Design/baseline principles?

Is there somewhere that has important or baseline numbers/uses/concepts for cards? Not beginner’s articles “card advantage is good, Block as default, etc etc”, but some general principles like “speed 1.0 is important BECAUSE…” “the average throw/attack is” “Most Jacks have 2.4 speed and are used for…” “You typically wanna shoot for x damage per card” or similar ideas? l looked through the Collected Resources links and didn’t see anything. A lot of the character guides say something is good or efficient or important, but nowhere really seems to delve into why. It’s like people are referencing generally accepted info that I can’t find.

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These are good questions! I don’t think there’s any single document like that in existence, but you’re basically on the right track when you mention about “average” speeds being a factor here. I think a lot of the guides will talk about specific matchups having important speeds because of attack/throw distributions, but there are some overall principles too. I’ll try and list some out here, at least for attacks anyway.

Almost all of the “accepted” important attack speeds arise because Yomi is based around a playing card deck and the move speeds follow the card ranks. Normal moves are by definition on charcter’s 2 through 10, and all the cast except Gwen have normal attacks at x.2 or slower. This means that speed 2.2 is guaranteed to beat or at worst clash with nearly every normal attack in the game.

After 2.2, the next most important speed is probably 1.0 speed. This is because a number of the cast either have important abilities that can boost their attacks speeds to 1.0 in certain game states (e.g. Zane, who has 1.0 speed normals while the opponent is knocked down) or have fast special moves between around 1.2 or 1.4 speed that recurr or lead to big damage (e.g. Lum’s coin Toss or Gwen’s Burnbarrow). A decent number of double ace super attacks also sit at 1.2 speed so being able to undercut this big damage is pretty important.

The range of moves below 1.0 speed are classed as DPs (Dragon Punches) and mostly consist of moderate damage defensive moves (“Get off me” etc) but there are also some high damage supers, and some combo starters that fall in this range. It becomes very matchup specific what speeds are good to have below 1.0. For example, access to 0.2 speed or faster is very important vs Grave as he can play True Power of Storms - which is 0.4 speed and deals 45 damage - where as against Setsuki you want to have 0.0 speed to be able to deny her Ninpo Flash combo starter.

Hopefully that makes some sense to you and goes someway to answering how you would go about making the same general comments about throws :smiley:

Edit: I airquoted “average” to imply average wasn’t really the right idea, but it wasn’t particularly clear on re-reading it and could have been misleading. As per @mysticjuicer below, average speed etc is not a good idea to think about in yomi but “cross character tendencies” are somewhat useful, as per the rest of my post.

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@thehug0naut did an excellent job covering the basic principles for evaluating speed, but in terms of “how much damage per card should I shoot for?” the answer is going to be a little more complicated.

One thing to keep in mind is that there are two ways to think about damage efficiency in Yomi: damage per card and damage per combo point. This makes it a lot more complicated to come up with general heuristics for how good a combo is across the whole cast (which is part of what makes Yomi a deep and interesting game!)

The best example comes from one of my favorite characters. :argagarg: has a King which costs 1 combo point. The base damage of the King is 6, but you can choose to pump it with a second King for another 4 damage. Let’s say I win combat with a throw (which consumes 2/3 combo points) and I have one combo point left to use. This creates a dilemma: is it better to cash in as much damage per combo point and pump the second King, or should I hold onto the second King because in the long run, I will get more damage per card? The former is a little less card efficient but gets me more immediate damage in, whereas the later is risker but theoretically a better payoff.

It’s also complicated by the fact that cards can be cashed in for damage in different ways. For example, as :argagarg: I could play a combo such as 4->K->4. This gets me 14 damage, which is pretty good! However, if I hold onto my 4’s until I draw a third, and then power them up for 2 aces, I now can do K->AA, which is 22! So again, the former gets me immediate, guaranteed damage, but the latter is better in the long run. So even if I decided that 4 damage per card is pretty good, that doesn’t mean I should actually play the combo.

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You’re not likely to find this kind of statement because it’s a purely theoretical discussion with little grounding in the realities of any particular member of the Yomi cast. An “average attack” in Yomi is going to be extremely hard to define if you look at the entire cast, and even if you do, it’s going to be meaningless in actual play, where your character’s attack speeds and characteristics compared to your opponents’ are going to define the pace and arc of the match.

Similarly, each of the character’s Jacks are going to do something very specific for their gameplan, so I don’t know that there’s significant value in defining an “avergage” Jack, if it’s even possible to do so. Having the idea that “Jacks are damage efficient attacks that allow you to beat your opponent’s normals” will make you misuse Gwen’s J, Rook’s J, Jaina’s J, etc.

Important speeds are also match-up dependent, but there are some broad rules that are true across the cast. @thehug0naut does a good job of summarizing the key ones: (1) 2.2 is typically good enough to beat all normal attacks, and (2) 1.0 is a recurring “important speed” across much of the cast and in tournament play due to Zane’s importance in the meta.

Using Gwen to illustrate, those broad rules are going to get you in trouble if you apply them in specific match-ups. Against Gwen, it’s valuable to have attacks that are faster than 1.2, as they will beat her K (an important combo starter/combat reveal). The next most important speed to beat when fighting her is actually 3.6, which is the speed of her J starter. Why 3.6 when she has 2.0 and 3.0 speed normal attacks? Because if you get hit with a 2 or 3, you can joker it, whereas her J starter prevents you from being able to facedown a Joker to prevent the follow-up damage.

Each match-up has its own rhythm and rules, and will force a different valuation of your character’s cards. I would encourage you to avoid thinking in generalities, and instead enjoy learning these match-up specific rules through play or discussion! :slight_smile:

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1.0 is important BECAUSE… it usually means your opponent will not be able to do a really long combo on you no matter what they play, unless they are awesome, like Gloria (or psssh Setsuki and Midori I guess)

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General baseline principles are exceptionally hard to pin down, but for each character, there are definitely some guidelines to follow, but they have mostly all matchup specific uses.

The easiest one of your questions to answer, is going to be the “damage per card” question, because that is somewhat calculated in a vaccuum. You generally save up cards that are going to deal a lot of damage in combos, for instance the Valerie J++ is mostly a combo ender. You could say the same about Vendettas J+++. And I think there are a bunch of combos written up somewhere that lists the max damage combos, and while some of them are unlikely, some characters consistently score either the max damage ones, or pretty close to it. But again, it is character dependent. Gwen is going to have a lower damage per card output than Onimaru. Midori is going to have a higher damage per card output than Valerie ect.