Weiss Schwarz

Japanese TCG primarily targeted towards the otaku market. Featuring various characters from all manner of anime and video games, the game essentially runs on Super Robot Wars logic, allowing players to pit their favourite characters and series in the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny against each other. It was made by Bushiroad, the same company who made cute detectives and dat new card game.

Weiss Schwarz consists of two sides, Weiss and Schwarz. The general concept of the game is that Weiss and Schwarz are in constant conflict and recruit different series to help them fight against the opposing side. Their story goes that their battles are conducted on a Stage, and their respective series utilise the characters within the series to vie for the audience's attention. The amount of attention a certain Character gets depends on their Power, which they use to battle with each other. The Character who loses this battle gets sent to the Waiting Room, waiting their turn to return to the Stage once again.

The series available in each side:

Weiss

Schwarz

The types of cards in Weiss Schwarz goes as follows:

  • Character: A Character is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. It is a character from a series that a side has recruited that is used to battle against other Characters and deal your opponent damage, much like Monsters and Units. Characters may have an ability, which is categorised into:
    • Continuous: An ability that is constantly activated as long as the Character remains on Stage.
    • Startup: An ability that can only be activated by the player during the Main Phase.
    • Auto: An ability that activates whenever certain conditions are fulfilled
  • Event: Exactly What It Says on the Tin. A special event that occurs that gives to give one side an edge.
  • Climax: Exactly What It Says On The Tin. A climax is the climax of a Character's performance, which generally uses significant moments from the source material. It boosts a Character's stats, as well as being the activating trigger for certain special abilities with the right Character.

The various areas in Weiss Schwarz is as follows:

  • Deck: Must contain exactly 50 cards, consisting of a maximum of 8 climax cards, with a limit of 4 of any card of the same name.
  • Waiting Room: The equilivant of a Graveyard and a Drop Zone. Where all Characters go after their performance and await to be called onto Stage again. Cards in this zone replace the Deck when the Deck runs out of cards, through an action known as Refresh, which results in one uncancellable damage dealt to Clock.
  • Stage: Where the various Characters fight it out through their Power. Whoever wins the battle gets to remain on Stage. If the Characters battling have the same Power, both Characters get sent off Stage. A maximum of 5 Characters can be on Stage at any point in time, with 2 acting as supports.
  • Stock: Mostly acts as a method of payment to summon Characters or activate Events.
  • Clock and Level: The equilivant of Life Points and a Damage Zone. Dictates the amount of time has left to fight it out. Clock increases based on Soul damage by Characters, which is dealt regardless of the Character's Power. Damage to Clock can only be negated when a Climax card is revealed, cancelling the damage taken, making Climax cards the most important card in the game. When the Clock reaches 7, it leads to a Level up. Pushing the opponent to Level 4 is the goal of the game.
  • Memory: The equivalent of removed from play or Exile. Cards in Memory are literally forgotten by the audience and cannot be used again. However there are some cards that can manipulate this field.

A turn in Weiss Schwarz consists of several phases, in the following order:

  • Stand Phase All Characters on the active player's Stage which were in rest will now stand up to prepare for another battle.
  • Draw Phase The active player draws a card from the top of her deck. Unlike most card games, this occurs even on the very first turn of the game.
  • Clock Phase The player may choose to place one card from hand to Clock to draw 2 additional cards.
  • Main Phase Exactly What It Says On The Tin. A player's Stage is managed during this phase, which allows the player to sort Characters in the order desired and decide whether or not to play Events. Startup abilities of Characters may also be activated at this time.
  • Climax Phase The active player may play a Climax Card from her hand to her Climax Area to buff the Characters which are about to battle.
  • Attack Phase Characters in the active player's stage which are standing can attack the opponent and deal damage to the opponent's Clock. If the opponent has a Character, the two Characters battle it out based on their Power. When the battle is over, unless the Character was defeated in battle, the Character rests up in preparation for the next battle. The following types of attacks can be carried out by the attacking Character:
    • Direct: If your opponent has no Character in front of the attacking Character, this attack is performed. An additional 1 Soul is added to the Character's Soul.
    • Front: The Character attacks head on and battles it out with the opponent's Character. The Character with lower Power loses the battle and is turned to Reverse position, to be sent to Waiting Room during the Encore Step.
    • Side: The Character chooses to avoid confrontation with the opponent's Character and deals damage to Clock through other means. The attacking Character's Soul is reduced by the Level of the opponent's Character that it sided.
  • End Phase The end of the active player's turn. If a Climax Card is in play, it is sent to the Waiting Room. If either player has more than seven cards in hand, they must discard cards until their hand size is no greater than seven. All active effects for the current turn lose their effect at this point.

A more detailed explanation of the rules can be found here. Translations for the various cards can be found there, or at WS@NK-DS, littleAKIBA, Heart of the Cards. Now also has a PSP game.

Please only put examples regarding the general tropes revolving around Weiss Schwarz, and not regarding specific cards if possible. There are too many cards for that.

Not to be confused with Weiss Schnee.

Tropes used in Weiss Schwarz include:

General tropes

  • Awesome but Impractical: An example is SYW08-057 or Haruhi in the beach only gets to 10000 power if you have unique traits in your field. Since a Character has 2 traits, having a full field of completely different Characters will result in a level 2 cost 2 Character with 10000 power on its own without sacrificing anything or having a negative ability.
    • A lot of the cards are this in the first place, and most decks revolve around making the card's effect Awesome Yet Practical by balancing out the drawbacks.
  • Blind Idiot Translation: Most of the card names in the first few sites. Heart of the Cards attempts to subvert this, but sometimes it still comes off as this.
  • CCG Importance Dissonance
  • Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Generally, each colour has certain abilities that are only present in that colour and all colours have certain themes. Yellow revolves around sending opponents to hand or Stock and own turn buffs, with many a search through Deck. Green revolves a lot around power, exchanging cards with Clock and maintaining or adding Stock. Red contains pick up abilities that allow retrieval of cards from Waiting Room and a lot of unique effects that are red exclusive. Blue has draw engines, heal spam mechanics, and normally buffs on opponent's turn.
  • Double Entendre: Climax card and Climax Area.
  • Expansion Pack: Some of the series only come in EPs, while some Boosters have these to increase the card count in a series.
  • Fridge Logic: How can cute girls have Power Levels that surpass that of veteran fighters and mages?
  • Gondor Calls for Aid: Essentially what Counters do. The Character under attack calls for another Character's support and they add Power to the Character.
  • Gratuitous German: The title, which means "White Black".
  • Loads and Loads of Characters: Well, other than the literal meaning, it also has more cards that Yu-Gi-Oh by several hundred. And, at last count, Yu-Gi-Oh had approximately 5000.
    • Although Yu-Gi-Oh has more Unique cards, most of Weiss Schwarz cards have replicated effects with only slight modification.
  • Mana Meter: Stock.
  • Power Levels: Though Power Levels is used here, Soul determines the damage.
    • Meta seems to be going in this direction lately, with new series coming up with more ways to buff the Power of a Character.
  • Serious Business: A signed holo Tenshi (a.k.a. Kanade Tachibana) costs 12,000 yen.
    • Professional players tend to count the number of climaxes that appear during their matches (both their own and their opponent's) so as to know when is a good time to push for damage.
  • Shout-Out: Its an anime card game after all. Many characters from other series end up in a card, with their respective quotes from the series.
  • The Anime of the Game: Weiss Survive, though due to copyright issues, only original cards are shown, which severely diminishes its draw. The plot is also non-existant.
  • The Cameo: Michi, Takeshi and Shizuru from the above anime are also included as promotional rare cards.
  • The Wiki Rule: The Weiss Schwarz wikia, which still needs a lot of work done on it.
  • Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny: Saber vs Nanoha vs Haruhi vs Shana vs Hitagi vs Tenshi vs Kyrie vs Konata vs Protagonist...

Weiss Schwarz Portable

  • Artificial Stupidity: The AI makes very poor moves most of the time.
  • Chick Magnet: The protagonist, who causes almost every single girl who meets him to fall for him. He has SEVEN (which becomes eight after the first playthrough) potential girls to choose from.
  • Childhood Friends: Suzuka. Going on her route results in a Childhood Friend Romance.
  • Class Representative: Suiko
  • Hot Chick with a Sword: Minami
  • Cash Cow Franchise: Essentially the whole point of the development of the game. Though, it has a surprisingly deep plot.
  • Twin Switch: In Suzuka's route, the player finds out near the end that the Suzuka the player has been interacting with is actually her twin sister, Honoka. When the real Suzuka returns, she's not exactly pleased to realise that her twin sister got a Relationship Upgrade with her old childhood friend
  • Visual Novel: The game is part this, part card game simulator.
  • You Gotta Have Blue Hair: And red. And green. And pink. There's also normal hair colours too.
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