Crossover eps take another card game, teach you the rules, and compare those ideas to Magic. What can we steal to use in our own designs? For this ep, our hair is turning gold, our energy is radiating from our bodies, and normal humans can’t even see the speed of our punches. It’s Dragonball Z! It’s got commander-style face cards, a more spell-like combat system, and plenty of wild nooks and crannies to its design.
Brad’s bsky: https://bsky.app/profile/specialbeamcannon.bsky.social
Important DBZ TCG peripherals:
- Z scouter for tracking your power stages,
- Anger sword for tracking your anger
The sweet Physical Attack Table
A smattering of cards to peruse from both the episode and from the cutting room floor:
Topics Discussed:
- tim’s advanced backstory
- toonami
- trading fan sub vhs tapes
- japanese property but an english-only game
- piccolo learns to drive
- octgn
- personality cards
- 85 or 90 card decks, depending on if you’re a green alien
- six styles: four colors, saiyan style, namekian style
- tokui waza
- first over 9000 reference
- all characters have four styles, some have saiyan or namekian
- an entire pikkon tangent cut for run time
- a mastery (like choose a background)
- starter decks give new masteries
- there is a color pie, red being anger, blue being anti-anger, black being damage
- you can play almost any character with almost any color/faction
- the one game where power creep for later sets is in flavor
- having to track a large discard pile mid-game
- regular, medium-sized exile to control graveyard bloat
- card types are in the card names!
- physical combat, energy combat, and noncombat
- up to 7 dragonballs, which have trinket abilities, but can combine 7 for big effect
- dragon balls can be stolen! makes getting 7 more possible, since both players have them
- battlebond battling over mcguffin balls/pucks?
- battlegrounds affect both players
- card type that removes others of the same type
- starter decks skip artifact/enchantment removal
- how did they decide to go with tokui waza as a mechanic name
- sensei decks (variable size sideboards)
- sideboarding has randomized removals
- how to design around people not feeling like sideboarding in draft/casual
- dragon balls as mtg-style wishes
- draw three a turn
- power stations and power-up rating: sort of a mix of armor and mana every turn
- multiple levels for each character (all separate cards?!!)
- most powerful personality victory
- need to read all face-up cards when a game starts
- multiple versions of each level of each story character
- higher levels can be rare cards
- discard down to 1 or fewer cards at EOT
- defender draws three cards during combat!
- lots more draw but much lower max hand size
- non-damage cards that interact, like discard, happen during combat
- the physical attack table compares power levels
- as levels go up, abilities change and power levels rise significantly
- some character abilities name other specific characters
- sensei (sideboard) deck-only cards!
- community rules overrode the sensei deck rules
- power stages and anger are different resources
- does monarch make games slower?
- the one fog and the one counterspell