The Ten Dragon Ball Z CCG Cards I Never Want To See Again

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

142

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

CA27 Alt. Earth Dragon Ball 3

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

GB6 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

CA2 Supreme West Kai Level 2

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

CC1 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

P5

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

SZ5

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

24 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

SZ9 Dragon Ball Z 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

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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

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