Bakemonogatari Weiss Schwarz

At the 21st of May bushiroad released one of their new series for the Weiss Schwarz Trading Card Game. Bakemonogatari.
So first of all, what is Bakemonogatari?
Bakemonogatari is about the third year high school student Araragi Koyomi who recently survived a vampire attack. And now he enters a world full of ghosts, demons, spirits, gods and myths.

It is a really popular anime and I recommend watching it!

Well, but I won’t talk about the anime here. I want to talk about the Bakemonogatari Trial Deck.

Every Trial Deck contains a prebuild 50 card deck, a Quick-Rule sheet, a paper playmat and a Rulebook.

Since the game is in japanese it could get a bit hard to understand and play this game, but there are a few websites with translations of the rules and the cards themselve.

For the rules you can visit http://ws.nk-ds.org/ and for more user friendly translations pay a visit to little AKIBA.

I am really glad that bushiroad spoilered Shinobu to me. No stats so far for her but I am glad to see she is in the game and on the yellow side. So I thing I need to buy a lot of cards to play a Hitagi x Shinobu deck.
A few days ago, bushiroad showed us an yellow Level 2/Cost 2 Shinobu with a really interessting effect which reinforced my decision to play a Hitagi x Shinobu deck.

These are the blue cards in the Trial Deck. Not that many. The Trial Deck is focused on red cards.
A few Hanekawa and Nadeko cards and a climax card who gives every charakter +2 soul and a bad screencap where you can barely see anything.
The Hanekawa card in the middle of the lower row is the only back row support card in this Trial Deck who gives every charakter in front of her a power bonus of 500.
The other cards are for attacking or defending purpose. A standard Level 1/0 Cost Nadeko with 5500 Power, a standard Level 0/0 Cost 3000 Power first round attacker and a Hanekawa who gets a power boost when put into play for one turn. And also a Nadeko who gets +1000 Power in the oppononents turn.
Blue is indicated as the advantage color. But to be honest I don’t see any advantage if I play these cards. Ok the Hanekawa who gets a power boost after I played her seems to be fitting but the rest could be green or red.
Maybe the defending Nadeko is fitting for blue as well, but not the rest.

Now we get to the red fraction. The technique color. I always was wondering why red wasn’t the power fraction but after seeing the Bakemonogatari TD I realised why it is the technique color.
Most of the cards either give a power boost for themselve or other characters with the same trait or I can play around with the characters in my waiting room (discard pile). I can either take them back into my hand or I can shuffle them back into my deck. That way I can be sure to get those charakters back which where in my Clock Slot or my Stock.

But the Trial Deck has also a few disadvantages.
The lack of support cards is one of it. Only the blue Hanekawa with the power boost support and Koyomis sisters, who give me one oddity-trait character back onto hand for the cost of 1 Stock can be counted as support characters
There is no Event Card! I really thing that is a bad thing because Event Cards can turn the tables in a heated battle.
The Level3/2 Cost Hitagi card has no healing effect. This is a bit sad because almost all Level 3 cards have this healing effect. What I mean with healing effect? When such a card is put on the field, you can remove 1 card from Clock Slot into your Waiting Room. But since the Hitagi is a TD exclusive card I have high hopes that we can get another Level 3/2 Cost red card in the booster pack release with a healing.
The next thing I am a bit dissapointed with is the fact that only one card has an Encore effect. This means its going to be an expensive deck to play. Sure I can get a lot of characters back to hand with other cards. But first I need to have those cards on my field or in my hand.

I bought two of the Trial Deck because I really dislike it when such a deck has some cards limited to one. But if you combine two together you get a rather decent deck.
And after I changed my Erza/Gray to an Erza/Lucy Deck until I get my hands on the missing Erza cards, it is a fierce battle between Fairy Tail and Bakemonogatari.

if you got interested, visit the official english bushiroad blog. There you will find a lot of comrades who love to play Weiss Schwarz or any other bushiroad card game.