Climaxes are one of the most unique features of Weiß Schwarz and through learning about how to properly use them a player will be able to master the game.
Decks in Weiß Schwarz are made up of 50 cards, with a maximum of eight climaxes, which people tend to max out on. Climaxes have three main uses, boosting, CX combos and blocking. These uses are essential to the game and how people play it if they want to see success. These are also the reason for Climax’s secret fourth purpose which will be disclosed later on in the article.
Boosting
Climaxes come with eight different effects with possibilities of nine different triggers
- Give all your characters +1000 +1 soul can have triggers of “Pants,” “Book,” “Gate,” “Wind,” “Shot,” “Bag,” “Bar,” and “Double Soul.” This is almost every type of trigger making it very useful due to how much variety it has. It is generally useful to inflict extra points of damage and get just enough points to down an opponent’s characters.
- Put one character of the same colour from Waiting room into your stock, and then give all characters +1 soul can have the Double Soul trigger. This Climax gives more soul and stock, and is good to use when preparing for future levels and effects while pushing. It can also provide some compression.
- Give All characters +2 Soul can have the Double Soul trigger. This climax is good for doing massive amounts of damage that will probably get blocked (Run eight for shenanigans). One of the best ways to push your opponent if you have counted climaxes properly, or are stupid lucky.
- Draw one Card and give a character +2000 +1 soul can have the Double Soul Trigger. Pretty useless only really ran for some spicy CX combos.
- Draw A card give a character +3 soul, can have the double soul trigger. Can be good if you can get out all the climaxes.
- Draw a card give all characters +1000 can have the double soul trigger. It can help your characters get over some problematic characters if your opponent doesn’t have a counter.
- Give two characters +3000 +1 soul can have the Double Soul trigger. It is very good for getting downs on at least two characters while providing a good amount of pushing power.
- Standby allows you to place a character up to one level higher than you from your waiting room onto your stage rested. Standby is great to set up for the next turn.
Generally these boosts can be game changing or a complete waste, so it is important to plan climax use ahead of time.
CX Combos
CX combos are some of the strongest things in the game. A CX combo occurs when you have a specific character played with a specific climax and then meet the conditions to activate the effect. Conditions to activate CX combos are usually on activation of the Climax, on down of an opponent’s character, or just on declaration of an attack. Their effects can vary from resource gathering (drawing, searching, salvaging or stocking) to kill combos like Birdcage and Sunder. Typically a player will want to have two CX combos and max out on all the cards you need for your CX combo to go off.
Blocking
Blocking is one of the most important parts of climaxes. If not for climaxes being blocks you would die immediately. It is because of climaxes providing a block that compression is such an important thing to do. If a player can block at vital moments it can be the difference between a win and a loss which is why triggering climaxes is very dangerous if you don’t pay them out immediately as they may not return to the deck increasing the odds of damage getting though.
The Secret Fourth Purpose
The problem with climaxes is that you can only play one per turn. This makes it difficult to get say, three climaxes out of the hand. This reveals the true final purpose of climaxes, being total bricks, that cannot be used for anything, if. Need two damage to kill but only have one character? Guaranteed (not really but it happens) to clock into two climaxes guaranteeing your defeat. It is important to understand that while climaxes are an important tool, they are just as likely to end up being total bricks, especially when you somehow manage to open five and mulligan into three with no playables.
Through proper use of climaxes and blocking like a “good player” (read: lucky piece of ****) will you be able to come out victorious on the Weiß Schwarz stage.
Clock For Game 