Supreme West Kai is without a doubt the most hated personality in the game. She’s thought of as an MP who takes no skill to build a deck for or play because you don’t have to think about defence and that leaves more room for adding extra cards to the deck. She’s associated as an MP for bad players because they don’t need to have defensive cards in their hand, which gives them more cards to attack with per combat. They always have a chance to defend so can survive for longer, and her shuffling power makes her even stronger. Her victories are brought down to having good luck, because if her defensive power had stopped a few less attacks the game might have had a different result. All of these reasons have made her a personality that’s not fun to play against. And her powers are so different from anything else in the game that many players don’t believe she should be part of the game. She was even banned from the Retro format for this reason.
I first started playing Supreme West Kai in 2004 just after Baby Saga was released. She became my main deck with Black CS control and I continued using her throughout the rest of the game, improving the deck with each new saga and all the experience I gained with her. After the game ended in 2005 I continued to play with friends for several years. We started playing the Focused Z format again too and I played SWK in Orange MBS and an older form of Black CS. Then I developed the MWS patch and started online tournaments on Toptiergaming where we kept the game alive until 2010. Throughout these 6 years I never stopped playing the deck, gaining more experience with her. All this experience with her has shown me a very different side of Supreme West Kai that I think few people have taken the time to see.
Deck building can be incredibly simple if you want it to be. Don’t worry about defence, add in whatever you want to the deck because there’s extra room, and you’re done. But if you want to play Supreme West Kai at her best, there can be a lot more to it than that. For example, did you know that Orange and Red both have the majority of their good cards as odd numbers? Build the deck without thinking, and you’ll end up with an average of 70% odd cards. If the opponent knows that, they have a 70% chance of getting successful attacks against you. For this reason a good SWK deck should aim to have 50% odd and 50% even cards. The struggle of replacing good cards you want in your deck for something else just to balance the odd and even ratio, while not sacrificing any strength to the deck is not easy to do. At first I found this a lot more difficult than having to make room for defensive cards, something that every player is already used to.
If you want to make things even more complicated you could also think about how many allies and non-combat cards you have that are odd or even. What will be put into play quickly and stay out of the deck for the majority of the game? What cards will be removed from the game when used, and how many odd or even cards on average do you sensei in? Maybe a 50/50 split still isn’t going to stay balanced for long after the game starts.
You want this ratio as close to 50/50 as possible, because that’s going to leave you with the most freedom to manipulate it. Supreme West Kai’s regeneration power isn’t just a neat way to recover cards you’ve lost. It’s also a way to stack the deck in your favour. One of the most well-known strategies for dealing with SWK is to keep naming odd, or keep naming even. The thought process behind it is to stop the bad luck factor many people associate with SWK. You perform an attack and name odd, then SWK removes the top card showing even and stops the attack, and you perform another attack naming even just to see an odd card appear and stop 100% of your attacks. If you keep naming odd for the entire game, you’ll at least have 50% of your attacks successful… This is the strategy for people who play with or against SWK with no skill or strategy. If you keep naming odd against a good SWK player, they will shuffle 5 even cards back into their deck every combat. Most players won’t even pay attention to this. Your 50% chance of a successful attack will begin to drop very quickly until you maybe only have one successful attack each combat. In Expanded format, players can even choose what 3 cards will go back on top of their deck and in what order. It’s no surprise then when the opponent keeps naming odd and has their first 3 attacks stopped, while SWK is playing a hand full of odd numbered cards. If you play against SWK, never let them know what you’re going to call because as soon as they know that you’ll have lost the game.
Stacking can also work in your favour if you have too many cards in your remove from game pile, field, and discard pile of the same type of number. If you built your deck to be 50/50 but notice the cards out of your deck aren’t matching that ratio, then the cards in your deck won’t be either. And if the opponent isn’t telling you what they’re going to name before they do it then you need to shuffle back the right cards to keep your ratio balanced. This is the difference between playing Supreme West Kai with luck, and playing her with strategy and skill. You have to keep an eye on small details of the game that normally you would never think about, on top of everything that player’s normally think about. A good Supreme West Kai player will be thinking more about defence than anyone who can actually play defensive cards.
Supreme West Kai’s regen power has strategies of its own. Many just see it as an overpowered ability that allows her to regenerate better than a Namekian. I won’t argue that, especially for Focused Z. In Expanded the amount of cards makes less of a difference, but it’s still good. Other personalities will have attacks that can do more than 5 life cards which could make up the difference, but what makes SWK’s power so great is the ability to choose whatever cards she wants. The strategy you can use with this is something I love about her. The obvious thing to do is regen good cards so you can draw them later and use them again. More skilled player’s will combine SWK’s power with other cards to draw what they want immediately. Having Vegeta’s Quickness Drill in play means you can draw any of the bottom 6 cards of your discard pile. Draw this and Super Saiyan Effect early enough and you can keep recycling it back in your hand every combat so the opponent can’t attack for the entire game. With Heroic Drill, SWK can shuffle Confrontations back into your deck each turn and Heroic Drill will search for them again. Those are just two of my favourite examples. Players who know how to use her power will get so much more advantages out of it than simply recovering 5 cards each combat.
Throughout my time playing with Supreme West Kai I often played against the same people. They would regularly play against Supreme West Kai decks and the strategies against her started to improve as they did. Giving up and wanting her out of the game because she’s stupid and lucky is a one way to deal with her, but there are also a few others. Firstly, everything that I said above that a SWK player needs to think about should also apply to their opponent. You need to watch what cards are being shuffled back into their deck, watch what cards they have in their discard pile, remove from game pile, and on the field. If possible you need to get a look at their deck. Confirm they really do have a 50/50 ratio and keep track of the ratio at all times.
Then there’s tech. We had arguments on toptiergaming because some people wanted her banned. We argued they weren’t using tech. You can’t expect to beat something if you don’t use tech. Discard pile removal works incredibly well. For some reason the counter argument was that DP removal wasn’t worth putting in your deck, and no one should have to tech against a personality. Obviously everyone had forgotten about Stunned, but even the argument that discard pile removal isn’t useful against enough decks to be worth running had baffled me. Most decks with strategy will utilize the cards in their discard pile just as much as they do with the cards in their life deck. And if any deck is stopping you from winning, you should work on finding a way to beat it. Complete DP removal works well just to stop SWK’s regeneration, but the opponent can find a way to stack SWK’s deck in their favour too by only removing cards of a certain number. If they aren’t paying close enough attention they may end up shuffling the wrong cards back into their deck and making it easy for you to hit them.
Everything else about Supreme West Kai comes down to personal opinion. I personally don’t feel like there’s much difference between the luck of her defensive power, and the luck of drawing a defensive card. And having only 50% of your attacks successful in a combat isn’t as bad as getting blocked by a stop all and having none of your attacks successful, or a card ending combat before you can even do anything. The main difference is we’re used to the game working a certain kind of way, and Supreme West Kai changes that. It makes the game uncomfortable to play for many people and they don’t enjoy that. Maybe that’s enough of a reason to ban her from the game. Everyone should have fun and enjoy playing, win or lose. She probably should never have been made. But there is no other personality in the game who I could write this much about the strategy and skill involved with them, and that’s only for the MP cards. You still have another 82 cards left to add more strategy to the game.
Being one of the front runners of Top Tier Gaming’s “I Hate SWK fan club” I can say after years of being away from the game and recently returning that I can properly explain my feelings on her.
I played against a few in my locals in 2002 when the card was released…back in the day she wasn’t as bad to play against, because a lot of people didn’t run her to the optimal ability let alone keep the numbers 50\50. This made it a still annoying personality to play against, because of her own separate rulings. Stronger personalities who pushed around other decks could only hit her for base of 2 until she got down to 0, and high regeneration every turn is what made her just plainly unenjoyable as an opponent would have to play through it. Then to top it all off she could prevent damage which was terrible thrown on to her personal rules.
Expanded made her more of a difficult personality to play against, because of the play style changes. Goku Energetic which ended up being my best option against SWK because of constant discard pile removal just became a luck fest because even if they have no hand you’re still forced to have even\odd come up in your favor. So even if you had a hand that would overwhelm any other deck than SWK the issue was still being able to deal with her powers.
Worst time I dealt with those odds was at Michigan’s Top Tier Gaming tournament in 2005, I remember being paired up against Jarrett who was running SWK orange OVA. I got up to level 6 very quickly, got a Black Star DB 3 hand so I was entering combat with 7 cards in hand, drawing 4 more from Goku level 6 and having I want to say a total of 9 or 10 attacks all stopped that combat, because I named wrong on them all. After 3 attacks it can no longer be said that the deck was stacked against me, this became terrible luck, since there was no shuffling and no more of his top 3 that were on the deck after looking at top 6.
Then came the online top tier tournaments and those were a lot of fun, and I felt that I was one of the most consistent players by making nearly all if not every top cut of the tourneys that I played in and still had “that one deck” that I couldn’t beat and unfortunately couldn’t have someone who had the tools to beat said deck in the top cut be able to beat them. So much frustration came from those tournaments, because of the fact that I came so close so many times (expanded and Z only) to winning and getting either 2nd, 3rd, or 4th in too many of them. I honestly questioned myself as a player for a little bit, because of the fact that I just couldn’t win one for myself.
I know we had many discussions on SWK in the past about how it wasn’t luck vs how it was luck, because the opponent never had an idea what was the top cards of the life deck, so there was still a luck factor. Even if the number is 50\50 the non SWK players felt that we shouldn’t have had to tech for 1 character vs 1 deck type. While we prepped for deck types, SWK should never have been classified as a deck type, because to tech just for her you had to completely change up your Sensei or deck as a whole and then take away for you originally teched for. Now I feel that she would be a fair personality going by Retro rules because of how there are characters who now advance levels without having to gain 6 anger, and Baba who mills like none other.
The two decks that really had my number were: SWK Black CS and that one guy that only used Mai non TW ball ( which to this day I still think he got the deck leaked to him by Joe since he was always mad at TTG and he was bragging about how he made a vicious mai deck and then mysteriously 1 popped up, but that is so far in the past that it didn’t matter ). It wasn’t because of the deck it was because of how cocky and arrogant the player was who used it was. He had the attitude of “You can’t beat me, because I use mai ball and that makes me better than you.” and that made me and quite a few others on the site not like the guy because of how he conducted himself.
I apologize for the length of my rant, that shouldn’t take away from the fact that SWK was a great deck. Even after an errata which gave back some of the luck factor to the opponent of being forced to shuffle up to the bottom 5 cards at level 1 it gave everyone headaches to the point where it should have been banned and that is where the looping discussions happened. I remember the discussion revolving around these points:
SWK is unfair > SWK is beatable; just got to use tech to beat her > shouldn’t have to tech for just 1 personality > it isn’t tech if its for a personality > SWK isn’t just a personality; she is a specific deck type who has her own rule set and this is what makes SWK unfair (go back to the start)
Then after the errata it became more of a fair personality, because we weren’t having to play around the choice of cards that went back into the deck at level 1.
Haha yeah I remember that Mai player. I think his name was Jester. Very annoying… What I hated most was him being a MTG player, and trying to figure out the game with his knowledge of MTG. He would even quote the rule book from MTG while trying to explain why cards and combos should work the way he wanted them to. I think he might have come up with it on his own due to how bad the deck was when he first made it, and all the work he put into creating new combos and improving the deck. By the end of our tournaments I was praying Kurt’s Goku Saiyan CS deck would fight it because I didn’t want to go up against it. I think that’s one of the only DB decks Black SWK couldn’t consistently beat.
Banning SWK would have been the best way to go back on toptier. I disagreed at the time because of the arguments against her. As someone who was used to playing with her, I saw her luck with defence being similar to the luck of drawing a bad hand, and as a control player who techs everything, I couldn’t understand why people wouldn’t tech something they were losing to. It’s something I’d expect people to do back in real tournaments while Score was running the game. If you wanted to win, you had to build a deck that could do it. That along with waiting for Baz to make a virtual set that would help balance the game (which did not), made me feel she didn’t need to be banned for the game to be balanced. But it should never have been about balancing the game. She made the game less fun for people and that should have been enough of a reason to take her out of it. But of course then we’d all be complaining about Saiyan CS being too strong again haha.
What it really came down to was: Did you want a deck that could beat 90% of the field atleast 50% of the time or did you choose to tech against the two or three SWK decks to about a 70% chance to win against SWK with about a 30% chance of beating anything else. I remember trying to even out the hand and discard pile hate while I was running goku energetic because I didn’t want to be relying too much on hand destruction.
The Goku Saiyan CS\Goku Energetic\Mai non TW was a vicious circle. Kurt would beat Jester, Jester had auto win against me for whatever reason…I could sack into DB 3 with Goku’s Farewell and still lose. and energetic pretty much had enough hand destruction that Saiyan CS was just not a good match against it.
I remember easily going undefeated or X-1 in the majority of tourneys and thinking “this is the one that I will win” especially when it came to Z only, but then losing either in finals or top 4.
I have a friend who entered the game and bought this character. Being fairly new he didn’t have as large a library of cards as I did and after buying her he had a deck that literally made the games I played with him hard to the point that he stopped trying to make other decks because he found a way to fight against me. This was annoying because instead of trying to get better he took an easy route to winning. Sure after a while I got used to how SWK worked but that never made it less rage inducing. I’ve never had the chance to go to a tournament. I’ve never won championships. Heck, I don’t even play errata because I play the game more for fun and since I have no real reason to do so seeing as me and none of my friends have ever been to a tournament and none of us are at the level of competitive play as people such as yourselves we find no real point. Plus a lack of money really made it hard to enter that level of gaming. When it came to SWK the game was hard for no reason. This is mostly because I have no luck.
I would use my best decks, styles of every kind and enough tech for certain play styles that I would still have a better chance of beating my friend but because SWK was so powerful with her defensive capabilities, healing hand gain, and lack of actual power rating he would take a route that allowed for extra damage dealing and some unstoppable attacks and just pretty much end me and my other friends. We eventually told him we were going to use the errata on her and instead of being graceful about it he got angry because it was unfair when none of us had cards as strong as her. Even my deck which hardly lost had a hard time against her and after a while the only deck anyone had which stood a chance was “saiyan suicide” (the Drawing one) because we could remove more than 5 cards a turn with attacks while having a decent amount of stopping. We eventually moved on to using proxies and every card from every game and I made my own SWK deck which since I was better than him I showed why we Nerfed her to begin with. He finally understood that as much as it does take some skill to run her, his running her had no skill and was more based on how good she was and our lack of having cards. SWK doesn’t need to be banned so much as Nerfed. Give her a power level so when shes fighting strong opponents she can take more than 2 stages. Make her regen less cards. Make her not have the defensive ability. Just make her less better.
I’ve actually enjoyed playing her now that everyone is on an equal footing with cards. SWK is not as big a hassle mostly because when she is pulled out we can choose to either play something that is without errata, very broken, or just try to beat her with actual skill.
Cheese.
SWK was solid, but overrated and not worth banning, in old Z 1-3 anger was a fairly prevalent check against her and even without it she was far from an auto-win. In expanded she was just one of countless viable options.
Banning her was a knee-jerk reaction to a handful of whiny players, even though she didn’t do particularly well in the first ever Retro tournament (the only one she was legal in.) The tournament had an extremely wide variety of decks represented and only 2-3 SWK decks, the best of which came in top 4. Other tournaments only serve to further show how mortal she was. Adam Morabito took 2nd at a Toronto GKQ (which only had 40 players and SWK hadn’t even been errata’d yet.) Nobody did well with her at St. Louis or Vegas GKQ. I know of two players who used her for cut at GKI that year and they lost to Conbere’s Orange Tien in top 32 and top 16 respectively. That’s not an impressive, ban-worthy resume (she was legal for 3 major tournaments in old Z post-errata, and she didn’t do well in any of them.)
SWK only became a “problem” in the eyes of uncreative players/deck builders after the majority of the players quit and the ones left standing either used SWK or weren’t skilled enough to beat the players using it.
As for the “fun” argument, fun is a dumb subjective word that should never have any effect on rulings. The best communities leave it alone and design with other values and purposes in mind (communities like Smogon, as a modern example.) Bad fan communities are the only ones that literally try to be the fun police.
I enjoyed the article by the way, brought to light a lot of things modern players don’t think about. SWK decks are hard to build and play properly, and the margin for error with both building and playing her is pretty high. Lots of decision making and non-traditional deck-building strategies.
I think as soon as changing the CRD became an option for players, deck construction and metagaming started to decline. When Score was in charge of it most of us felt like we had no choice but to live with whatever the rules were, and do our best in the tournaments even if we weren’t happy with the rules. On Toptier, OCG, and with Retro too it’s become a lot easier for player’s to influence the changes to the rules so the game will fit how they want to play. In some ways the fresh environment with updated rules and new cards is good to keep everyone interested. In other ways I think it’s taken some of the skill out of the game.
It’s sad to think that players who are still around after 15 years will quit because a deck they don’t like isn’t viable anymore, or the format is slightly different from what they enjoy. It’s all similar enough that even if it isn’t your favorite, you should still be able to have fun in any format with practically any deck. No one who has stuck with the game for this long should just be able to quit that easily. But for some reason they do. We’ve seen it right through toptier, OCG, and I’m sure it’s also happened with retro. If players don’t have things exactly how they want them then they’ll quit, even after over a decade of playing the game. With the playerbase so small now it’s something we can’t afford. It killed toptier and OCG, and Retro needs to be careful of it too. The game has to cater to whatever the majority finds the most fun for it to stay alive.
I played a fair amount against a Blue WGS and black expanded SWK. Use Namekian Scouting to put her top 3 in any order I wanted. Hit hard. Rinse and repeat. She’s good but not unbeatable. Kill her rule, let her be just a normal 1-3 and she still wouldn’t be as good as many of the Retro personalities.
I agree, when I first started playing I didn’t even know she had her own rules built a deck with her and she got destroyed. Her rejuv can’t keep up with a massive beat down that many decks can throw out.
I don’t know much about the Retro personalities, but I think SWK would become even more powerful if you took away her blocking power and left the rest of her unchanged. You get an MP for stasis ball with Z stages who can regen any card they want. And then the combo mentioned above with her shuffling power would start to include cards like TIAWT in her hand every combat. You’d have to do something about her shuffling powers too. And I think if you go that far to change both her rule and her power, she becomes a completely different card.
*Disclaimer: Not the actual creator of SWK, but was involved in the influence of her creation.*
I think that when you take the game at his highest levels, the elites playing among the elites, SWK is fine. She’s really really really really good, don’t get me wrong. But there are decks and techniques that, piloted by extremely skilled players, should be able to handle battling against her with both Survival and Control. There are ways you can tech against her to help, and those super nutty about deck construction could even figure out mid-game wither “odds” or “evens” was the right call.
That being said, this really only applies to those that float on the top. Your McGraths, your Morabitos, your Valdezes and Tebows. But these players are (were) “the 1%” Honestly, they could handle anything. But for the other 99%, SWK is a bitch. And it’s not that she’s just strong at what she does, but it’s the feeling you get sitting across from her. The feeling that you “could do nothing about it”, while not fully real, controls that player’s perception. IMO, kinda falls in the PTT territory. And since the Retro group’s focus is for people to have an enjoyable environment and have fun playing, it’s ok for her to not be in the Retro environment. Out of all the changes, this should get the least amount of flak.
Chippy
Odd… unless it’s Even.
Phil nailed the entire topic on the head with 1 comment. SWK was always beatable, and at the end of Z triple victory or even double victory 1-3 decks kept SWK in check like none other. Which at the time made a lot of sense and to this day 1-3 saiyan broly is still played so I don’t see why she is currently banned from retro’s format, especially after giving Goten ways to advance levels without being having to gain anger.
When GT came along 1-3 victory became a thing of the past and control became more common to see being played by the 1% as Chippy put it. This is when SWK became more viable, because no one really went to Z method of anger when they can just use a GT card effect to advance a level.
Back when playing DBZ I was someone who I would have considered to be better than the average player, but not elite by any means. I really just hated how there was 1 character whom came with quite a few special rules just to play her or against her. Sure the rules were pretty simple: couldn’t run blocks, couldn’t end combat, had to remove the top card from the game when she was attacked. had to name even or odd to see if your attack hit, and her physical attack table base was 2 except when she was at 0.
I think my biggest gripe was the solution of beating her according to players who used her, which was “tech against her” … which was the worst thing that could be said, because she wasn’t a deck type where you could add in Winter Countryside and Cell’s Threatening Position to keep anger in check; Huh, Black Water Confusion Drill, No, Really Drill for dragon ball decks. etc. She was a being that you couldn’t really play around, unless going with an anger deck or speed ball deck; something that didn’t require you throwing attacks at her and didn’t have a normal power which could be dealt with. The best thing that could be done is keeping her at level 2, where she doesn’t have the regeneration powers of levels 1 and 3.
Was she good in Z, yes. More viable in expanded, still yes. Did she deserve to be banned because she was sucking the fun out of the game for some people…definitely not.
.
Not just some people, a lot of people. Myself included. I had nothing to do with her banning, and didn’t even know of this site’s existence when she was, but when I came here and read that I wanted to high-five the retro guys.
Still really want to do that study on the value of blocking and why SWK, statistically, as a personality, is completely off the charts in raw power.
SWK left a bad taste in my mouth after leaving Philly 04. I played Preston in Top 32 there, he was running SWK Orange, and I was obv Broly Energetic. Id check discard pile for numbers, and I ended up landing I believe, two successful attacks on her, and both were physical (Z base, they did pretty much nothing). I had two separate combats where Id have flipped any other players entire deck over with damage if they didn’t have a super block. I even had a double Ki Push hand, which in Broly Energetic, starting at Lv 3, you get 11 attacks with personality power and the two Ki Push, then whatever else is in your hand.
There wasnt a whole lot that I could do outside of looking at card numbers in the discard/rfg pile. I obv had a TON of dp removal since I was running Energetic, but that doesn’t matter if my attacks aren’t landing.
That game was purely me losing at “Choose heads or tails” There wasn’t one strategic thing I could have done to win that game since I lose due to a random rule that is found no where else in the game. There was no fun, skill, or enjoyment in any part of that match.
Fun is absolutely a legitimate argument. I knew people who stopped playing locally in Cincinnati as half of the decks there were SWK, and they were sick of playing flip the coin every round. Card games are meant as entertainment. If those players had just stopped Z altogether (I think some may have), then Score failed as a company. If they let something affect players in a negative way, then they will lose money. The CCG boom was happening around that time too. There were plenty of card games popping up that these players could get into. Why leave in (Or even create) something that could make players not excited to play the game. The point of these companies is to make money, isnt it? Dont you want the people playing your game to want to play it as much as possible? The more they play, the more product they will inevitably want. They should want to do everything they can to keep players from transitioning into another game. Hell, DBZ stole me from Magic. Hasbro had just bought WotC, and the quality of cards in the game took a nosedive, except for the few insanely broken cards (Skullclamp, mainly). The game became to narrow minded, with Hasbro trying to force out decks based on themes, more pushing the artifact (Obv with Mirrodin, Ravager decks mainly), then with creatures types becoming far more relevant. They did their best to kill combo decks too. Tried to make it just beatdown vs control, and not giving much to control for a while..It was not fun, so I found a more fun option. Im not going to waste my money and time on something I wont enjoy.
Are tournaments serious and competitive? Yes, they are. But you can enjoy them and have fun without losing that. I traveled to events, and took them seriously. But I never would have wasted the money on gas, hotel, conventions, tournaments, etc if I wasn’t having fun, or enjoyed the competition.
Combats lose strategy. There’s no baiting blocks, there’s no reading the opponent, and holding a block for an if successful effect that you think they have. You just vomit your hand out in the most damage efficient way, and roll the dice with your fingers crossed. That’s not an enjoyable card game
Card games already have luck as a factor in them with drawing unknown cards off the top of the deck. I get that there is an underlying skill to building the deck correctly, and using her shuffle back for both correct card choices AND card number choices. But at the end of the day, you still have to name odd or even correctly enough to win a game.
There’s nothing major on the line in these Retro events. These are to get people together who enjoy the game. I’ve only played at GenCon. If I knew I would have to deal with SWK, then guess what, I can find 100 better things to do at GenCon and then play Z with friends whenever I want. Im not trying to win anything in these events. If I were, Id probably play something other than Blue Buu Farewell (It’s a good deck, but there’s def better, I just enjoy it). Im there to enjoy a game I grew up loving. Im choosing to spend my time playing Z at a place that has enough attractions to bring in 30-40,000 people. If I wanted to not enjoy a card game, there’s plenty of YGO there.
These are all obv very biased opinions since Ive had terrible run ins with SWK (That’s not the only time it’s happened, but Top 32 would be the highest profile time it happened). But I think they are legitimate. The “fun” argument is obviously far more valid now as there isnt a true tournament circuit with great prizes, and people playing to get into GKI. Those things were enough to just suck it up and deal with her for the more hardcore players.
It wasn’t SWK’s regeneration that was a bitch it was her special rule set. Getting rid of the DP isn’t very good tech at all. SWK was good because she could run a 50 card deck with all attacks, and no defense, without any drawbacks. She would simply attack, attack, attack, while blocking 50% of your own attacks for free. If you performed four to six attacks in a single combat then she would wind up blocking two to three attacks. They might as well have printed a card power that said draw three cards.
As far as her not making tops in tourneys goes, she didn’t make tops because people ran decks specifically to beat her. Whether or not you get tops in a tourney has little to do with whether something is overpowered. In fighting games people make teir lists based off of which characters beat which other characters most consistently. Characters like Vega and Sagat are top teir because when you put two equally skilled players together, and have one choose the top teir character, the top teir character wins most of the time. Nevermind that the guy who won the tournament was running Ryu. It doesn’t change the fact that Sagat and Vega were top teir. The same goes for SWK and her not making tops in tourneys.
Z Warriors Gather ally was equally stupid and annoying. The game just started with 21 allies on the field, and if you weren’t lucky enough to draw Cell’s presence the game was over.
OVA/Carpet decks were also extremely annoying. Since OVA/Carpet were all their attacks they didn’t need to worry about defense, and would just throw in all the control cards they could. They would simply stall the game out until they had fifteen drills in play, and then use Heroic Drill/Broly’s Evil Drill to grab Confrontation and Staredown. After that they were free to hit you with OVA FTW. The only way to beat it was to pray you happened upon both copies of BST before they wiped you in a single attack.