What an exciting time to be into the game right now! With the Panini America Dragon Ball Z game fast around the corner, we’ve already started to see many of the card images for the game. It already appears that a significant amount of the cards are either direct remakes of Score Entertainment cards or are slight alterations to accommodate the new direction of the game. I’m pretty okay with that and what I’ve seen so far, but take it from me there are so many ways to ruin any game with just a handful of cards. Here are ten Score Entertainment cards that I hope I never see printed again.
10. Majin Buu Saga Orange Style Mastery
I’ve never been a fan of this mastery because it’s a turn one card that can bring out some pretty destructive cards, depending on the archetype it’s facing against. Now granted this mastery came out after thousands of Dragon Ball Z cards were already available and several options were out there for this deck, but I definitely don’t want to ever see a card that stays in play for a two card tutor every turn. You could shut down physical attacks, energy attacks, Dragon Ball decks, Ally decks, all the while setting up your own win condition and having the means to keep your current drills in play. It’s just too many easily reachable answers for one deck, and I would hate to see such a low effort Swiss army knife of a deck rear it’s head again. I would rather build decks with the goal of winning, rather than the goal of keeping my opponent from winning.
9. Earth Dragon Balls
Okay, technically this is about eight cards. Not all of them are detrimental to the game, but you have three that will end or skip combat and another three that will allow you to draw more cards outside of the combat step. This is what aided Dragon Ball decks to being the near dominant deck type throughout Dragon Ball Z’s original CCG run. A 50-card deck that devoted itself to not being in combat made games real fast and real boring. Periodically beat down decks would be able to get a leg-up on Dragon Ball decks, though they were usually dependent on shutting down some aspect of the deck, whether it was their personality power, combat cards or non-combat cards. The introduction of HUH??? did serve to slow Dragon Ball decks a little bit, but more often than not it just changed the way they were run. The deck was just too easy (and usually cheap) to build and play and cut out many of the aspects of why we loved Dragon Ball Z from the game play. It was just a boring mess. When beginning Retro events, we seriously considered just outright banning the entire Saiyan Saga to avoid that quagmire.
8. Black Body Destruction
This card is just bad math. It’s basically a two fer, on either attack or defense from one card. It’s a really good card, and when up against the likes of Saiyan and Namekian decks it’s a perfectly reasonable card. The problem became just the huge disparity between hand sizes that just got out of control towards the middle to the end of the original game. You started to have certain styles just simply being unable to compete with the amount of hand advantage gained by other styles (either by draw advantage or card denial). This is certainly not the only card responsible for that situation, but one of the best examples of the terrible path the game and the Black Style would take that culminated in the Dragon Ball GT CCG.
7. Supreme West Kai
The first and only cards banned independently by Retro DBZ. The horse has been beaten to death, so I’ll just say that anything with special rules are a bad idea. Anything with special rules that completely change the way the game is played are a terrible idea.
6. Namekian Strike
Namekian Strike is a REALLY good card. Is it broken? Eh… Could the power have been a little more balanced by limiting the card like Blue Terror or making the secondary effect an “if successful” effect? I would agree to that. It is a combo piece that combined with Energy Lob, you can more or less get any card in your deck into your hand after making two attacks and constantly replacing the card that was used. Definitely a card with some balancing issues, but what really caused it to earn its spot on this list was the botched release of the promo through mispackaged Androids Saga packs and then it being declared legal to use despite not having any official way to get it. Obviously prices skyrocketed, and the already fairly dominant Namekian decks got in an incredibly deadly new tool… at least if you could pay the price or had the right connections. It was also not lost on many when players of lesser means but known associates of Score employees started showing up to events with full playsets in what was one of Score Entertainment’s worst kept secrets. The negative perception from that fiasco and this card in particular persist to this day and still haunts the game license.
5. Jewel
Who the hell is this? Seriously! I love it when some of the lesser known characters get personality cards, Garlic Jr. is a straight up filler character and I can even stomach Icarus since he did actually have slight roles in the movies and more lines than Tapkar (another personality along with many of his Celestial Fighter ilk who can fall in the same category as Jewel). But these one episode gag/background characters definitely did not need a personality card. I would’ve loved to have seen the World Tournament Announcer over this guy. What’s worse is that he actually has a decent power where he will actually die first before your other allies do, basically something that Krillin is known for throughout the series. Why was this not a Krillin personality? No more of these background/filler guys without some context.
4. Victorious Drill
I’ve written at length why I think this card is detrimental to the game. More important than that, in the Panini America remake I don’t want to see any cards that start the game in play outside of a Main Personality and a Mastery (and perhaps a Sensei Deck). Once you start inventing effects and cards that begin the game in play, you’ll always have to design the rest of the game and every card made after around that one. It’s just a can of worms that doesn’t need to be open. Victorious Drill is innocuous enough that most don’t think it”s an issue, however I do feel that it removed “slime anger” decks and strategies from the game. Any card that starts the game in play will effect the metagame environment, and it’s something I would not like to see again.
3. Pure Defense
An anti-card to an anti-card. For starters, I don’t think there should be counters to counters, that’s already one strike against this card. But what’s worse is that this lone card, that is “Limit One Per Deck” has single-handedly added another step to every attack made in this game. The “Attacker Attacks” phase is held up by one card. Now every time you play an attack, a new phase is basically created where you have to wait until your opponent passes their opportunity to play Pure Defense. Every attack, whether they even have or play Pure Defense you must pause for that opportunity lest you have to “undo” a secondary effect from that rare card. Pure Defense is a staple enough in many decks that the game has effectively been slowed down all because of this card, and it’s limited to one per deck! Crazy!
2. Ultimate Champion
I’m all for unique cards for winners and top cut cards. I think that’s a neat idea but there’s a limit, and that limit becomes when you need that card to remain competitive (like GT’s Farewell Drill) or when that card is absolutely devastating, like Ultimate Champion. It’s just a card that went too far. We’re fortunate that “only one” was ever awarded and allowed for tournament use, but it was still a nightmare card that could end your event real quick and you just really couldn’t do much to protect yourself from it short of a well-timed Trunks Energy Sphere or a small handful of other cards. It was a bogeyman that didn’t need to exist.
1. Gohan’s Kick
This card is not on the list because of what it does. This card is on the list because it needed to exist in the first place. This is a property about fighting but the game very quickly took the opposite approach. There were just too many cards that either stopped all attacks or ended combat, enough that this card became a staple you had to lead into combat with just to try to get a piece of the opponent. And if things weren’t bad enough with the combat enders and stop all defense cards, you also had stuff like Dazed and Hercule’s Dream Sequence made to get around Gohan’s Kick. What the hell is up with that? I want combat! I want blood! Somebody hit somebody!
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Later, BroZ
Thank you! Finally somebody said exactly what I’ve been thinking all these years. A lot of the cards on this list are what made the game unfun to play at a competitive level. Earth Dragonballs made Roshi speedball too strong. Victorious Drill allowed Gohan to get 21 allies out in the field on turn one. Orange Buu Mastery along with Orange Vegeta’s Attack created a deck that could easily shut down whatever it wanted to shut down, and then kill you in one move. SWK is SWK. If none of these cards had seen print the game would have been a lot more balanced. Hopefully Panini does some heavy playtesting and actually determines teirs ahead of releasing the game. If any decktype wins vs the majority of opponent’s more than 65% of the time then that should be a sign that a nerf is in order.
I definitely agree with this whole list. Cards like Gohan’s Kick and Pure Defense alwasy seemed somewhat innocuous, but once you step back, you do see that they were warping. A big reason why some of these cards had to be created is because the tutors were just too powerful. Just look at all the support and tutors Dragonballs got in Saiyan Saga. I think Energy Lob would have been a powerful, but fine design in a world without Victorious Drill/You’re Invited/Farewell Drill. Saiyan Supreme Mastery would have been a lot more fine without Gohan/Cell level 2. Conditional tutors can be fine as long as it isn’t essentially free to meet the condition. And cards in general can be powerful as long as the tutors are reasonable. I think Energy Lob(without the aforementioned cards) is a good example I think of where we want tutors that do exist to be, Vegeta’s Plans/Goku’s Lucky Break/et al are not.
Caught Off-Guard Drill is one that I hope doesn’t make a return, to the point that I won’t even bother getting into the Panini game if it gets reprinted. It’s annoying and only serves to protect decks that build a wall of Drills or Allies.
Trunks level 4 from the Cell sage was pretty annoying. I don’t think that there should be cards that make it so that you can’t play certain attacks or card types.
Personally I’m not a fan of event-only exclusive promos at all. While it does take a mountain of talent to get to the top-32 of Worlds, giving out event-only exclusives to those individuals is not healthy for any game. Maybe if the exclusivity is limited to alternate artwork, foiling, etc of an existing card then that’s acceptable, but to not have the card available to the masses immediately turns the game into “pay to win” (more than just the collectible aspect) if the cards in question provide a significant advantage over players who don’t have it.
Completely agree. Event-only promos need to be kept in check big time. Just follow Magic’s example of promos and everything will be fine. Promos like the Power Pack I’m down with, but none of this $100+ exclusive promo crap please.
I agree with everything but Jewel!
I liked the random 1 off personalities of obscure characters. I dont really see what the problem is with them, sure there are more important characters but its just a bit of fun!
Also because of ally rules you need a variety of different characters so you can play more than 3 or 4 allies.
I hate to be a sheep, but I agree on all points. I want to say that world’s 2003 was probably my favorite event I ever attended, mainly due to the split structure featuring half Tuff Enuff. And that pretty much encompasses everything you wrote about, no cheese allowed, no anger to deal with or dragon ball decks to stop combat endlessly, just a battle to see who could beat down the hardest and the best, even featuring overkill. This fits a lot more with the theme of the show. I am fine having all 3 win conditions in play, but like the Gohan’s Kick description entailed, all of the combat ending really just changes the tone completely, shifting things from a fun battle game to playing a bunch of non-combats, dragon balls, and finding ways to stay out of combat. The other thing that could have been done is to just make more anti-dragon ball cards available, why was Huh??? really the only solid removal card for dragon balls, and only after numerous sets, and only limit 1, and only available as a sensei deck card? To me that should be the type of tech card available in set 1 with slightly more ease of use as dragon ball was a win condition after all. Kami Fades seems cool, when you only have that one set of dragon balls, but once you start having multiple sets available, it makes the card so situational and useless against most things it was not playable after the first few sets. Then again, if all the combat ending was more in check, there should really be more capturing going on rather than just trying with all your might to draw a tech card to remove a ball.
I will say that I never really thought about how ridiculous MBS Orange Style Mastery really was. I love all the tutoring in this game, it makes it interesting to set up combos and react to different situations, but having a constant tutor every turn that is always out … yeah I agree that is a bit much.
On a different note, I am hoping that dragon balls can be more of a part of “regular” decks with the new game. I like that the new Namekian Mastery tries to tie in directly with the dragon balls without doing anything with the combat phase. We need more “beatdown” or other benefits of having them around.
Lastly, I am surprised to see that Tapkar and Cosmic Backlash did not make the list. I guess Tapkar got fixed pretty quick, so maybe that is kind of mute. Cosmic Backlash on the other hand was a pretty big deal. I never really had a problem with it personally, but many voiced negative attitude towards the RNG nature of it. My response to that was always, well hey if you can’t block a standard physical attack after drawing your 3, keeping whatever was in your hand, plus drawing 5 from the effect, do you really deserve to live in a game like this? Decks that specialized around the card, making it focused somehow, or making it so you could not play a certain type of card with their “if successful” effects (see Krillin’s Solar Flare), this made things interesting in the meta to me. Again, most complaints with the card was for the “random Backlash” factor, if you can’t stop a basic physical in 5+ cards, you should be losing in my opinion.
Fun stuff, thanks for the article.
I never had a problem with dragon balls. I always ran 3 copies of Earth Dragon Ball Combat. Nothing like the look on your opponent’s when you capture a dragon ball with a physical combat card that doesn’t perform an attack. It just takes your dragon ball.
I am never a fan of power cards that are extremely hard to obtain for the average player, warping the game, since to be competive, you either need them, or you will lose (barring dumb luck). This includes Ultra Rares, Promos, and other silly event giveaways.
Jace the Mind Sculptor was an example in recent Magic memory. And he still commands a high price. K
Hilarious how most of these are under that umbrella, barring Gohans Kick and the mastery haha
All i’m going to say is if they put out level 6’s for anyone i’ll be angry.