You VS. Your Deck: What flavour is your character's favourite?

When you look at a character you may wonder which symbol you should try building them on, and some people will just give up and build them on the symbol they are most familiar with. This isn't generally a bad practice, especially when you don't know a majority of the cards in the format, but it is a good habit to learn to break.

Most characters will try to fit all of their symbols together in a nice package the flows in and out of each other well, such as Talim here, who has an ability that combines Good's staging area building with Air's card pool clearing, but since it clears specifically your face downs it works well with Water as well, as the symbol is very adept at playing with the multiple keyword. You can choose to build her on Good to use cards that want you to have face down cards in your staging area, on Air to gain access to cards that are happy when things leave your card pool, or on Water where you're just happy to be slinging big multiples at people.

So maybe instead of just looking at what cards you're familiar with, or a fancy combo that exists on a symbol independently of the character, look for deeper synergies within the keywords and abilities that are on each symbol. You can maybe even find some unexpected synergy on other symbols, too. Since each character and their support has 3 symbols, this means that a lot of abilities will end up on symbols that wouldn't normally have it. This card combines Water and Death in one ability, but it still has Order, this makes it an especially valuable card to Order characters that can build momentum reliably, as it gives them strong ability synergy that they are missing out on. This can go even further if you happen to find another character that has a similar strategy as the character you are wanting to build, and they share at least 2 symbols. Kuwabara shares Good & Water with Talim2, and he can provide great ways to pull back the foundations that you build with Talim's commit ability. This gives you the synergy that you would have gotten from the Good symbol, but brings it on Water as well. You can run Kuwabara cards in a Water Talim2 and have a much more flexible deck than if you had just focused on the staging area ability with the Good symbol.

Finding characters that work together, especially if they work together in their own lore, can be very satisfying and will aid a lot in deckbuilding. The King of Fighters series has always been a team-based game, with players from a team of 3 characters, and the characters almost always have their own lore-based teams. This translated well to the King of Fighters 13 sets for ufs, where each set was comprised of a few teams of characters, and each team would share a common gimmick and two symbols, and they would even would even get a team asset to help make their gimmick easier to accomplish! It is of course much more difficult these days to find characters whose abilities click well together, but it can still be done. Some characters may have been designed so that their gimmick was difficult to consistently do, maybe a bit limited in its uses, or they had very little defense on purpose, so their support balances this by allowing you to use their ability more consistently, or maybe their support is filled with ways of getting around their own character's cost or limitation, or they simply reward you with a very strong effect for your trouble. Each of these are examples of cards that reward the player for using their intended character's gimmick, but you can just as easily slot them in to characters that share similar gimmicks. Each of these cards can be very viably used in characters released years after they were designed, sometimes even simply because symbols sometimes play in pairs. You can find multiple characters with Life and Order that like to play with an attack's zone, so you get some interesting tech right as face value from the symbols.

You may need to look deeper than the face value of a symbol to find true synergy with a character, and sometimes you might just give up very quickly when looking at a character. You are going to want to look a bit deeper than just what your character says on them when deciding on a symbol, and think about how the character wants to be play, maybe even throw together a quick simple deck just to see how the character plays. Kurama is a character that I tried very hard to build when he was released. To me, he seems to be a character that really wants to be on Water, as it loves the reversal keyword so much, but on further inspection and many losses, it became very apparent to me that Kurama wants a fair bit of speed reduction, especially with needing to protect his tiny health pool, which Water just did not provide at now. Your character may get a bonus from playing with the Order symbol and committing lots of your opponent's foundations, but you should also consider that you are going to need to deliver these attacks, and get even before that you will need the attacks to be delivered to your hand! In C. Viper's case, the Order symbol is appealing for its ability to commit everything ever, but the Fire symbol can bring you lots of speed pump to help deliver your attacks, and you could also consider that since C. Viper can discard an extra card every turn with her response, she will jive pretty well with Fire's cards that enjoy having specific things in your discard pile!

Just because your character, like C. Viper above, can commit your opponent's staging area doesn't mean your character needs to be on Order. Perhaps you could use the “Orderness” of your character to amplify a symbol's weakness. The Good symbol isn't one known to have lots of stun or committal, so you could bring Order's strong committal to the Good symbol here and have a Good deck that is a bit more aggressive than the norm.

Consider thinking a bit deeper about your character when you are deciding your symbol, and maybe think about what your character really wants to do and go from there.