A ki blast from the past

An infant is rocketed away from a dying planet. On Earth, he's given a moral compass and raised to represent all that is good. His alien biology gives him powers far beyond those of mortal men. He grows up here among us, fighting to protect our world from devastation at the hands of criminals, war mongers, and galactic tyrants.

Sound familiar?

The parallels between Goku's origin in Dragonball Z and Superman's origin enraptured my young imagination. Superman comics don't always land with a modern audience, and even I was growing tired of the Man of Steel in my adolescent and teenage years. DBZ seemed like a fresh take on an old favorite, and the martial arts stuff didn't hurt either. I had a new obsession, and a new world to explore.

In 2000, card games seemed to be everywhere. From the lunch table at school to the back room of a dingy card game shop at the mall, there was always another collector, another player, another rival. Pokemon and Magic: The Gathering were already invading my headspace on a daily basis, but when my love of deck building and battling crossed over with my love of Toonami's latest hit cartoon show, "hopeless" doesn't even begin to describe how deeply I fell into it.

The Dragonball Z Collectible Card Game from Score wasn't the first DBZ game; that distinction goes to the Ani-Mayhem game. However, Score picked up the license and ran with it just as the DBZ phenomenon was really coming into its own. The strange-at-first spikey-haired protagonists used to be relegated to the import pages video game mags like Electronic Gaming Monthly and Gamefan, but now (thanks in no small part to the anime boom of the late 90's and early 00's) it was pretty hard to avoid.

This game was a learning experience, both for new players and for the designers of the game itself. While Pokemon and Magic both used a system that was similar enough that new players of either game could cross over, DBZ used a strange new rules system that would require a little getting used to.

In place of setting various monsters or summons on the play field, the DBZ CCG employed a system of "personality cards" that centered your deck and play experience around one main character, or "main personality". Powering up your main character through various means would allow you to level up your main guy or gal and that's how forms like the now-infamous Super Saiyan stages were achieved.

Combat consisted of hurling attack cards at your opponent during a "combat phase" and waiting to see if your opponent could deflect them with cards of his or her own. A preliminary "non-combat phase" allowed players to boost their main personality's stats or use other cards to stack the deck in their favor. Non-combat cards could be compared to Pokemon's Trainer cards or Magic's Instant and Sorcery cards.I always found this system clumsy and the vague rules inserted with the initial starter sets only led to many time consuming disputes about who exactly did what.

One aspect of the game that I did enjoy was dealing damage. Rather than marking hit points on a given character with damage tokens or somesuch, once the values were calculated you would damage the opponent by bumping cards off the top of their deck into their discard pile. The notion of both players using their actual decks as life meters was endlessly fascinating to me. I know this most likely wasn't the first time something like this made its way into a card game (Magic had Millstone for instance), but it was my first exposure to the concept and I thought it rocked.

Let's talk about promos. The rarest of the rare (sometimes).

The DBZ CCG was flooded with promotional cards, some of which becoming the game's very first big ticket items, going for a quite a bit of scratch on the then-fledgling eBay. The thing about "rare" and promo level cards in DBZ is that they were usually quite a bit stronger than the stuff you'd get in booster packs. This led to a "whoever has the most money will have the best deck" kind of situation and gave early detractors of the game something to latch onto when backing up their ire.

The sets themselves were based around the various story arcs from the show. You had the Saiyan Saga, the Frieza Saga, the Trunks saga and so on. This led to what must have been a challenging hurdle for the game designers moving forward: as characters on the show become stronger with each arc, how will older cards stay useful and/or relevant?


Therein lies the major problem with Score's game. They never found a way to keep most of the cards from earlier sets viable. Combine that with ever-shifting rules and constantly revised errata and you have a hot mess of a game. It also didn't help that there wasn't a clear vocabulary for in-game terms. Some cards were worded so vaguely that they were banned in my area altogether because of the disputes they caused. This didn't derail the gravy train for some time though, as new expansions were bring churned out up until 2006. It makes sense, as that's when I personally remember a lot of fans at this time transitioning to different "more sophisticated" genres of anime.

(Not me tho! Hair and yelling and punching FOREVER!)

At that point in '06, the paths diverge for players hungry for more DBZ card gaming goodness. Virtual expansion sets for Score's game showed up online and the game has a dedicated following to this day. Meanwhile, Bandai snapped up the license in 2008 and started their own card game line with different rules.

This card game, like so many fads from my junior high days, came and went like a raging storm. It was a whole lot of sound and fury while it was here, but as soon as it dried up, nothing remained but desolation and empty wallets to tell it had ever been. Thanks for reading!

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