No Memories, Tough Outer Shell, A Beautiful Nightmare, Controller of Souls, etc. It has some amazing draw, including Aquakinesis, something water and order also have. Attack wise, it also has Heel Snipe, Kuzuryu Reppa, and that sort. It was once the king of control, but that title has been passed on.

All - A very interesting symbol, it has some amazing control pieces with Chester's Backing, Blood Runs True, Psycho Style, and many others, and some very good attacks as well, with Kuzuryu Reppa, Neo Raging Storm, and a few others. It has several very good characters, like Sakura, Promo Alex, etc. A very solid symbol.

Evil - The king right now, up with Air and Order, essentially. It has a huge amount of control, Chester's Backing, Manifest Destiny, The Evil-Doer Destroyer, Blood Runs True, The Red Lotus of the Sun, Oral Dead, the works. It also has an amazing attack lineup, with Midnight Launcher, Knight Breaker, Ichi no Tachi, Reverse Flayer, those sorts. Rejection and Gorgeous Team as well for recursion and damage reduction, and several amazing characters, including Zi Mei, Ibuki, Jonathan Herr, Andrew Olexa, and many others.

Good - The king of Damage Reduction nowadays it seems. It has some amazing tech with Torn Hero, it can be amazingly aggressive with Hilde, and insane amounts of damage reduction with Amy's Assistance, Holding Ground, Assassination Arts, and some others.

Order - Another king of control, but mostly board control. Order can completely tap someone out, using things like Psycho Style, Chinese Boxing, Experienced Combatant, and the sort. Several very good characters again, and attacks can include Kuzuryu Reppa, Neo Raging Storm, Ira Spinta, High Plasma Beam, and many will off-symbol Feline Spike. It also has very good card draw, and the sort. It also has some silly control check hacking, with Blood Runs True, and Forethought.

Chaos - Another heavy control symbol, with some very interesting tech, but it's more of a control check hacking symbol, at least, that's how i've always seen it, or at least traditionally, with K' and Cervantes. Nowadays, it has some interesting control options with Oral Dead, The Red Lotus of the Sun, Forethought, and the sort.

Figure out what you want to play, who you want to play, look through the twoheadeddragon database a bit and search for the block and the symbols, and find what looks interesting to you, is what I suggest. I'm sure several players and your area will likely be willing to help you out, assuming there is an established playgroup, otherwise well, the boards are always willing to help.

Eithinis said:

This. Becuase it's a cool mini-primer for the OP, and anyone else very new to the game. Good lookin' out, mang!

I'm in OK and thre really isn't any regular games any where in the state. So my friends and I are starting from scratch. My problem with most of my decks now are getting enough speed on them to land. I seem to get blocked a lot. I also have a question about Ira spinata. Why is it so good of an attack? It looks pretty average. I know it is a throw with 5 control but it seems that it could back fire on you due to the effects. Thanks for the help so far. It seems I will have to go to ebay and buy a ton of singles to be competitive.

Really quick question. What should be the largest deck size I shouldn't try to go over? I have a deck now with 70 cards. Should I try to get close to 60 all the time?

Ira-Spinta is good because it's a single card that generates major board advantage -- if you play 2 or 3 of them over the course of a few turns, then your opponent will struggle to keep any of their most important cards on the field.

Particularly for new players i suggest going for 60 cards, but once you get a hang of things and understand what cards are important to be out all the time, if it works for a character well, and those sorts, then you can go over. For example, my ibuki deck I ran recently at a regionals has 64 cards, but my fire astrid deck runs 73. My old fire adon deck ran 59 cards, plus character, despite the fact that he had an 8 hand size.

i'd suggest playing an aggresive deck with Akuma as your character. Run on fire and use his control check modding ability to make sure the your attacks connect. As a start put in the Tiger Furys and Blinding Rages you got in the Sagat deck then look at a website called twoheadeddragon, it is what i do if i get stuck for ideas. Here's a tip, ask around in your area, you never know there maybe some players willing to help. best of luck with the deck.

if your worrying about attacks conecting, i would suggest either hacking your attacks threw, locking out your oponent so they don't have resources to block, hand stripage, looping so your oponent runs out of blocks, or playing gaint throws. speed pump is kinda dead right now. it just takes too many resources.