Sooper-Dooper Super Sayians - Part III

So, am I deliberately spelling the title of this series wrong every entry, or doing it because they're so far apart I forget how it's done? Your guess is probably as good as mine! So what happened to my Dragon Ball Super TCG gaming anyway? Well, my local group fell apart and I didn't feel like spending money on it anymore; especially seeing as I dropped nearly $100AUD on my Zamasu deck and only ever got to play it twice. Thankfully, the RetroDBZ online fandom came to my rescue with the new "FuZion" format, a blending or the Score, Retro and Panini versions of the game. Naturally, I'm annoyed that I have to disassemble my Retro decks and, in fact, my Freestyle Goku Dragon Balls and Freestyle Trunks Sword Beats are still together because I just can't bring myself to take them apart, but the advantages of smaller decks and leaving some of the idiotic Virtual cards behind are too good to ignore. I paired down my Sayian Gohan Beats deck easily, but the one I like best is Black Garlic Jr MPPV Balls. 

Man, that's a lot of jargon, let's explain a few things first. To play FuZion (or any format based on the Score build of the game), you'll need a few things; first up is a Main Personality, or MP, this is three to five cards depicting a character from the franchise, as pictured above. MPs aren't 'technically' part of the 60 card deck, and neither are a couple of other things you'll need, a Mastery and a Sensei. A Mastery dictates the "colour" of your deck, unlike Magic the Gathering or Pokemon, you have to stick to one "Martial Arts Style", my Garlic Jr deck is Black, which is pretty aggressive and focuses on discarding your opponent's cards. There's also Blue, Red, Orange, Sayian, Namekian and Freestyle. Blue and Orange are more defensive, Red is aggresive, with a few varying tricks here and there. Freestyle means that the deck can only be built with "non-styled" cards, so tend to be stronger for more popular characters like Goku and Cell. Only Sayian characters (for the most part) can use Sayain cards and the same for Nameks and Namekian, though Gohan can also use Namekian style because he was trained by Piccolo, which I always thought was neat. 

Sensei cards give your deck a little more punch and also act as a "Sideboard", giving you between 5 and 21 extra cards you can "opt-in" before a game. Because the cards taken out of your deck to make space for the Sensei cards are random, a lot of "top level" (for a game with maybe a few thousand players across the world) dislike using them unless they absolutely have to. I tend to be more flexible on it, as I'll most often use Sensei cards for Gohan, because there's no one card in that deck I "need" to win, less so for Garlic Jr, as accidentally removing one of the seven Dragon Balls can be a major issue. Then again, my player pool for this game is maybe three other people, so I never have to worry about tournament play or how "killer" my deck needs be. 

The meat of the deck is made up of 60 cards that match your Mastery and/or MP, there are Attacks, Blocks, Non-Combats, Drills, Allies, Dragon Balls, Setups, Locations and probably more things I've forgotten. Like any card game, the idea is to create synergy and win games. What I like best about FuZion is that the game has multiple win-conditions built in. The deck of 60 cards is technically called a "Life Deck", when the last card is drawn or discarded from the deck, that player is out of the game. Also, a player can win by controlling all seven Dragon Balls of the same set, or by reaching their highest level MP card and powering up to full. Deckbuilding is essentially a process of deciding which win conditions work best with your chosen MP and heading towards that. There's a few more elements to the game, like Anger Levels and the difference between Physical and Energy Attacks and Blocks and how Allies work, but I've gone on long enough this time. All that and more, next time on Dragon Ball Z!