A Beginner's Guide: Ener Management

P.S: I don't plan on teaching how to play the game from scratch. For that, you can check either this or this article.

Ener Charging is a term nonexistant in any other card game I've ever seen. Ener is something like Gauge in Buddyfight. Each turn, you choose a turn from your hand and can "Charge" it into the ener, which you will later use on skills, ARTS, and most importantly, Growing. The major difference with Ener and Gauge is the fact that the damage you take and the destroyed monsters into Ener.

Going straight into the main point of the blog; Ener management. Ener management is literally what it sounds like: managing you and your opponent's ener. Why would you control your ener you ask? Because ener is what you need to do most of anything in the entire game. You need ener to grow, you need ener to use defensive ARTS, and you need Ener to use majority of spells available. So limiting your opponent's ener is limiting your opponent's options on what they can do. If you could completely deprive your opponent of their ener every single turn consistently and reliably, you'd probably own the entire game. Thank god that this isn't a thing though.

Set your opponent on
fire, grab popcorn, and done

Anyways, so you're asking how to limit your opponent's ener? Well, Yuzuki and Midoriko have Surrounded by Fire and Retribution as finisher methods to completely deprive your opponent of their ener, but most decks can't do that. Offensive decks that give your opponent huge amounts of ener run Fracturing lust as a method of depriving your opponent of ener.  That being said, F.lust isn't exactly the most maxable card in the game, and isn't reliable to the point of reliable for ener control. Generally, what you like doing in ener control is more simpler: don't attack SIGNIs. Remember kids: SIGNIs go to the ener zone when you destroy them. If you attack every SIGNI ever whenever you can, your opponent will end up with 9 ener by the time they reach Level 4, which would suck hard for you since you need to deal with all that ener that your opponent can use against you easilly. This is the reason why banishing is the worst way to get cards off the field among Banishing, Trashing, Returning to hand, and one of the reasons on why Attack Phase Banishing is much better compared to Main Phase Banishing.

Aside from not attacking SIGNIs, at times, not direct attacking is also a choice, namely when your opponent only has 1 ener while being at a Level 3 LRIG because he was either forced to or failed to manage his ener and spammed Cost 1 spells. Assuming his Level 4 LRIG is the typical one that takes 3 ener to grow into, with 1 ener and an ener charge during the ener charge phase, he won't be able to grow and you'll be able to outpace him/her.

Tl;dr: Know when to attack and when to not.

Whooooosh

Now, to managing your own ener; due to all the points mentioned above, you generally want to keep a lot of ener. However, to manage the slight minimum amount, what you could do is to know when to take attacks and when to guard them. Usually, you like taking the attacks coming from your opponent's LRIGs, unless you two have a 2 or more LC count difference, in which case, you should have enough ener regardless. Generally, when you guard too many LRIG attacks, you find yourself having a lack of ener. The typical "step to step" way of how turn 1 goes with a limit of 2 is for both players to take 2 damage and be at 5 LC. You could guard the LRIG attack if you have a reliable source of Ener such as Three Swords, Cyclamen and Kayappa, but those generally eat up hand, especially more if your plan is to guard the LRIG attack, which is bad.

Tl;dr: Generally, during the early game, take the LRIG attack and don't guard and make sure you have at least 2 ener during most turns.