Super-Duper Super-Sayians - Part I

Please note, this article was written the better part of two years ago and, as such, much of the information contained is out of date. However, this series of articles is going somewhere, so stay tuned. 

When I was working full-time, I picked up a couple of the Dragon Ball Super Trading Card Game starter decks and a few boosters, mainly to check it out rather than to start playing seriously, but I didn't get a chance to play it for a few months and the cards just collected dust. When I finally got to give the game a go, it was pretty interesting, being something like an update on Cardfight! Vanguard with a DBS coat of paint; which isn't bad, just not something that really grabbed me in as much as RetroDBZ or the Panini version. 

Recently, I've been playing card games with some friends, mostly the Magic the Gathering "Commander" variant, for which I have a deck that sees rare use. Naturally, I've floated the idea of my beloved RetroDBZ, but it's always easier to get people into a non-defunct game, in my experience. Thankfully the DBSTCG cards are rather beautifully wrought, so tempting in new players isn't too hard. 

Decks in DBSTCG are fifty cards plus a double-sided "Leader Card" featuring a character from the long history of the Dragon Ball franchise. My first two decks were built around Son Goku (from Dragon Ball GT) and The Masked Saiyan (from Xenoverse). I picked these decks because the idea appealed to me of running characters from the franchise that the majority of the fanbase disliked, such as Pan, Bardock and Chilled. Naturally, my friend Ryan and I played with the basic decks a few times first to get the hang of things, making plenty of mistakes, as beginners tend to and finding the patterns and synergies that make the game work. 

After a few games, I certainly preferred playing with the "Red" Goku deck, which focused on drawing cards for faster combos, rather than the "Black" Masked Saiyan deck which discarded cards to form combos. When playing a card or deck based game, I like to go for a "toolbox" approach, wherein I'm able to get the card I need into my hand, rather than relying upon brute force or all-out defense. With the few new packets I was able to get, I could expand my Goku deck, and found enough cards to make me believe that Goku Black would be fun to play, as well as more than a few Android and Cell cards. So the Masked Sayian deck became a "Green" Android/Sayian deck and some other cards got bundled for future ideas, though I'm sticking to the two decks for the moment. 

Why two decks? It helps to teach people the game to have at least two, it's why I used to carry around two unaltered Starter Decks when I ran Pokemon League at Good Games Blackburn, even though neither was a particularly "good" deck. Once I have a solid player base to draw opponents from, I'll probably focus on the one deck, maybe with another that's more "fun" to break things up a bit. I know a few of my readers aren't really into card games, but I thought I'd mark my progress on this one to try and share my enthusiasm for this kind of gaming as much as the game itself. So sorry, but this will likely be the first of a few articles.