User:Maihen/Recommended Cards

'This guide is a Work in Progress, and will be moved to an externally-linked blog at some point in the future. This page will then be replaced with a table that references different card skills of the same type and compares them to each other. Feel free to read while the article is drafted here, though :)'

Puyo Puyo Quest has an obnoxiously large amount of cards, which can make it difficult for you to decide which ones you should be focusing on or rolling for. Of course, pulling for your favorites is nothing short of enjoyable - but this guide aims to assist in making decisions for dealing the most damage in different scenarios.

Section 1: What skills matter?

This question depends on what quest you're attempting. For the sake of this article of sorts, the skills that "matter" are ones that maximize your damage, keep you alive, and keep or get your skills up. Of course, this will always vary on a quest-by-quest basis, but if you're here as a beginner, you're probably looking for cards like this anyway (and if you're a veteran, then you're probably tired of me telling you this).
Both a card's Leader skill (LS) and Active skill (AS) can matter, along side whether or not it has Extra Support/Killer skills (ES/EK), Full Power (FP), Cross Ability (CA), or Dual Shift (DS). Because there's so many combinations of different Leader skill and Active skill features, it's simpler to sort these cards into "concepts" or "components" instead. The way I sort cards is as follows:

• Offense - Offense cards are cards that help increase your damage output. This includes attack up, conditional attack up, ASE, Amplification, Same-time coefficient boosts, Special rules, and so on. In a 5/6 card deck, it's typical for all or most cards to assist in the increase of damage. In a slide deck, this is typically every card except your attacker and slide card (8 cards).
• Defense - Cards in which assist in your deck survivability. This includes mirror cards, color shield cards, ailment clear cards, and similar cards. It can also include Toughness LS cards or Damage Reduction LS/CA Cards - there's plenty others, as well. Usually, you will be able to have these effects in combination with the other already existing skills on your team, like Attack Up/Attack Down duo cards. In a 5/6 card deck, you'll usually only need one of these, but having more can sometimes be helpful if an attacker or damage up skill already provides this. In a slide deck, the number of Defense cards purely depends on who you're fighting.
• Ailment - Cards in which inflict status effects on the enemy. Ailments are unique in the sense that each ailment does something different, but they usually function as both a Damage up and Defense effect simultaneously. It's best to be able to inflict ailments with already-existing skills on your team, but in some rare cases, ailment-infliction only cards can serve useful as well. In both 5/6 card and Slide decks, the number of these you have usually just depends on what cards you're using, though these typically always end up useful in slide decks.
• Juggernauts/Cannon Cards - A card which aims to amplify it's own attacking power to deal big damage - the card(s) doing the majority of the damage on your deck. Usually expressed as Self-Consecution, Self-ASE, Self-Boosting Field Effects, and so forth. In a basic, 5/6-card deck, it's typical for all or most cards to be doing damage in unison, though juggernauts can still be used. In a slide deck, this is nearly always only 1 card.
• Slide - Cards in which "slide" your deck position left or right. Typically used for a special type of deck in which you manipulate deck position to heavily amplify the damage output of one "Juggernaut" card. Sometimes referred to as Spin cards. In a 5/6 card deck, these are usually completely useless, but they can be fun on these types of decks nonetheless if you know what you're doing.
• Skill Charge - Cards that help to accelerate the speed in which your skills charge. This can be done through LSes such as Secondary Skill Source or Conditional Skill Down, or through ASes like Fisherboy-esque skills, Trace up, a combination of the two, or those that activate Skill Acceleration.

In general, there are some skills that can adjust their "class" based on the actual effects of a quest itself. Attack up might seem like it'd always be offensive, for example, but during Attack/Recovery Inversion quests, it becomes more defensive (even if unintentionally so!)

Section 2: Skill Category Breakdown

Some of the skills in the previously listed categories have unique or special traits that are worth mentioning seperately.

Attack Up Vs. Adjacent/Self attack up

In general, Attack up is usually divided into 2 groups - "Full" attack up (which affects your entire team) or "Adjacent" attack up (which affects the activating card and those to the side of it). Full attack up is used more often on decks without a juggernaut card, though of course it can still be used regardless. Adjacent attack up, however, is used more on decks with a juggernaut card or a card which is dealing more damage than others, but isn't necessarily a juggernaut (see: conditional 2x attack-of-self boost after popping a heartbox in Miracle Charmy Draco LS).

ASE Vs. AMP

Attack source expansion (ASE) and Amplification (AMP), alongside ASE's stronger multiplied variant (referred here as ASE+) are skills that affect the sources of normal attacks (attacks that involve a regular trace). ASE allows cards to attack using any colored puyo, whereas amplification multiplies the attacking power of a specific colored puyo. Typically, amplification reigns supreme - but this doesn't mean ASE is bad! For example, cards such as the Outlander Fairy Tale Series or Shiroyasha Gintoki Sakata have something I refer to as ASE+ - a skill that both expands what sources you attack from and multiplies them. Shiroyasha Gintoki Sakata is an example of a Self-ASE juggernaut - his amplification multiplier extends up to 10.5x normal attacking values!