Not all Masteries are created equally. We all know that. Sometimes it’s because they have a specific niche that Score was trying to make, sometimes it’s because Score gave up after one set’s worth of support, sometimes another Mastery (even of its own Style) was just better at doing what it wanted to do, sometimes it relied too much on every attack being successful to do what it needed to do, and sometimes it was just better to scrap it. A prime example of this is the Trunks Saga Blue Style Mastery, the first and only Mastery that Score ever had to MRP in an attempt to make players at least remember Blue had a Mastery before the Cell Saga one. So in this article, I’ll explore the nine Masteries I consider being nigh unplayable, as well as one-card ideas that would take them from the trash bin to being playable. I decided to mock these card ideas up for display purposes, but take note that they are not legal. If this warning isn’t enough, the cards are stamped “Not Legal” and have a “Not Legal” watermark over them. You cannot use them in official RetroDBZ events. 
1. Trunks Saga Blue Style Mastery
If you watch Josh and Garrett’s live streams, you’re likely to have seen the attempt at making this Mastery work with Meta-Cooler. It took time to set up when Josh used it, and when Garrett used it there just wasn’t enough consistency in the milling when it was set up to be worth it. Because of this, it was decided the Majin Buu Saga Mastery would likely be a better fit for the deck, though the deck had some potential despite seeming like it shouldn’t be able to do anything.
So, the question was, “What can make the deck more consistent without giving the same boost to the Majin Buu Saga Mastery variant?” The first step was to get Drills more quickly, since the deck requires both Blue Biting Drill and Blue General Blue’s Fascist Drill. Then, since Meta-Cooler needs a Blue Style card top of his discard pile to use his power, I opted to allow the card to remove any cards in his discard pile as well as removing the card itself from the game. It wouldn’t do any good to make it detrimental to his own power now, would it? The final step was the actual consistency to make the Trunks Saga Mastery more useful than the Majin Buu Saga Mastery. The key to this was the anger lowering effect of the Mastery, which is sadly an if successful effect. Thus, a floating effect to make your Mastery’s effect secondary instead of if successful.
 
2. World Games Saga Blue Style Mastery
The second Blue Style Mastery that made this list, but only barely. I consider this Mastery to be teetering on the edge of playability, but just needed a small push to make it work better than other energy decks. Blue’s energy niche? Anger. However, like the Trunks Saga Mastery, it relies on every attack being successful to utilize its Mastery to its full potential. As such, I made yet another card that made if successful effects into secondary effects. Of course, I had to make sure to slap a “Styled card effects” clause in there to prevent any shenanigans with Vegeta’s Gutter Wallop.
 
3. World Games Saga Saiyan Style Mastery
This Mastery isn’t really bad, per se. It’s just that its effect happens to be subpar compared to every other Saiyan Style Mastery, making it so the only benefit you get for running this Mastery over the others is that you get a secondary effect even if you do not draw a Saiyan Style Card. Preventing four power stages and four life cards from the first attack each combat isn’t very impressive, but what if it stopped the first attack each combat? However, unlike the previous two Masteries, this effect would need to be in play for as long as possible to make it worthwhile. Thus, a level 1 personality was created. It doesn’t have to be Gohan, I just chose him because the Great Saiyaman was on the Mastery itself. I’ve never liked personalities that specify Styles like Krillin, Android 19, and Broly, so I made his power non-specific. I made sure to make it so Drills and non-Styled cards would not trigger his power, so it’d be difficult for other Styles to pull it off. Majin Buu Saga Blue Style Mastery can potentially create a combo to essentially stop all attacks in a combat by removing a single card per attack, but the number of times it can do that is limited. And besides, giving that Mastery a small boost wouldn’t be the most horrible thing anyway.
 
4. World Games Saga Red Style Mastery
Yet another World Games Saga Mastery. Noticing a pattern yet? Similar to the Saiyan Style Mastery, this one isn’t necessarily bad… Okay, it’s bad, really bad. It doesn’t do anything to really help its niche – Red Styled energy attacks. Anger lowering effects aren’t that great, which the Blue Style knows all too well, and forcing two discards when your Styled energy attacks are stopped doesn’t help your strategy at all. In fact, it seems as if it’s giving up just by existing, as if it’s saying, “Well, okay you stopped my attack, but at least I slightly bruised you!” Not only that, but both the Trunks Saga Mastery and the Majin Buu Saga Mastery fulfill your goal better. One raises your anger so you level quickly, thus allowing more power stages to fire off more energy attacks, and the other makes your attacks focused so you don’t have to worry as much about the chance of them being blocked.
So, the key to making a card for this Mastery was to ensure that it didn’t help either of those other Masteries all that much. What would be the point in trying to help this Mastery if those other two are still superior in every way? It’s not “Red Style Energy” that I’m aiming to boost, but rather this Mastery specifically. The two ways to accomplish this would be to trigger off of one of the Mastery’s two effects. One effect simply exists by using an energy attack, and the other relies on the opponent stopping your Red energy attacks. Clearly, the former is better to base it on than the latter. The rest of the card’s effect basically makes the Mastery’s Red Style specific effect meaningless, but ensuring that floating stop-all effects and pesky Absorbing Drills do not stop your attacks should give it an edge over your other Masteries.
 
5. World Games Saga Freestyle Mastery
The forgotten first Freestyle Mastery, which always looked fun but never did anything. Then, once the Majin Buu Saga Mastery came out and granted both hand quality and the best Drill protection this side of Meta-Cooler and Orange Focusing Drill, this became completely obsolete. I also decided to make a card that I always found the absence of to be rather odd: a Freestyle Gambit. Every other Style, even Namekian, got a Gambit card in Majin Buu Saga. Since they required Styled cards, which this “Style” does not have, I went with Named cards instead. I also solved one of the two main problems that Gambits had. One, they required that every other card in your hand met the requirements, with the exception of Saiyan and Namekian if they were using card-draw Masteries. And two, other copies became useless after you got the first attached. This was fixed simply by letting it draw a card. Then, I just made it so it enhanced the effect of the Mastery, effectively making it a Black Scout Maneuver every combat. It becomes an incredibly dangerous Mastery once attached, but it takes quite a bit to both pull off and takes some level of luck to use. Also, since there is no General White personality as of now, it does not itself count as a Named card.
 
6. Cell Saga Namekian Style Mastery
This one was a real tough one to make a card for. It drew a card like the Trunks Saga and World Games Saga Masteries, but its secondary effect after doing so was pathetic. Its life deck healing compared to the Majin Buu Saga Mastery was equally pathetic, so it really had nothing going for it. So, thinking along these lines, I remembered that its physical attack pool was relatively low as well. So why not turn this Mastery into the physical beatdown Mastery? Well, as we’ve seen over the years with the Cell Saga Saiyan Style Mastery, drawing a second card is often better than any minor secondary effect you can come up with. So, whatever effect was made would have to last a long time to ensure it was better for physical beatdown than the World Games Saga Mastery. To make it last as long as possible, I made it attach to the Mastery, and decided to give it an effect that could stack.
At first, I went with a damage modifier effect to give +2 power stages of damage to your physical attacks. However, both Red and Black already do that, so how would it really be new or fun? Especially since Namekian’s physical attacks are relatively bland, at least compared to Red and Black’s fun effects. Then I remembered the recent Future Gohan virtual cards and their anger raising effects, and decided that’d be an interesting avenue to go down. The way these stack would also mean that you could level in interesting ways. With all three attached, you raise your anger 1 level three times, so if you were above 2 anger, you’ll start the next level with some anger already in the bag. Like the Majin Buu Saga Saiyan Style Mastery, however, you cannot win by the Most Powerful Personality Victory while you use the anger raising effects.
 
7. Majin Buu Saga Namekian Style Mastery
This is a Mastery that feels like it should have potential, but all it really does is keep you from losing by Survival for as long as possible. This does nothing in a standard environment, as you’d have Dragon Ball decks and possibly even Anger decks to contend with. Not only that, but like the two Blue Style Masteries displayed above, this also relies on attacks connecting to do what it does. Like a few of the other Masteries, this one would need a personality power to allow an effect to be in play as long as possible.
So, I based the power around the idea of not having any Freestyle cards in your discard pile. Since Freestyle cards are so powerful, whatever personality power created would have to be worth the chance of losing your Freestyle cards from damage, or not running them at all in decks without this Mastery (though that was of little importance when deciding how to help this Mastery). The basis of this effect I decided to, once again, make if successful effects secondary, since that was the other half of the Mastery. However, unlike the previous ones, this one is for any Styled if successful effects. It’s quite potent, but even more restrictive. As for the personality, I figured Pikkon never really got any love, and could use a niche. And since his level 2 was an energy attack, I might as well make this one an energy attack as well.
 
8. World Games Saga Black Style Mastery
This deck type already had some number of “if your opponent has no Non-Combat cards in play” effects, but they were all over the place and relied on your if successful effects going off. The above Pikkon level 1 helps you with this reliance, but then the question was what sort of effect would make it worth both nuking their Non-Combat cards (over, say, their hand via the Cell Saga Mastery or Life Deck via the Trunks Saga Mastery) as well as keeping Freestyle cards out of your discard pile? Since you had to use attacks to get the Mastery’s effects, it made sense that the deck as a whole would be beatdown oriented. Card draw seemed like the most obvious boon to a beatdown deck, so that’s what I went with. Since I made it a Freestyle card, and this does not have the above Namekian Mastery’s automatic removal, I gave it endurance to ensure your discard pile can remain squeaky clean. Then, in case they do happen to have Non-Combat cards in play in other decks (like the above Namekian deck), it has a small amount of empower. This cross-synergy felt like a fun idea to attempt, since it helps create more usability with less cards.
I was originally going to make this card some sort of Focusing Drill while the opponent had no Non-Combat cards, but that felt like a bad idea. In the end, it felt better to go with a more pro-active card effect.
 
9. Majin Buu Saga Black Style Mastery
I think a lot of people tried to make this Mastery work at some point, and quickly gave up. Being able to use a “stop any attack” card to stop focused attacks is very nice, but that alone isn’t very impressive unless your meta-game runs 80-90% Majin Buu Saga Red Style Mastery. The second effect of gaining stages and raising your anger was pretty bad. Its best use was to raise your opponent’s power stages, negating their use of Allies.
To fix this, I decided to focus mainly on the “gain 6 stages” part of the Mastery. Like the World Games Saga Saiyan Style Mastery, whatever effect I made would have to be in play for as long as possible to be worthwhile, so a personality was made. Since the Majin Buu Saga Saiyan Style Mastery has a somewhat similar power stage gaining system, I figured it’d be best to make it a character with Saiyan Heritage. Since I decided to base it off of the number of stages gained, I figured being usable with the Trunks Saga Namekian Style Mastery and all the Namekian Style power-up cards might be a little too much. I went with Goten, since I figured he needed some love, didn’t really have much of any niche, and could use a card that showed him at the end of Z like Kid Trunks got. Plus, his level 2 power continues the power-up cycle that this niche deck should be based around. His power is based off of two things. First, dealing damage directly when you gain power stages, and second, increasing the damage of your future attacks. Yes, this means Hidden Power Level becomes a playable card outside of stage-starved energy decks.
Red Energy Mastery not playable? Combo it with Vinigar or Nail. You don’t have to worry about getting through their defenses at all. And they have to worry about keeping up with your forced damage output. Dealing 8-10 damage every combat no matter what is brutal. Throw in dying planet and control/combo decks will hate you forever.
How is that at all playable compared to running the MBS Mastery and forcing your attacks through 70% of defenses? Not only would you be doing more damage per combat on average, but you can apply modifiers, capture dragon balls, and use if successful effects. Your version throws their power and four red energies. Congratulations, how are you going to have the stages for that when they’re both in the B bracket and you have no blocks in your hand? One average physical for +3 from anyone and you lose a minimum of 4 stages.
Furthmore, if you run Dying Planet, control decks will laugh at you. Their precious discard pile isn’t filling up? Oh, but they can still use their non-combats? No problem.
Although I love the idea of getting free focused attacks, I have to say that there are many decks out there where focused attacks are meaningless.For example my Red Kid Buu runs nothing but stop alls for energy defense. Saiyan, Namekian, and Orange hardly have any omni-blocks at all. I suppose if they are facing Blue or Black they will get through 70% of their defenses, but a mastery that is nearly useless vs half the game is pretty weak.
“Congratulations, how are you going to have the stages for that when they’re both in the B bracket and you have no blocks in your hand?”
That doesn’t happen if you build the deck right. You should always have a block in your hand.
Actually they will cry when they realize that Andriod 20’s absorbing drill causes them to lose four life everytime they use it. They will cry when they realize that vinegar gets to steal a DB every turn. They will cry when they realize that they cannot stall the game agianst you due to your forced damage output.
Hmm. Maybe instead of arguing over this we should have a match. Your Red focused energy vs my Red WGS energy. What do you say?
1) Saiyan Brace and Saiyan Stop are two of the most used blocks by Saiyan. Those aren’t omni-blocks now?
2) If your red deck runs nothing but stop alls for energy, then you must run all of 2 blocks (maybe 3 if you’re hero and count Goku’s Running Defense). That means the choice of Red mastery is basically useless.
3) Vinegar isn’t going to be stealing a ball from 4 life cards of damage, and the masteries don’t have modifiers. I guess you can run drills or Roshi sensei, but that’s just bringing in more variables that aren’t important to the discussion.
4) So you have a block, 4 red energy attacks, and your power? And you somehow get to full every combat? You must be the true Dragon Ball Master. Dave, time to hand over your title.
5) No one gives two damns how a deck does against the mirror when only one out of every hundred players are going to play the deck, and based on last year’s turnout there was only 50-60 players. A deck matters based on how it does in the meta, not the mirror, unless your deck IS the meta, which obviously it isn’t.
6) I don’t have a red energy deck built. I really couldn’t care less what you have to say about how brokes Vinegar Red WGS is.
1. I forgot about the two Saiyan omni-blocks, but that still leaves half the game not running omni-blocks. Orange, Namekian, and Red won’t care that all your attacks are focused.
2. There’s Force Bubble, Cell’s Perfect, Buu’s Invinc, Nappa’s, x3 Red Back Kick, x3 Straining Focusing Move, and Red Rapid Deflection. That’s a lot more than two blocks. If you think having more than 20 freestyle cards in your deck makes a mastery useless, then I just don’t know what to say to you.
3. How exactly are they not important? We should consider all variables, shouldn’t we?
4. That is assuming that combat is declared every time it is someone’s turn. Don’t forget about allies, and cards that raise your power level to full. Someone wouldn’t have a five card hand unless they had a drill or someting to draw extra cards. The deck only needs to declare combat, force a bit of damage and wait for combat to end. It doesn’t need to throw tons of energy attacks. Have you ever tried the deck out?
5. I thought the discussion was which mastery was better for Red Energy beats. “How is that at all playable compared to running the MBS Mastery and forcing your attacks through 70% of defenses?”
If you want to say that something is bad because it doesn’t do well vs the current meta, then almost everything was bad back when Roshi/PTT dominated.In Street fighter 2 terms, you might as well be saying that Vega is horrible, because people can use the secret code to select Akuma.
6. I never said it was broken.
What you’re missing is that when this card dropped, the biggest energy defense was Android Absorbing Drill; you know, “pay two life cards, stop an energy attack”?
This mastery scrambled the meta on drop. Suddenly, the standard “stop an energy attack” effect made you take damage equal to a basic energy attack, and no endurance to save you. On paper that’s kinda lame, sure. In tournaments it put pressure on the opposing player to actually prioritize energy defense cards in hand, and defense shields, over the drill and it’s protection.
Some people cracked under that.
Really fun article!! Red WGS mastery always makes me sad, as I loved Red Blazing Mastery in GT. I haven’t been able to find a decent substitute since coning back to the game.
It’s great to read articles that deal with the science of the game and card design evaluation. I may not agree with some of the calls, but will grant that you’re only evaluating a pool of 22 cards for the least appealing to a competitive player. For a self challenge I like to sometimes build decks for each mastery/personality just to test the success rate. Admittedly dominant decks are still more effective than their weak counterparts, but it is nice to play something new every now and then. At least there’s hope somewhere down the line that a retro dbz event might offer something for those decks we never got to play the way they were meant to be.
Can you redo the card images? All of the new cards you’ve made are really hard to read. I think it might be due to the original images having a certain resolution, which was changed when it got paired/”Not Legal” thrown on them.
And while I disagree with a mastery or 2 on this list, the article is good. Good Jorb!
Chippy
Must… Keep… Typing…
Part of the problem might be because WordPress is a bit wonky with putting images side by side, so Geoff had to combine two cards into one image to fit for me to post it in an aesthetically pleasing manner.
Run the images through Illustrator CS6. It has a “trace image” feature that will turn any image into vector art, meaning you can resize the images to larger images without a loss of quality. Extremely handy.
As for the article, I think this is one of the better ones, as these masteries don’t really get any press. Pretty apparent that Orange got the best masteries.
More like the Orange MBS Mastery is soooo good it makes everybody forget about the other ones. Before Buu, Orange had some pretty terrible masteries… and this is coming from the guy that even got to make them until WGS.
Chippy
Man With The Plan… in his sensei
I was actually pretty ok with the TS Orange Style Mastery. Orange had a lot going for it already, and the Mastery was just icing on the cake (unlike the fairly aimless styles of Black and Blue at the time, thought the Black TS Mastery gave that style what it needed to be more playable).
Orange CS is garbage and Orange WGS doesn’t make sense when Red, Black, Saiyan and hell, even Blue are better physical beats styles.
My problem with Orange MBS is that it didn’t give Orange what it needed to be a good style. It filled Orange to overflowing by taking one of its main strengths and making it damn near untouchable.
I don’t know, I always liked the CS Mastery. It felt like it was giving you defense while also boosting your offense. Granted, the -1 cost from the TS is really nice in most decks, and likely the better build, but CS at least has its moments.
Main reason I didn’t put an Orange Mastery was because no matter what you give the other Masteries, the MBS will still be better. Want physicals? Run the MBS and get the +4 stage drill. Want to run TS? Run the -1 cost drill and +whatever damage drills. CS is the only one with any unique advantage here, but even then MBS can grab Halting/Haulting drill and call it a day. There’s just no point in boosting the other Masteries without nicking the MBS Mastery down first.
Something I’d like to make/see would be cards similar to the “winners circle” cards in yu yu hakusho, where you could pull them out at the beginning of the game and attach them to your mastery. they could add additional benefits or floating effects.
and while this might seem like a cheap fix (it is) it allows you to add a lot of depth without doing something as dramatic as making a new mastery, or lame like specific support cards that still have to be drawn and/or setup.
as an example, since it was talked about in this thread: “search your life deck for this card before the first turn and attach it to your Orange Style Mastery from the World Games Saga. All of your physical attacks with modifiers gain “Shuffle the bottom card of your discard pile into your life deck””.
lame but you get the idea. also, I too love the orange ts mastery! 1 stage energy attacks that do a ton of damage are fine by me
It’s the reason that we gave Orange no Virtual Cards. We could either make a card that did absolutely nothing for Orange or a card that could potentially be used by Orange MBS. We chose not to make one at all.
So in Black WGS defense in did win a regional once. Its not great, but its pretty good in the right meta, I’d say its biggest problem was how bad black was in general.
Also, so much hate for Orange. MBS is very good, but it can also be slow as hell. Additionally, back in the day when you didn’t get to reorganize your top 6, having your deck being a good chuck of noncombats had to have massive upsides since those cards are all dead in combat. In fact I think its the only thing that made drills playable with all the hate that was out there. Its not like orange was dominating the tournament seen after it came out, I remember it was still Namekian vs Namekian in the finals of Worlds that year. You could make the argument Orange MBS is un-fun, but its not overpowered. Finally, WGS Orange is where its at anyway >.>
Just out of curiosity, if the WGS Freestyle was the same as the MBS Freestyle in regards to the non discarding of drills, which would you play? The drill protection and ability to search for a named card that matches your MP or drill protection and the ability to potentially discard certain cards from your opponents deck. I think it’d be dependent on who your MP was, but just think of how much chaos that could inflict as well.
it absolutely depends on the deck, but they’d both be fantastic options. I would’ve killed for a freestyle WGS that did that in a control-type deck.
What deck did Black WGS win a regional with? I T8ed a few GKI Qualifiers with Black WGS Buu Anger, but that’s the only instance I remember of anyone actually using that mastery competitively.
And yes, you are all being crybabies about Orange MBS.
as an old-school orange player, my biggest issue with the MBS mastery is actually how boring it is. Once you’re set up, it actually doesn’t even do anything for you, either.
It’s very powerful/good, but it’s also lame. sadness.
I wanna say that it was Trevor Parker and it was a Southern regional, possibly GA. I believe Roshi was the main.
I reserve my right to cry over a dumb deck.
Josh hit it. Trevor Parker won GA 03 with Black WGS.
Did they ever nerf CAT? I hated that in OMBS with Hercule. Just defend all day, build up your drills, tutor out confrontation/staredown with Evil and Heroic drills, then smack them around with CAT.
id like to honestly see an article about the best decks ever made.
Could make a good Top 10 List, but it’d be incredibly subjective.