The Meliodas update reshuffled which lineups are worth building in Anime Vanguards, and the practical answer now splits three ways depending on whether you care about cost, raw damage, or leaving a stage running unattended. Three compositions cover almost everything a player does day to day.
Quick answer: Run the Dragon Ball team for general play, the Escanor and Meliodas duo for autoplay, and the Berserk team when a mode is long enough to justify its setup time.
The three best teams compared
| Team | Best for | Main limitation |
|---|---|---|
| Escanor + Meliodas duo | Autoplay and low-effort clears | Heavy stun stages |
| Dragon Ball team | General play, cheap upgrades | Needs four units built |
| Berserk team | Maximum DPS in long modes | Slow setup, poor under 20 waves |
Each of these solves a different problem. Only one of them is a genuine “place it and walk away” option, and it is also the cheapest to assemble in terms of unit count.
Escanor and Meliodas duo: the easiest autoplay team
The most convenient setup in the game right now needs only two units: Iscanor (Pride) and Wrath (Assault), both on the Monarch trait. That pairing alone pushes past 100M DPS, which is enough for the overwhelming majority of stages without any supporting cast.
The synergy is what makes it work. Placing Escanor makes Meliodas free to deploy, so the second unit costs you nothing at all. From there, every upgrade you put into Escanor automatically upgrades Meliodas alongside him, which removes almost all of the manual input a normal team demands.
Because upgrades are shared, the duo holds up on autoplay across roughly 95% of stages. It clears Floor 43 of Golden Castle in the Worldline mode without intervention, which is a reasonable benchmark for how far it stretches.
The duo falls apart on stages built around stun mechanics. The Diavolo Occult Hunt is the clearest example, and you should bring a different lineup for it.
Dragon Ball team: the best all-round lineup
If you only want to build one team and never think about it again, this is the one. The core is Super Vogito, Boo (Evil), Holy Deceiver (Dark) and Rogita (Super 4). It delivers high DPS, keeps upgrade costs low in yen, and still functions on autoplay.
The low yen requirement is the reason it beats the alternatives in shorter modes. Teams that need enormous sums to reach their damage ceiling stall out before they get there, while this one is already at full output early. That makes it the safer pick for Occult Hunt, where boss waves arrive on a fixed schedule regardless of how much economy you have banked.
Berserk team: the highest DPS ceiling
Built around Griffith, The Falcon (of Light), the Berserk composition posts the largest numbers in the game, reaching up to 571M DPS. Nothing else comes close at full ramp.
The catch is how long it takes to get there. The setup process is lengthy, so the team is impractical in anything under 20 waves. In short modes the stage ends before the damage curve matters, and you would have been better served by either of the other two lineups. Save it for extended content where the ramp has room to pay off.
Which team to pick by situation
- Farming stages while doing something else: Escanor and Meliodas.
- Occult Hunt and other short, yen-tight modes: Dragon Ball.
- Modes running well past 20 waves: Berserk.
- Stages with heavy stun mechanics, such as the Diavolo Occult Hunt: anything other than the duo.
- Only building one team: Dragon Ball, for its versatility and cost.
You can tell the Escanor and Meliodas link is active the moment the second card reads as free on the deployment bar. If it still shows a yen cost, Escanor is not on the field yet.
For most accounts the sensible order is to get the duo online first, since it costs the fewest units and immediately unlocks hands-off farming, then build out the Dragon Ball core as your general-purpose answer. The Berserk team is a specialist tool, and it only earns its place once you are regularly running content long enough to let it ramp.
