Talk about a blast from the past! I was going through some of my old belongings and I found the deck list for my Black Yajirobe deck that I used to win a Dragon Ball GT Expanded Regional at the DBZ Atlanta Comic Con event way back in 2004. There were 128 players in that event. This is the unaltered deck list, and it is exactly as I ran it ten years ago where the most recent set released was the Baby Saga. Since I recently added all the Dragon Ball GT cards to the library, I figured that I’d share this classic winner.
Yajirobe, Retired Lv. 1
Yajirobe Lv. 2
Yajirobe, the Hero Lv. 3
Yajirobe Lv. 4
Black Energetic Mastery
Deck Size: 53
Dragon Balls (7)
Earth Dragon Balls 1-7 (Alt 3)
Event/Combat (12)
Epic Battle of Saiyans
Pure Defense
Dazed
Time is a Warrior’s Tool
Startled x2
Trunks Energy Sphere x3
Dream Fighting x3
Drills (6)
Caught Off Guard Drill x2
Goku’s Capturing Drill x2
Victorious Drill
Black Mischievous Drill
Energy Combat (1)
Energy Lob
Physical Combat (3)
Earth Dragon Ball Capture x3
Locations (2)
Majin Buu’s New House x2
Non-Combat/Setups (17)
Teaching the Unteachable Forces Observation
Where There’s Life There’s Hope
Initiative
Releasing the Sword
Long Journey
Don’t You Just Hate That
Bulma’s Scouter
Goku’s Lucky Break
Vegeta’s Plans
Mommy’s Coming Dear
Powerful Followers x2
Hercule’s Dream Sequence x2
Black Power Up x3
One of the first things you may notice is that I do not run a Sensei. This is because I am a badass. I was also concerned about the Red Style at the time with cards like Red Annihilation. Since no Sensei really particularly helped me, and could potentially be a vulnerability, I just chose to go without. I don’t know if I would make that same decision again.
The other huge weakness of the deck was it had no way to stop focused attacks. At the time, this wasn’t really much of a problem since there weren’t many viable focused attacks to be fearful of and GT hadn’t introduced focused attacks that did ungodly amounts of damage yet.
The strategy was simple and very adaptable thanks to Yajirobe, Retired’s power. Either end combat when you can, fetching Black Power Up if you are caught without a combat ender for some reason or get a Hercule’s Dream Sequence (which is neither Limit 1 or restricted so can be targeted by Yajirobe) if you can’t end combat or in the rare instance you want to stay in combat to Ball out with some of your Dragon Ball searchers.
It’s a pretty straightforward deck, but there are two stand-out cards worth mentioning:
Majin Buu’s New House pretty much puts the entire game in your hand. Being able to scope out your opponent’s hand lets you know what cards you need in order to have a safe combat. The look-at-the top six rule added in GT just put this way over the top. With the House in play and especially on defense, you would have to have extraordinarily bad draws to come undone.
Black Mischievous Drill is the other stand-out that helped you just shut down other Ball decks, and even helped thin your deck for a quick ball out (for example, if your opponent played just two non-combats, you could easily go through close to a quarter of your deck) plus you made more targets for Yajirobe, Retired’s power. It was only one of two Black Style cards I bothered to run in the deck, and I was amused that both were reprinted in Panini America’s new set.
Which leads me to the choice of Black Energetic Mastery. I only ran the Black Style so I could cycle Black Power Up, and the deck was solid enough that really the Mastery (and Sensei) were completely irrelevant. Black Energetic Mastery was pretty much the only choice available because it had the passive (and incredibly useful) power to limit the cards (and options) my opponent could keep from turn to turn. There was absolutely no way for me to trigger the leveling portion of the mastery’s power, which was perfectly fine by me. My second choice probably would’ve been the Cell Saga Black Style Mastery, but it wouldn’t have added anything of value to the deck.
So there you have it. It doesn’t look like much, but this deck won a 100+ person event and earned me a paid trip to the GKI, three Golden Tickets, a foil version of the deck (which I didn’t get until a year later and was a completely different deck), $250 and a box of GT. Not a bad haul, it makes me really miss the old days of fierce competition.
At the 2004 DBZ Atlanta Regionals with some of my buddies. It’s amazing how different I looked back then (far right).
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Later, BroZ
Haha this is awesome! great to see old expanded decklists again. I wish there was a place to talk expanded format I still love it.
Wow… Was no one running Turmoils or were you just getting the luck of the draw and getting rid of them?
The one loss (I remember) in swiss was from a CiT that I couldn’t do anything about. My first COGD always named CiT unless it was obvious you didn’t run it. The deck was so quick, you usually hit a COGD or a counter House pretty quickly. Even without non-combats, the deck was not defenseless.
I still feel, even after all this time, that GT ruined the game (and Kid Buu Saga lead us there in preparation)
2021 It’s time for score only, swapping mastery for cell saga and Epic Battle for Vegeta’s Smirk