The best part of the new Macross Delta set is more Wild Wild Weiss Content
-PGH’S Beanwolf, 2023.
Late last week, the Macross Won’t Stop online variety show revealed another pack in promo for the Macross Delta Weiss Schwarz Set. This promo is included with the Walküre Last Mission concert BluRay as a pre-order bonus. While Suzuki Minori (Frejya Wion) showed off the Last Mission promo, a climax with a comeback trigger, what caught my eye was in Toyama Nao’s (Reina) hands. She held the “Sayonara no Tsubasa” climax and “Alto, Searching for a Real Sky” from the Original Macross Frontier set.
This, combined with Frontier and Delta often cross promoting each other, leads me to think the sets will be compatible Weiss’ most commonly played format, Neo-Standard. Neo-Standard stipulates that only cards printed in the same “series” can be played within the same deck. Sometimes the decision seems rather arbitrary. I believe that Macross Frontier and Macross Delta being playable together is good for the game, as Weiss is at its best when you have a larger card pool to create innovative decks that require different strategies to pilot and play against.
Why should I care
Weiss Schwarz’s great promise is the ability to combine character’s from a lot of different shows to build cool and creative decks. The ideal realization of this promise would be the Standard format, where all sets are compatible. You could build a deck where Action Kamen from Shin Chan and Boba Fett team up to fight characters from Symphogear and Love Live[1]. You can build decks that rely on a diverse range of strategies from hyper offensive field control to outright deck destruction through removing your opponent’s climax cards from play. Unfortunately, balancing Standard proved difficult. This isn’t a problem unique to Bushiroad, as Pokémon and Magic the Gathering’s extended and eternal formats are also unbalanced and unfun to play. The Pokémon Company and Wizards chose to solve this problem by rotating sets out of the main format every year. Bushiroad didn’t like the idea of a rotation format for their games. I understand why they made this choice: There are often long gaps between sets for particular properties (e.g., the 12 years between Macross F and Macross Delta) which I could see alienating players who didn’t like the current slate of legal titles, a hazard that Pokémon would never face as Pokémon fans like Pokémon. Thus, to balance the increased likelihood of unbalanced decks from an unlimited card pool with the fun of building a variety of decks[2], Bushiroad made the compromise Neo-Standard format.
Neo-Standard allows only sets that exist within the same “universe” to be playable. For instance, Fate Stay Night and Fate Zero are compatible. Cards from Sword Art Online that appear in the Dengeki Bunko set can be used in Sword Art Online decks. This incents players who already have Weiss sets to buy newer cards while easing the difficulty of making the main Weiss Schwarz meta-game both eternal and diverse. No one wants a re-run of the Summer of Zero no Tsukaima.
I would prefer Bushiroad create a fun Standard metagame, and build Weiss around Standard. However, if they correctly identify the task impossible, the second best is a Neo-Standard format using an expansive definition of “the same universe.” However, Bushi has used a rather narrow definition of the same universe, with the Fate series being the most emblematic. Fate Grand Order and Fate/Apocrypha cannot be played with Fate/Stay Night or Fate/Zero. Arguably the decks could have been problematic, but it misses the great appeal of Weiss: a anime fan game where we mix our favourite characters together. I’m sure Fate fans were disappointed they couldn’t mix Fate GO, Fate/Apocrypha, and mainline Fate characters together, and it seems nonsensical because the characters mix in Fate GO. It feels doubly absurd as the Fate/Apocrypha and Fate GO sets weren’t particularly powerful either, keeping the combined power level of a combined Fate set would have been a reasonable task for game designers.
Thus, as a third best, I am reduced to making a (reasoned) plea into the aether so that my favourite cards are playable together.
Why Macross Frontier and Macross Delta should be Neo-Standard
There are several reasons Macross F and Macross Delta should be playable together. First, they occur in the same timeline, within ten years of each other. Macross Frontier takes place in 2059 and Macross Delta in 2067. Freyja is inspired to sing by Ranka Lee; characters cover music from Frontier (as well as Macross 7 and the original) in show; characters in Delta discuss the events and characters of Frontier and Seven, particularly Nekki Basara, Ranka Lee, and Sheryl Nome; and Kaname Buccaneer, the leader of Walkure, mentioned she was on Ranka’s Variety Show during Zettai Live as a way to name drop.
Second, Macross Frontier and Macross Delta often cross promote each other or are part of the same release. Macross Delta’s second film was a double feature in theatres and on Blu-ray. The first part was Macross Frontier, Labyrinth of Time. For the 40th anniversary of the original Macross TV series, Big West released two albums: one of Sheryl and Ranka covering Walkure songs and the other of Walkure covering Sheryl and Ranka songs. Walkure, May’n (Sheryl), and Megumi Nakajima (Ranka) often take the stage together as special guests at each other’s concerts or on the Macross Crossover Live billing. Simply put: Macross Delta Fans are more than likely Frontier fans. The converse is also true. Most of the people who have Frontier cards would love to combine them with the new premium set.
Third, reflecting the fact that fans of each series are likely mutual, Sheryl and Ranka are already on the Macross Delta promos. All of the idols from all of the Macross series are on the Shooting Insight promo. It would be a little odd to not be able to play that promo card in a Macross Frontier deck. Fourth, the Premium Booster’s product page does not say that they are incompatible, which is a good sign.
Finally, the Macross Delta premium booster is only 60 cards. It would be way more fun to build a deck with the 160+ cards from both sets then just the separate card pools. Mixing older and newer sets creates decks that play in unexpected ways as many unique effects exist in old Weiss sets. This is especially true of Macross Frontier with unique climaxes, ways to easily summon characters early, and funky events.
Conclusion
As we can see, there are lots of good reasons for Macross Frontier to be playable with Macross Delta. From a structural perspective, Weiss is at its best when more sets can be combined. From a Macross perspective, Delta and Frontier are heavily intertwined, both in universe and in reality. From marketing materials, we’ve seen the Macross Delta cards revealed while showing off the original Frontier cards.
I feel that all the signs are pointing towards Delta and Fro tier being playable together. I hope Bushiroad follows through.
[1] Green and Music are fun in Standard.
[2] There is an Economics paper type blog post to be written here. Basically, the card pool is an exhaustive space where each card that can be played with another is linked into a network. Cards that can’t be played together are not linked. I’m not 100% sure on the mechanism, but valid links that don’t result in busted decks are costly for Bushi to make but increase player utility. Cards that are linked to cards players already own increase the utility for new cards above some baseline. Bushiroad maximizes profit by building discrete networks within the card space that maximize demand subject to their costs. Heterogeneous representative consumers with concave utility functions and linear budget constraints complete the model. I’ll need someone who is better at math to help me rig this. The idea is that Neo-Standard or rotation formats arise to reduce the cost of many links in the network. I really shouldn’t be allowed to write footnote tangents that are longer than main section paragraphs.
Wild Wild Weiss 