Interference

One of the ways you can increase the power of your equipped weapons is to utilize the game's interference system. Although "interference" sounds like a negative thing, it's actually quite powerful, and will often let you double or triple the power of a given card. Interference is most useful when dealing with weapon cards; there are ways to boost the power of defensive cards, but you're unlikely to need to worry about doing so.

The interference process is based on the arrows that you'll see on most equippable cards. There are three arrows:

• Red: A red arrow indicates that the card being pointed to will get +10 ATK and -10 DEF.
• Blue: Blue arrows indicate that the card being pointed to will get -10 ATK and +10 DEF.
• Green: Green arrows indicate that the card being pointed to gets -5 ATK, -5 DEF, and +10% REA.

So, in other words, you want red arrows pointing towards your weapon cards, and you don't want blue or green arrows pointing at them, or at least not at the weapons that you actually intend to use. We actually found blue and green arrows to be pretty much irrelevant; most items and support cards that you're going to want to equip will usually have high REA and DEF stats already, making the +10 bonuses relatively minor; most weapon cards are going to have somewhere between 10 and 30 ATK, though, meaning that, with a proper setup, you can relatively easily add at least 20 ATK to the weapon that you think you're going to be using the most.

In order to do so, though, you'll need to have at least one Equipment LV. 2 in your deck. Equipment LV. 2 will expand the 2x1 equipment setup you have at the beginning of a level into a 2x2 square, letting you equip twice as many cards. With it, you'll be able to set up a card in the lower-left slot of your 2x2 square, and put cards with red arrows pointing at it in the slots above and to its right, making it relatively easy to bust out with +20 ATK. The easiest example of this with cards from MGS2 is to have an M4 in the upper-left square (which has a red arrow pointing down), and an AKS74u (Laser S.) in the lower-right square (which has a red arrow pointing left). If you then equip a weapon (preferably an M4 (Laser S.) or an M4) in the lower-left square, then it'll have two red arrows pointing at it, resulting in +20 ATK, meaning that each individual shot from it will deal 20 more damage. E.g. if you had an M4 in the lower-left slot, it would deal 10 damage (its base number) +20 damage (from the interference effects) with each shot, meaning that you've effectively increased its damage by 200% with just two cards.

To give a somewhat more detailed example of a late-game suite of interference, here's a setup from after you've gained the Equipment LV. 3 card (which nets you a 3x3 equipment slot setup). The image here illustrates how we attempted to set up our equipment after obtaining the R-5 from Chronicles packs.

A late-game equipment setup.

It's not too difficult to set up something like this, given enough time. Luckily, most missions will place Teliko and Snake in an area a good distance away from enemies, allowing you to cycle through your entire deck, discarding cards that you don't need, until you find the Equipment LV. 2 and 3 cards and the equipment you want to throw into the slots. This will boost your overall Cost for the mission, thus making it more difficult to get an S-ranking, but you can make up the points with optional missions later on, and having your equipment set up ahead of time will make it a lot easier for you to take down anything in your path.

Anyway, as we said, we mostly set up our equipment so that the red arrows would point towards our most powerful weapons. In this setup, the key card is going to be the R-5, which has a base attack of 30, but which is boosted by the red arrows from the M4 and the AKS74u (Laser S.).

(Note that you can switch out the AK's here for a Solid Snake (MGS2), if you wish. You won't actually be using any of the AK's for firing; they're in there solely for the purpose of including a red arrow pointing to the left. Solid Snake cards are a cheaper way to find a left red arrow, but will have to be replaced after every 90 cost, whereas the AK's are permanent. The main drawback to the AK's, though, isn't their cost; it's that they'll often be used as a Reaction, which won't hurt your enemies and in fact may result in more damage coming towards your character, since they can start a counter-war. Solid Snake cards can't react, so that's not a danger with them. Note that you can only have one Solid Snake (MGS2) card equipped at a time, though.)

So anyway, the R-5 card is going to be what you want to use to kill most enemies, since it'll do 50 damage a shot and can be loaded with either an M4, M4 (Laser S.) or R-5 card. The M4 and the M4 (Laser S.) that are equipped can both be fired as well in case you happen to need to do so; they each do 20 damage a shot. Having the M4 (Laser S.) in the bottom-middle slot is purely optional, as you're unlikely to ever really need the extra accuracy, and the laser sighting usually makes firing more problematic than it should be, so feel free to eliminate it for extra optional equipment and items. We would've likely done so, but we never had too many problems sneaking up behind enemies and shooting them in the back, meaning that they rarely had a chance to return fire, meaning that the single suit of armor and single Front Evade up in the corner were enough to get us through any rough spots. The Miscellaneous slot in the lower-left corner can be used for anything you need to use for a specific mission, such as a Card LV. 2, a Uniform, or a Mine Detector.

Anyway, this is just a sample equipment setup that we found useful; feel free to tweak your own setup to suit your own favorite weapons.