Now that we have our first official CRD and the threat of the Namekian Style has died down, a new scourge has emerged on the tournament scene (not that he was ever absent from it): CAPTAIN GINYU! OH NOESS!
The evil captain has certainly made a splash, and there’s already talk by some to bust him down to lieutenant and take out some of his steam, but does Captain Ginyu need a nerf? Like I pointed out was the problem with the Namekian style, he certainly is consistent for what he does and I would even go as far to say he is the most consistent personality in the crucial early turns. So like the Namekian style, same malady means it needs the same medicine (a nerf), right? Well, not so fast…
The problem with the Namekian style lay in the overall design of the style, whether that means the designers were overcompensating for something with the Namekian style or the other styles just weren’t given enough power remains up to debate. The problem with Captain Ginyu is that he exists in an environment that just does not have the tools necessary to keep him in check.
Captain Ginyu is a Set Three personality released in Set One. And again, we can get a good picture as to why Captain Ginyu seems to be the personality to beat by analyzing what’s in the set.
Right off the bat we know that there are Critical Effects that can take care of allies. Just about any attack is capable of getting one, but I’m just gonna come out and say that it’s an unreliable method for ally control. It’s basically a conditional HIT effect, and it really becomes irrelevant by the time Captain Ginyu reaches Level 2 and can fish allies out of the discard pile and completely useless once Captain Ginyu reaches Level 3+ and is immune to losing allies via Critical Effects.
So we have to start looking at cards that either Banish or Destroy allies to make a dent in the Captain Ginyu ally machine. Out of the six styles, only three of them have cards that can outright Banish an ally: Blue Betrayal, Orange Stare Down and Red Energy Blast. If you include cards that can Destroy allies, then the Saiyan style can count the conditional Saiyan Surprise in its arsenal while the Red style gets two more cards with conditional/situational Destroy effects: Red Lightning Slash and Red Observation (which is limit one per deck).
Unless you want to count Yamcha – Action Ready, the Black and Namekian styles have no way to combat Captain Ginyu’s powers (though in most cases they only have one less anti-ally card than every other style).
But here’s the thing about the situation and why I believe that overall Captain Ginyu isn’t broken: there is almost certainly going to be more cards that can Banish or Destroy allies introduced in later sets. Right now, some styles can’t run any (non-Critical Effect) anti-ally cards while others can run a max of three and the Red style can get all the way up to seven tech cards. Introducing at least one Freestyle card that can Banish/Destroy an ally plus another styled one means that some decks could have close to 10% of their cards being ally tech, should the meta environment demand it.
It’s just a shame that the meta currently does not have the infrastructure to combat a consistent ally deck like Captain Ginyu. His powers would be perfectly fine (and maybe even on the average side) if he was released in Set Three where we can assume that there would be more card effects that were anti-ally available to all styles. Unfortunately in Set One, Captain Ginyu has few (if any) natural predators. I’m not saying he’s unbeatable, he just has every advantage going for him.
Is Captain Ginyu broken? No. Does Captain Ginyu need errata? No. What he needs is a bigger card pool to find his balanced place in the meta.
Later, BroZ!
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I like your analysis of the deck. One thing I feel that is lacking is that the meta isnt a threat to GInyu. With red lacking any stable deck archtype and arguably the worst mastery (it has a tone of ally hate). From my experience a solid black kirllen deck can beat ginyu. But black is another problem all together. With its banish top x cards from deck it makes Dragon ball a very risky deck to play (if not unplayable).
Yes, the card pool is the main issue.
There are some minor things that could still use some pointing out regarding general resource economy that is a bit skewed: Goku level 1 and the amount of Power Stages Allies enter play.
I saw someone compare Goku 1 to Ginyu 1 and there is a definite gulf in power between grabbing an Ally as an Immediate effect and having to both hit confirm and discard a card to get a Drill. Goku can get some weak tech in a Drill beck by discarding a Drill to get a Drill, then leveling up or using Orange Mastery at the end of Combat to get the Drill back, but it’s a lot of work. If Ginyu also had a discard effect, he could discard an Ally to fetch an Ally, then use his level 2 to get it back, so this lack or parity between the cards is really apparent. Am I saying Ginyu is broken? No, but he has a power that is better than his set 1 personality peers.
There are still other considerations in card economy right now that are in favour of Allies. We have a non-Styled card, Overpowering Attack, which can get Allies out of the Deck or Discard Pile, but no non-Styled Ally killer. This may not be a problem, per se, but Overpowering Attack also costs 2 Power Stages to put an Ally into play at 5 Power Stages, which is a 3 Power Stage net gain. Ginyu himself on his level 1 costs 3 Stages to put an Ally in at 4 Stages. Positive Stage economy isn’t a big problem now, but should be considered as Panini makes more cards in the future and is another advantage in Ginyu currently.
As a Retro Player of many years I find this meta game very stable. There are rock paper scissors type deck match ups and PanZ meta offers a much more diverse environment than many other ccgs.
That being said, the biggest problem as this article states is the low card pool. For a lot of Retro players we were very used to a huge card pool to construct our decks from and tweak our decks for the local meta. With PanZ only having 1 set at this time we are very limited. And thus with a limited card pool comes 1 or 2 dominant decks. Right now we have Ginyu blue, red, orange, and black. We have Piccolo Namekian. Krillin Blue / Black. God Goku Orange / black. These decks on any given day can beat one another. Ginyu and Namekian seeing the most consistency, but still not having a 100% win ratio vs other decks. We as a DBZ Community need to sit back, enjoy the fact that the game has resurfaced after a decade, play cards and wait for more cards to come our way. We cannot scream nerf or ban every time there is an emerging archetype that dominates the format for a while. Magic the Gathering, Pokémon, and Yugioh do not make such changes when there is a dominant deck. They encourage their players to think outside the box and create new ways to combat the threat. They also have larger card pools, so that is what we should be focusing on. The Future sets to be released.
Agreed, 100%. As part of a retro group in my community I tell my guys the same thing, think outside the box.
If a nerf or ban happened every time a deck became dominant, that to me spells trouble for the game itself.
It’s not a bad thing to cater to the community, but to baby them every time there is a complaint would be bad news.
this could be a good argument that promo cards could be used to correct the game, kinda like a patch, create a card or cards that can help keep things in check until the next set just distribute them in the 3 card packs like they use to have in scores game sensu packs I think they called them. I don’t see why they didn’t just put a cap on hand size instead of making us throw away so many cards also limit ally setups and drills and an increase to how many could have been a part of masteries. one of the things that kept orange in check in scores game was the threat of loosing your drills as you lvled or delvled that mastery shouldn’t have been allowed when I use my orange deck I see a lot of my drill getters not being used cause they arnt in the discard pile cause they never go away its almost too powerful but they wanted that dumbass kamehahmeha combo and didn’t really put much more thought into orange. my point is as time goes on im seeing so many flaws in this game it makes me think they really didnt care or just want to make decks they wanted to use (Namekian) (Ginyu) (Kamehahmehah combo) PLUS THEY LIED! ITS RIGHT ON THE BOX COMPATIBLE WITH SCORES OLD GAME BULLSHIT! yeah combine them all u want u cant use them in tournaments
Hold up a minute, I don’t think we really need rush promo cards yet. We only have one set to work with for now. And while it may be compatible with the OCG I think starting fresh is the way to go. I’m sure there will be events later on that will include all the cards from the OCG and they will be closer to Vintage tournaments for MTG. Broken as heck and for hard core fans. Besides, how difficult would it be to design around every original card ever printed. We’re at Saiyan Saga 2.0, and I think we are a lot better off this time around!
honestly they could fix this problem just by lifting the restriction of only being able to use one color per deck. Then you could have plenty of ally removal (with the current card pool) and it wouldn’t hurt the game at all.