Dezigning Zarbon!

Back before I had ever played in any National or World Championship competitions I was mainly known as the Co-Founder of DBZ Fanatics and the creator of the “Dominator” Anger/Dragonball control deck that allowed me to pull off 52 straight ranked wins in the DBZ CCG Online Ladder League. It was during this time that Score Ent. was getting ready to release it’s first expansion, The Freiza Saga. Fanatics was selected as one of the sites to start showing previews to hype the launch. This also gave me the chance to access the Frieza Saga card spoiler right before it’s release. Going over the spoiler, one thing jumped out at me…Zarbon was nowhere to be seen. Zarbon played a big role early in the Frieza saga and I found it a shame that other characters such as Dodoria and Guldo were given personalities instead. I remember in a discussion with David “Chipmunk” Eckhard on mIRC asking him,”Where’s Zarbon?” only for him to reply,”He’s coming.”

At the time of my last DBZ tournament, the 2002 World Championships, Zarbon had still yet to be seen and all hope I had for him had but died. That is until I was contacted by Chaz Elliot asking me if I was interesting in becoming a playstester for Score Entertainment. I would accept with the thought deep in the back of my mind that if ever got the chance to, I would create a Zarbon personality set. A few months went by and it didn’t seem like I would have a chance, until one lucky day David Eckhard gave the green light to both me and IQ to create personalities for the Cosmic Anthology subset. Zarbon was now a reality.

Now the Zarbon that eventually made it into the game isn’t the Zarbon I first had in mind. There was one thing that always bothered me about the way main personalities were made. It was there was rarely any synergy between different levels of Main Personalities. Trying to build a deck off a level 2 or 3 power was just too inconsistent to work effectively. I also felt that the best main personalities gave you some sort of card advantage. So the idea was that I was going to give Zarbon an universally playable level 1 power, but instead of the level 2 power being something completely different than the level 1, I would just make the level 2 an amplified version of the level 1 and so on. I also wanted to have a built in mechanic that promoted going up in levels. One of my favorite powers is the original Saiyan Saga HT Piccolo. Up until Trunks Saga, I played the Piccolo HT exclusively. I felt the Piccolo HT had a solid all around power suitable to a wide variety of decks. The first version of Zarbon went a little like this…

Compared to IQ’s Supreme West Kai, I felt this was reasonable. My error was I championed Zarbon during playtesting and he proved a little too good while SWK, while annoying, was still losing to some of the other in house decks, namely the several backlash variants I had built. I was forced back to the drawing board. In all honesty, the final Zarbon personality powers were rushed. I had to reach a deadline and had to get something out that would get the OK from IQ and Chipmunk. So I settled with not only giving attacks an if successful effect to gain 1 anger, but also another to give powerstages which would open up the possibility for gimicky infinite combos. The fear was that Zarbon would gain levels too fast vs. other personalities with only 3 levels so I was also forced to add the going down in level mechanic. I made this compromise by also giving the level 1 a Focused Energy Attack.

Overall I felt that although Zarbon wasn’t as playable as I wanted him to be, having him in the game was a personal victory. I remember back, when I was a young kid playing Magic, reading articles about how a Jon Finkel won the Magic World Championship. Part of his grand prize was the chance to design his own playable card for the game. Being a 15 year old kid playing a cardgame, you dream about doing something like that. It doesn’t seem a possibility. With a little luck, a lot of hard work and a dash of faith, its all possible.

One last thing. Now you know I had to pay homage to DBZ Fanatics in some form or another. I feel it was this website that opened a lot of doors for me. I was able to “sneak” this tribute in by naming Zarbon’s level 3,”The Fanatical, after DBZFanatics.com. With that being said, shout outs to all the other old school DBZ CCG sites such as Top Tier Gaming, DBZ DeckZone, DBZCCGTips, Makyo Star, and the countless others I can’t remember off the top of my head. Until next time…