Welcome back, my old friend!

Hello all.  It's been a long time.  Why is that, exactly?  Is it another episode like my LiveJournal, where I just write in a big burst because of some big moment?  (Warning: that journal featured some very low emotional moments as a teenager for me, but w/e, I like being an open book.)  Hopefully not.  See, what I've been doing since my last entry is I've been writing about the My Little Pony TCG.  Yeah, that's a thing, and I was pretty good at it, too.  Here's a link to my other blog about it as well as my work on Ponycard.net.  Unfortunately, I have concluded that I simply cannot afford to continue with a collectible card game.  I'm trying to move forward in my life.  Once I can get my car fixed up, I'm going to be looking for another, better-paying job, and move out into a new place.  While I do that, I also realize I need to invest in the job I actually want to do, which is gaming culture.  I'm hoping I'll be able to put out some more YouTube videos on the subject, as well.  They'll be crap at first, but I'll learn more about video editing in time.  My previous work was all done using Windows Movie Maker, and I've since gotten something better.  It'll just take some time for me to get accustomed to how all of it works.


Of course, I can't neglect my writing.  Now that I'm not doing it for Ponycard anymore, I can focus more on the things I actually want to discuss.  That brings me to the Dragon Ball Z header I've used for this article.  I don't know if I mentioned it before, but one of the games I used to play buttloads of was the Dragon Ball Z CCG by Score Entertainment.  A lot of the friendships I have now were founded because of this game, at least the stronger friendships that mean something.

It all started one day in high school.  I was already well-known as the tabletop gamer.  I would bring whole briefcases of my cards to school with me and carry them on my person every single day (the lockers couldn't be trusted).  During homeroom, some guys showed me the common card Saiyan Neck Hold from set 1, and challenged me to figure out how you play the entire game based off of it.  Obviously, this was an impossible task, and even though I sincerely tried to dissemble something from it, I ultimately couldn't get much.  The unnecessary symbols definitely got in the way.  Eventually, I found a starter deck for it at a Gamestop and picked up 2 (for set 3).  I started to introduce it to my friends, and before you knew it, I had a reasonably large group to play with.  I eventually started attending tournaments for it, though the only place I knew that held them was a pretty good distance away.  I would eventually wind up devastating them, even though I later found my strategies often just couldn't hold up well to the big boys.

The game intrigued me because it used your deck as your health.  As you took damage, you would discard from the deck.  I was already pretty novice at these card games, so this just worked to reinforce the bad idea that having a large deck was good.  It would allow me to take more of a beating while I work on doing my own thing.  Too bad nobody explained the logic behind Akuma to me.  I could've been thick-skulled enough not to listen, too.  It also had 3 ways to win.  Obviously, destroying your opponent's deck worked.  You could also win by getting all 7 Dragon Balls in play or by ascending your character to the highest level.  This variety and relative ease of rules just worked out (a teenage boy's fascination with the source material didn't hurt, either).  I really like games with unique mechanics to them, which explains my fascination behind the MLP CCG.  Conversely, the Adventure Time game Card Wars looks to be too similar to Magic to be worth my time.

My passion led me to Score Entertainment's message boards, which eventually got me a position as a moderator on their message boards.  This was great at first, but you know how "at first" goes.  The internet being what it is + the target audience of the source material meant I would be encountering some serious trolls.  I have the mind of a criminal, albeit without one's heart, so I would envision the great lengths someone might go to be a jerk.  As anyone who has been watching recent political events can tell you, enforcers who constantly look for the worst-case scenario will find it, and it ends up causing more problems than it solves.  As a player, I was quite popular.  As a moderator, that popularity took a huge nosedive.  Unfortunately, this scenario came back to haunt me much later when I was a moderator for Uber Entertainment's Monday Night Combat forums.  Further complicating things, I was given tons of free product for being a moderator, so it really felt like a paying gig to me.  I was given multiple boxes worth of product every month.  When my parents cut me off of any money & gifts and I had no job, I basically relied on this to keep me serious in the game.  Even as I hated the board, I was motivated to stay because of the payment I was receiving.  Things got pretty bad.

Ok, getting back to the game at hand.  As I said, the game had a very good concept going at first.  Unfortunately, there were far too many obviously terrible cards.  Most of the main characters were pretty poor.  Reaching the highest level (the "most powerful personality victory") was ridiculously easy with the mere 3 levels players could access, unless someone was lucky enough to stumble upon one of the promo level 4 cards.  The only character whose level 4 wasn't promo was Saibaimen, which was a pretty lackluster character otherwise.  There were 5 styles you could use, and you would receive a small benefit for sticking to just 1.  That benefit was barely useful (slightly faster power increase), so nobody had a reason to deny themselves the other 4 colors for this minor perk.  Set 3 introduced "mastery" cards that you could only use when you restrict yourself to one style, which was known as a "tokui-waza."  The power was not distributed very well, but the concept would end up being a primary force in shaping the game.  By the 5th set, the game had shaped itself very well and was quite enjoyable for everyone involved.

Of course, it still wasn't without problems.  What game is, especially in the collectible variety?  Cards were getting errata frequently.  The banned/restricted list was constantly changing and large.  I recall Android 18 and Master Roshi getting obscenely powerful for the Dragon Ball victory, to the point where everyone questioned how their abilities managed to get past any playtesting, and they got errata to nerf their power level to the point of essential obsolescence.  The DB and level victories were also consistently much easier to get than survival, so they ended up making a "survival-only" format.  This format also had an "overkill" condition, because it's DBZ so why not?  While overall a Swiss tournament structure, if you did an excessive amount of damage for the final hit, the player got removed from the tournament entirely!!!  Obviously this made for a poor time for whoever was unlucky enough to get hit with that, but because the non-survival conditions were so prevalent otherwise, people put up with it (at least around me).  I have to admit, it was much more fun than the standard format.  There were also new mechanics being introduced in basically every set, and since every set was constantly legal, this made introducing the game to new players increasingly difficult.

Then Dragon Ball GT came around.  Things got quite nuts, but at least it was a mixed bag of nuts.  As is easily predicted, power creep went further, but this was balanced out a bit by the introduction of the GT-focused format.  The power level of any card in any game is determined by their environment.  If everything is super-powerful, then nothing is overpowered.  Also, in trying to continue making interesting cards without necessarily having power creep (not that it stopped them), cards got even wordier, making for significantly less picture space on the cards.  To their credit, they did manage to take out a lot of the standard wordiness for attacks.  Rather than cards describing their type, cost, and damage all in the text box, they adopted a handy little symbol that kept it all easily identifiable in a small package.

One thing that really stuck out to me was the "backer" mechanic for main characters.  Remember how I said I loved unique mechanics?  This definitely fit.  When making your deck, you had to decide what specific cards you would use for the different levels of your main character (personality).  Since the game's inception, starter decks would include "high-tech" cards that were basically just thick, extra-layer foil cards and obviously could only be used for a main character (not possible as an ally in the deck).  For GT, their "high-tech" cards would have some information missing, such as power levels at certain stages, their rating for powering up, and/or their abilities.  You would choose a backer card for all your levels, and this backer would fill in all the missing information.  It would have to either be a named card for the character or else match the style you were using.  It was really quite clever, and opened up a tremendous amount of design space.  You're already customizing the deck, so why not add an element of customization for your character?

http://retrodbzccgcom.fatcow.com/

Finally, we get what inspired me to start writing about this whole thing in the first place.  I've long been aware that there was a group online attempting to keep the game going.  I was never able to get the program to work properly for me, so I basically stayed out of it.  Last night though, I saw a friend using old DBZ cards as tokens while playing Magic, and it brought the nostalgia in me hardcore.  I decided to go to that site, find the cards, print the proxies and make some decks again.  I know at least 2 people right in my local area that would love to bring this stuff back.  Just a basic Google search later, and I find news that a new company is actually bringing the game back!  According to the news I've read, it should've already been released by now, so I have to really watch this thing.  The fact that the community for this game has held on to it so well that another company feels it's actually profitable to revive it is absolutely marvelous.  I've never heard of a success story quite like this for any game.  Yeah, we have our continuous staples like Magic, Pokemon, & Yu-Gi-Oh, but those have always been right on the forefront.  When people thing TCGs, those are the immediately names just by name recognition alone.  The Dragon Ball Z CCG has always been much more niche, and perhaps because of that, the community for it is much more passionate.  I am immensely proud of this accomplishment, even though it has yet to actually hit store shelves.  I promise you though, I will be keeping a very close watch on this subject.  With the amount of history I have for this game and how it's stood up so well to time, I have a feeling I'll be bringing back one of the better parts of my history.

The only trick is the money.  As I said, I'll probably be playing with just proxies for a long time.  I need to improve my financial situation significantly before I can afford to actually buy more cards.  That will be pure luxury for me.  I already foresee very little more video gaming for me in the future (I'll be getting the new Smash Bros. mostly because I know other people will want to play it, and specifically against me).  I do wish Panini America all the luck they can get in this revival.  It's surely going to be better than Bandai's terrible attempt.