Generation 2 – Enter the Elliott

Last time on Dragon Ball Z: Score Edition – The customer service team has come back from the World Championships triumphant, yet un-triumphantly losing the office battle for the soul of the game. The head of the games division and the tournament director quit the company, leaving a gaping whole as the department continued to run with its head cut off. But who is this new Chaz Elliott guy? Why does he smell of scotch and talk about “smoking fags”? And will the customer service team convince Jim Ward to see the light? All this and more on the next Dragon Ball Z… Score Style.

Warning

First, I apologize about the length. There is alot to talk about in this time period, and this is just the brief version. If I wrote it all out, I would never get to see my girlfriend. Also, there may be some mild language, as I write how I talk. If you are under the age of 13, go download some porn. Seriously, you came to the wrong site and need to be cultured. This place is for us folk that were playing with cardboard crack while you were still hanging with Barney and watching Blue’s Clues.

A New Leader

So we’re sitting in our cubicles doing our daily routine of answering a bajillion rules questions about the game when Larry Blackwell shows up to introduce us to someone new. Beside him was a man in his 30’s-40’s, with that style of goatee that immediately let you know he was one of those stiffs that sip their lattes in a Seattle Starbucks or similar coffee house, a smell of smoke so strong you already knew he was going to eventually die of lung cancer, and an accent strikingly similar to Scotty from Star Trek. He was quickly hired as the head of the games division, which is when we got to better know the man.

The give you a little background, Chaz Elliott had previously worked for Wizards of the Coast as their brand manager. If you are a fan of Magic: The Gathering, then the fact that he’s one of the guys responsible for the entire Weatherlight story arc might mean something to you. He’s also a remarkably talented sculptor. At one point in time he was known as one of the best 3 living sculptors in the world, and even had his own line of minatures (which is what he did best).

Seeing his house filled with all the different sculpts molded with painstaking detail shows not only how great of an artist he was, but also how he was such a bastard for detail. He was a master critique-r, with eagle eyes that would search out for any and all flaws that could be found. This lead him to a very heavy micro-management style similar to that of Larry Blackwell, which could be a major reason why the two gentlemen worked so well together to get so much done. But, this also had the unfortunately side effect of pissing people off, as no one likes to hear where they are screwing up, let alone needing ever step you do signed off by someone. It all depended on how they reacted to criticism – Some people saw him as an asshole, while others (like myself) used the information to improve themselves. Think of it like a verbal report card, using it to improve your weaknesses by finding out what they are.

Chaz stepped up to the head of the division around the time Frieza Saga was finishing up. He kept an eye on all of us, as he was beginning to flesh out what would eventually become the ship that he was piloting. Trunks Saga was about a month to two months in development when we reached December of 2000. It was at this time that Chaz really took the reigns of the division and started to change things to the Score that everyone eventually came to know.

Transformation

There’s alot things to talk about here, so I’ll start with the personnel aspect and a life lesson, followed by all of the changes to the game. It was in December of 2000, 6 months after I began working for Score, that everyone in Customer Service got a promotion. Seeing many spaces to be filled in the company and a young capable staff just answering emails, he decided to pass around a few more hats to everyone. Joshua Minnon was promoted to Organized Play Director, I was promoted to Lead Game Developer, and Josh McManus go “Head of” added to his title. While there are various stories of how I was able to earn this position, but I’ll tell you the real secret of getting the position you want.

The true secret is a mix of hard work, open proactivity, and working next to someone worse than the average person for the job. Now, I love Josh McManus (in a purely heterosexual way) and he is fun as hell to hang with at raves or parties, but he is not a strong worker. Often he would goof off listening or looking for the latest techno, talking about the latest drama in life, consistently come in late to work, or just going at a slow pace. On the other hand, I quickly whisked through the 100-200 emails I needed to do by lunch. Whenever I finished a job, I’d walk into Chaz’s office and say “I’m done. Anything else?”. I’d then go do what Chaz tasked and return saying, “I’m finished. Anything else?” As long as I kept my head to the ground, busted my ass doing my job and let everyone else go about doing things the way they did, I was on the fast track to moving up. Honestly, I don’t ever know if I was ever compared to Josh Minnon, since McManus sat between us like a little barrier. And that’s how I got my promotion, in my humble opinion. All I had to do was be a good worker and sit next to someone that wasn’t. If you walk away with just one lesson from all this stuff I’m writing, walk away with that. You’ll never need to backstab people or do dirty tricks if you strive and succede in being better than who you would be compared to.

On top of all this, Joshua Minnon and I were very vocal in pointing out the various things that were wrong with the TCG. We were a bit more humble while Jim Ward was in town, but we did let our opinions known. Going into January of 2001, we had Chaz was convinced we needed a drastic overhaul if we were ever going to “save the game”. Little did many people know that Score still had a huge inventory of Saiyan Saga and $$$-wise wasn’t succeeding. So we went to work changing up the game and playtesting it (something the game hadn’t received since launch). The first change we made was to help fight the very same deck that won the World Championships – we had to hurt combat ending. So, we made the simple change that Non-Combat cards needed to be used during Combat. This change alone DRASTICALLY changed the way the game was played. With a few bans and restrictions, the deck still existed but was on a much more level playing field. Little did we know at the time that we could have made a tweaked version under the new rules and still have a dominant deck.

We also had a big problem with Tokui-Wazas in the fact that they weren’t worth it. Only getting +1 to your Power Up Rating was not worth the sacrifice of sticking yourself to only 1 fighting style. So, Joshua Minnon came up with the idea of Mastery Cards, spawned off the same line of thinking as Legend of the Five Ring’s Strongholds. And as the beginning Score tradition, each of us got to make a Mastery Card and 9 other cards (for a total of 10) to be put into the game. Minnon got the Black style, McManus got the Red Style, and I got to design for the Orange Style. This may have also been why the Saiyan Style got a whopping 2 cards in the set – with all of the restructuring going on, no one was specifically “tied” to that fighting style. The Saiyan Decks we made in house were still really good (mostly fueled by the new Saiyan Mastery of pimpness), but the lack of attention probably was what happened. It also explains a little bit why the Blue Mastery sucked so bad, nobody was “on it” at the time besides Jim. I don’t remember who designed the rest of the Masteries, but I do know that Jim Ward had already been planning to introduce the Namekian style in the Trunks Saga.

But wait, what happened to Namek Saga? Wasn’t it supposed to come out right after Frieza Saga??? Well, it was supposed to but that was another change that Chaz instituted. When the beginning redesigns were being done on the game engine, the Trunks Saga was getting ready to come our or was already hitting the airwaves. Chaz knew that, by the time we got the Namek set out and produced the Trunks set, Score would be way behind the TV series. We needed to “catch up” with the TV show. And thus began the neverending quest of Score trying to catch FUNimation and even surpass them. In order to begin this catchup, the Namek Saga was change too Trunks Saga.

It was because of the game engine changes and the change to Trunks Saga that delayed the expansion for 6 months. Jim Ward had to go and do the image capturing for Trunks Saga and handle all of the designer production work, while the rest of us hammered out the game engine. Among many of the changes:

• Dragon Balls – Jim ward already designed the newest set of Dragon Balls, but they were going to replace the Earth Dragon Balls. We changed it so they were 2 different sets, and then added the rule where you could only run 1 set of Dragon Balls when things got to abusive.
• Namekian Style – You know all of those cards that say “Up to 8 copies in a deck”? They originally allowed unlimited copies of the card in your deck, ala Decipher. But this got neutered because of a deck that I designed. With the Namekian Style Mastery letting you power up to full for drawing a Namekian Card, I just made a real basic deck that used TRASH (Time is a warrior’s tool, nappa’s physical Resistance, nappa’s energy Aura, vegeta’s physical Stance, chiaotzu’s psychic Halt), a set of Dragon Balls, and 3 other Namekian cards. The key was the Namekian energy attack that lowered anger 2 levels. That was the only attack in the deck I ran, and then used the Namekian stop a physical and Namekian stop an energy. This simple deck wrecked all the other decks we were testing with. I argued that it was the Mastery that was too powerful, and being able to gain all of your power stages every turn by setting your deck up this way was too good. If I only gained, say, 4 power stages then I wouldn’t be able to feed off of the “unlimited energy attack” and physical decks could still hamper my ability to sling energy around. Minnon and McManus argued that it was the fact that I could run as many of that energy attack as I wanted that put the deck over the top. If I could only run 8 of them, I couldn’t fight anger decks as well and would still have to add some variance to the deck. In the end, the majority won and all the Namekian cards were limited to 8 instead.
• Chiaotzu’s Psychic Halt – This card was actually going to be a promo! At the very last moment, after begging and pleading with Chaz, it got switched into the Trunks Saga main set and replaced some crummy card.
• Defense Shields – This rule was only created because of needing to explain how the Orange Drill in Saiyan Saga could “Stop an unstopped attack”. We thought it was a good explanation and we could work off of it as a new mechanic (even though the idea wasn’t really touched again until the Cell Games Saga).
• Multiplayer Rules aka Fast Combat Sheet – We never saw anybody play by these rules or reference them, so we took them out. Other little tiny BS rules like this were pulled, but the “Drill Color Mismatch” rule stayed because of variance in starter decks and booster packs.
• Nappa/Vegeta Rule – Zapped because they were no longer the strongest
• Hole Fixing – Based off of our experience in customer service, we knew what questions alot of people asked us about. So we tried to apply this knowledge to make certain things a bit more clear in the rules.

In the end, we felt that all of our hard work had finally paid off. As a team, we were much happier with where the game was and felt that the time spent in getting the game there was well spent. We ended our development around March-April-ish, with the rest of the time spent getting the game through the production process.

Newbies

It was at the beginning of the Android Saga development that alot of new things happened. First, we hired 2 additional people to the staff that would forever etch a legacy into the games division. The first person we hired was a playtester to help upkeep the development on the game. We quickly reached out and tapped a good friend of ours from the Pokemon Tournaments/Pojo.com days – IQ, otherwise known as Israel Quiroz (rhymes with Gyros). For those that did not know, I was slightly big during the Pokemon TCG days, and both of us were writers for Pojo.com for the Deck Garage and magazine. He was a great competitor and was very good at TCG’s, so we thought he would be a great fit. While not necessary my subordinate or my lackey, IQ worked directly with me in designing, tweaking, updating, and managing all of the inhouse decks and playtesting.

A little bit later, Chaz realized we needed an editor. While our first pick for editor was almost Scott McGough, he was offered to write some novels for Magic: The Gathering and took that job instead. So we hired the next guy that walked through the door, William Harper. Will had alot of experience writing technical manuals for VCRs and remote controls and such, so we thought he would be perfect for the job in keeping our card list consistent and our rulings intact. Mr. Harper himself was a religious-turned-agnostic because of some ways life treated him as he got older. He was just getting out of a nasty divorce from his super crazy wife and had to be a father of 2 children while still trying to recover from the rediculous debt his wife gave him (she was crazy AND evil). Needless to say, Will was a good guy and I respected how he handled life’s lemons. It wasn’t until much later that we realized we had a round peg in a square hole.

Jim Ward had just turned in the Android Saga playtest list, and IQ and I went to town with the initial testing. But once again, Jim Ward’s set list was alot of poop. Tons of cards that ended combat with no direction and nothing really new. But things had changed since Frieza and Trunks Saga. Chaz had a bit more trust in me now that he had seen me work for 6 months, and let me loose. Unlike Frieza and Trunks Saga, where we got to change a handful of cards (Besides the cards we made, I think we got to change 4-5 of Jim’s cards in Trunks Saga), I had full control of the set’s card list and could make any changes as I pleased. I was still only allowed to change up to 10 of the card images in the set, but anything that had to do with the ext on the card was fair game.

I’ll always remember the Androids Saga as my first real set. IQ and I rehashed 40% at least in the first night and brought alot of focus into the deck archtypes. After being able to play with all of the styles with the new Trunks rule set and masteries, we knew where the direction of each fighting style needed to go. We created the “If you declared a Tokui-Waza” effect so that we could make style specific cards to reinforce these ideas. I did research at planetnamek.com (RIP) and other DBZ sites so I could try to put appropriate power levels on characters that made sense, since Akira Toriyama no longer had any official power levels. I put an entire set of “Terrible Wounds” variants into the set to help fight what I started to see as the “anger” problem. Terrible Wounds was pretty poopy for what it needed to do, but it just needed a not-so-easy clause to get knocked off. These cards would help decks tech against anger without needing to devote a huge deck space to it, while forcing anger decks to diversify a little by now having to “solve” these new conditions. Anger could still win, and more diverse decks could be made with the extra deck space. I even got to make a new card type – Battlegrounds.

This card type shows some of the difficulties that comes with working with a licensor. When Jim Ward captured the images for the battlegrounds, some of them were sites of battles while others were real places (Like Roshi’s Island). FUNimation, or more specifically Toei, had a problem with this because we were giving the label “Battleground” to some places in the DBZ universe where no fights had actually taken place. So, Score responded by just wanting to change the name to “Locations”… But FUNimation didn’t like this because some of the locations were just random places in the countryside where they fought. In the end, we had our hands tied and the only way we could move forward with the approval process is to do both, and thus Battlegrounds AND Locations were made. While at first I thought this was a pretty crappy decision, I ended up learning to like it in the end. While both “card types” did the exact same thing, I could create effects that could target them separately. This duality was half-planned, half-accidental in later lists.

Speaking of approval processes, FUNimation was great to work with. But when you have to deal with a company overseas like Toei, things get a little more sticky. We had to most random stuff unapproved for minor reasons, ranging from some of the surnames on characters, the “Future Trunks” symbol for any images from the Future Trunks storyline (or the lack-thereof in the beginning, and thus why it was added), and other pansy things. In fact, the only parts of a card that didn’t get touched by the approval process in all of DBZ’s lifespan was the card number, the rarity symbol, and any text in the textbox of a card. And I’m sure that Score is not the only company that has had to make these types of changes because of a licensor’s decision. Hopefully this should help shed some light on just how much (or little) power a company has when working with someone else’s intellectual property(IP).

Another event of note is that I started the terrible habit of smoking cigarettes during the Android Saga. As the Lead Game Developer, I had to understand the source material and make sure that we included all of the important stuff and didn’t leave anything out. We were already having people complain about the Ginyu Force being skipped in Frieza Saga, so we weren’t going to screw up again. So I had to watch all of the Android Saga (I had already seen the super short Trunks Saga) from start to finish. And when I mean start to finish, I’m talking non-stop gorge-fest. FUNimation supplied us with all of the tapes and DVDs we needed, so there weren’t even commercial breaks. Now this would be cool and all if it was at the parts where they were fighting and beating the hell out of each other. But I was in the beginning of the Android Saga… They start by looking for the Androids and just talk about where they are going to search, or boring pictures of them looking! And then, oh no, someone shows up! And he throws a punch! Now, everybody talk about that one punch for the next 15 minutes! Gasp! Aww! He’s Over 9000!!!!! Seriously, this is the worst part of the Dragon Ball Z storyline, moving at a ridiculously slow pace and going absolutely nowhere. I swear my brains were melting out of my ears.

During this entire time I was watching this in Chaz’s office, since it was the only room with the TV and tech on it. And Chaz was an avid smoker. Up until this point I had been somewhat “straight edge” – except for a few shots or beers I had been off of anything “bad” like weed or nicotine. I had gone out with him on many of his smoke breaks but never really had an urge to smoke. To each their own, but it just wasn’t for me. We even joked about the different names for things between Europe and the US even though its English, like the fact that cigarettes are called “fags” in Europe and while Fanny Packs are normal vocabulary in the US, a “fanny” is something on a female that cannot be spoken of on a non-NC-17 site. But at this point in time, I just couldn’t take it. My brain friend from DBZ-talk, I needed an escape. So when Chaz went out on one of his smoke breaks, I tagged along to get away from the TV. I can’t explain what clicked next, but I asked for a cigarette. “I need some healing after all that mind-numbing I went through in there.” Chaz even warned me that I was taking the first step down the dark path and I shouldn’t do it. But I grabbed the pack and pulled out that long sleek cigarette from its chamber, a pearly white Benson and Hedge’s 100’s stick with its end ablaze. Chaz was right even to this day, as I’ve tried to quit multiple times (longest was a little over a year, but most are a month) but still just went to smoke a fag in the middle of this sentence.

I’ll always have fond memories of the Android Saga set, from the late night playtesting and debating, drinking down the Red Bulls and taking an occasional break of office Nerf Wars, to just doing all of the fundamental work of a designer for the first time. I was so proud of my work that I still have a slice of the Android Saga booster wrapper (pre-boostered). I have it hanging on my wall next to my “Chippy Ears” hat that I wore at some world championships and my lone Limited Edition box of Trunks Saga (still in its shrink wrap and a 50% chance of having an Ultra Rare). I finally got to make something my own, published and new. I was becoming a game designer.

To top off a few questions from the message boards, Tien and Yamcha were given similar LVL 4 power ratings because, well, they were pretty equal. While I shall always be a Tien fan, Yamcha did catch up to him and surpass him (if you believe the World Games/Celestial Games storylines where Yamcha was wrecking EVERYBODY).

The last note I’ll make on Android Saga was the beginning playtesting philosophy that Score took on that held for a few years. The idea was if we could find one deck that could beat a “dominant deck”, that our players would eventually find this deck and make a better version of it. For example, stasis decks began to begin a rise around this time, and would later become a mighty force in the tournament scene. We had 4 different variants of stasis we tested ourselves in-house. But, we had found a deck that could 85% of the time beat Stasis without actually using Stasis elements. It was an Orange Drill Lockdown deck that truly focused on board control AND discard control (A Hero Is Down FTW!). It was easily able to handle any victory condition stasis tried to do while either winning through Dragon Balls or by survival with a few of the fat energy attacks thrown in. The deck did have some trouble against survival based decks, to the point that we had to add Earth Dragon Ball 7 and Dream Sequence to the deck as “get out of hell” cards against super aggressive decks, but we felt that in the end it was ok. We had a “triangle”: Survival lost to Stasis, Stasis lost to Lockdown, Lockdown lost to Survival. We never wanted to influence the playerbase, and thus why we never released decklists and always had the enigmatic “Well, we have a deck in house that beats it” response.

In hindsight, I understand this is not the most correct philosophy. But we felt that our players would eventually be smarter than us and find the same decks we would find – it was just a matter of time. As a plus, this definitely helped playtesting when you just have 1 developer and 1 playtester needing to handle it all. Later, when we had more cash and a different division philosophy altogether so we could have more playtesters, this would change.

World Championships

So we were preparing for the divisions next World Championships (for those that haven’t kept track, this one is #2) and we were brainstorming how we were going to run things. Android Saga had finished development and it looked like the set was going to hit stores around the same time as the tournaments. So we came up with what I humbly believe is the coolest tournament gimmick in TCG history – We would give the Top Cut a box of Android Saga each BEFORE THE SET WAS EVEN RELEASED to fix up their decks before the single elimination rounds. Seriously, how cool is that? And we let nobody know about it until it happened. It was our grand secret and we already knew it would be a success, seeing everybody drool over our card countdown of the Android Saga on the main website.

So our World Championships grew in size, with 130-150 people showing up. The combat ending decks, Stasis as they were becoming to be called, made an appearance but not as much of a splash as it had been before. The big name players were coming out of the woodwork, with notable characters like Brian Valdez and the Fantatics Network crew, the Terra-Haut 5 (don’t know if I spelled that correctly), Bag of Bean’s players and many more with Super Saiyan sized egos. The tournament went along like a normal expected Score tournament at the time – no computers, no blowhorns, all raw manpower. Pairings were yelled at the top of our lungs going from match to match, laying out our little sheets of paper that kept track of the player’s match records. We even had to do the tiebreaker math by name on note cards, which gave a few hour delay between the final swiss round and the Top Cut announcements.

When we announced the Top Cut, everyone was in anticipation of who the game’s new top players. Who could talk the talk and walk the walk? But no one, and I mean no one, expected our Android Saga surprise. I believe there is still a brown stain in the carpet in GenCon’s old convention hall where we made the announcement, marked forever by how much our players crapped themselves when we put the fresh, new, unreleased boxes in their hands. Players quickly tore into booster packs, shredded silver and red flying into the skies, just to see what was in the entire set. For many, the fact that they still needed to think about how they needed to update their decks for the next day was the furthest thing from their minds.

This night was the first night I had been asked to autograph someone’s card. You have no idea how weird it feels to do this. I haven’t ever really considered myself famous (then and now), so the thought that someone wanted me to sign something… Seriously? Me? But, I wasn’t about to say no, so a signin’ I went. I even added my little insignia to my cards, a kind of “proof” that it was me since my handwriting is really illegible and my signature can come in 1 of 10 different flavors when I write it (all without my control or consent). For those that really want to know about the little symbol, it was a cheezy quick way of writing my nickname really fast that I had made while bored in school one day. Every letter of my nickname appears somewhere in the symbol (thus why the dot is needed on top… i). I know, pretty dorky, but it became as much of a staple as my name itself. And only when someone’s been a real dick (or super drunk as in Keith’s case) that I would ever secretly deviate from this pattern, as to “not make it official” or some stupid drunk thought like that.

The next day our Top Cut brought their new decks to the table. Some modified their existing decks, while others were able to make new ones from scratch. With the way the set size was designed, a player should have received at least 1 of every rare (with a few duplicates), and enough common and uncommon cards to have something to work with. One of the major impacts of the new Android Saga boxes being added was its effect on anger decks. Android Saga came with a set of “Terrible Wounds variants” that I put into the set, which made everybody run from anger. It was an interesting mind game on our Top Cut players. There were enough “Terrible Wounds” that you didn’t want to run an anger deck, or should you run the gambit? But that means everybody is going to think that way, so why really run the “Terrible Wounds”? Or maybe just play with one of them “just in case”? The entire playing field was juggling these questions in their heads the night before and the day of.

And leave it to the Asian Sensation, Mr. “Aik” Tongtharadol (I know your real first name, I’m just not going to butcher it with bad spelling on the internet. I respect the series of tubes!) to out-mastermind the field. Thinking that no one would pack the heat, he ran a fully upgraded anger deck and blitzed the field. His opponents didn’t pack the “Terrible Wounds” and quickly were wrecked. He quickly sped onto finals where he faced off with the one, the only, the supreme luckstar of our universe, Mr. Brian Valdez. Tensions filled the air, Aik coldly stared, Brian’s eyes all blared, and the battle began. Truly a close match, but Brian Valdez did pack some “Terrible Wounds” to his deck. It all came down to the final game, Aik on his final level and Valdez with Goku’s Heart Disease (I think) on the table. Brian Valdez couldn’t use the Non-Combat card right away because Aik had ways around it, so it was best save to when Aik reached 3 or 4 anger to also take away any anger that had been gained. And so Valdez wait, crouched in the grass like a tiger in Africa stalking its prey. And then Aik reached the critical 4 anger on his final level… and Valdez kept crouching… More specifically, he played an attack… that didn’t lower anger… And Aik slides in his last card to reach his victorious MPPV win that crowned him as the World Champion. I believe that he took the match 3-1, but it may have been a bit closer. But truly, Aik had played the overnight metagame and emerged the best of the best.

Sneak Release

So it was when people opened up their Android Saga booster packs when they saw a weird thing happen – Someone pulled a Champion Drill. Many pulled other cards of such high “privileged” status, all from Android Saga booster packs. This would begin the “Score Curse” as far as trying to keep exclusive cards… well, exclusive.

How did this happen? Obviously not the Cell Jrs. 😉 When trading card sheets are produced, they are often in sizes of 10×11 cards or 11×11 of cards. While normally cards are batched by rarity (the common card sheet, the uncommon card sheet, etc), you could give specific instructions to the printer on how to divvy up the cards on the sheet. Often, promotional cards are tacked on as a “line” on the top of the sheet. Most promotional card print runs were small, so only printing them once on the rare sheet would give us ample quantities above what was needed. When we printed the Android Saga, we put the championship cards as well as other major exclusives on the rare sheet. Well, the printing company forgot to cut the promos of the rare sheet for X many sheets, at which time those promo cards were mixed in with the rare cards. The amount of sheets this happened to in the overall run was small, but it still allowed a decent amount of copies of Champion Drills, Line Ups, and such to reach players hands in ways we did not intend.

Slaying In a New Direction

While I won’t go into it in great detail (since this is a DBZ site), Score eventually acquired the license for the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer series. Two gentlemen from Unicorn Games by the names of Christian and Owen helped setup the relationship with Fox and designed the original prototype. The initial idea they proposed was decent, but similar to Mr. Jim Ward, lacked execution. So I turned on the Developer gears and shaped the game up unto its release. This was my second game that, in essence, I took someone else’s game design and tweaked it out. Although this time I had alot more control of Buffy in its early days than DBZ, as I took full design control in the Angel’s Curse set. The reason I bring this up is that for the 3 sets that were produced for Buffy, I had to juggle time between Dragon Ball Z and our new IP. With Josh having a bigger burden with Organized Play and McManus always having his hands full, there was only IQ and myself to playtest, with more and more of my time being devoted to developing and design work on both properties. We did the best we could with our resources, but you’d be surprised how much work it is to do all the work for 2 TCG’s at the same time, with sets and production cycles planned as to quickly switch back and forth between them in tandem… It was quite a mighty task.

To goals for the Buffy TCG were no easy task, as a majority of the Buffy demographic was female. Because of this, the game and “tournament structure” had the be designed a little differently. Instead of actual tournaments, we had “Slaying Socials”. The game had to easily be split into multiplayer. There had to be some fancy card (like a High-Tech) in order to make the product more attractive. In the end, the Buffy TCG looked a lot different than the original game engine proposed by the Last Unicorn guys. I ended up really enjoying the game engine once we were able to get the first expansion out to balance the game (we had a bit of trouble with speed challenge decks in the first set, especially with that freakishly smart Giles), and the game was really complete with the Class of ’99 set. In fact, there were tons of decks that became viable once the Class of ’99 set was released, and it could have worked well as an actual tournament environment. Things seemed to be going great for the game and we were even developing the “Angel TCG” that would use the exact same cards as Buffy but with a different game engine.

The irony? The Buffy game paid itself off by the 2nd set and was generating a decent profit off of the Class of ’99 set (third and final official card set). The game got axed because it didn’t make ENOUGH money, in comparison to how much Dragon Ball Z was making. I’m kind of glad there’s been a fanatical base in Europe that have taken the game into their own hands to finish up the series. Good work guys!

Cell Saga

Jim Ward just released his new set list for Cell Saga, with IQ and I devouring every card in the set. But things were pretty clear that Jim Ward had begun to be very unattached to the DBZ TCG. He didn’t seem to see the work done in Android Saga and completely went in a very bad and opposite direction. I’m not just talking the idea where the set should go, but the actual effects on cards. “Non-Combat Card: End Combat.” “Combat Card: End Combat or Lower Your Opponent’s Anger 2 Levels” “Non-Combat Card: End Combat or Gain 2 Anger Levels.” “Combat Card: End Combat or Gain 2 Anger Levels” The Ultra Rare: “Combat Card: End Combat or Gain 2 Anger Levels or Discard a Non-Combat Card.” The sad thing is that I’m not exaggerating one bit about this set list – Those are the actual cards Jim turned in. “Combat Card: Gain 2 Anger Levels or Lower Your Opponent’s Anger 3 Levels.”

We quickly pointed this out and how we drastically needed a change. But Jim argued that he wanted it this way, that he liked ending combat and that’s how the game should go and all this other stuff. Jim and I even sat down and drew up these rediculous restrictions that were to be placed on future sets, like how there could only be 1 new card that ended combat in a set, only 1 new card that could gain 2 anger levels in a set, you can’t have cards that draw more than 2 cards… Again, not exaggerating. Chaz saw how much Jim and I were butting heads, so he stepped on in. He handed the design of the Cell Saga to me while Jim would begin setting up the Cell Games Saga. But this time, instead of just fixing the set I had to create it from scratch.

At this time the game had been out for quite awhile, and this would be the 4th set (not counting promos) that the game would have. Based on previous sets, we also did not have a base set where a new player could pick up and learn the game easy. Trunks Saga did wonders on fixing the game, but the rules + card set didn’t exactly make for the easiest learning experience (even with the “Battle Simulator” Demo). So we came to a decision that the Cell Saga was going to be a base set to help out new players. We didn’t want to do reprints, so they had to be all new basic cards. The goal was when a new player opened a booster, all the commons would be the basic stuff to get the player used to the cards, with the uncommons and rares ramping up the difficulty slightly. This is why a majority of the cards in the set actually suck – they were vanilla on purpose for the new. If we designed the set well enough, the rares at least should have made up for the rest of the lackluster set, as we had complete new personalities and new masteries, as well as other added cards.

Speaking of cards, I need to mention a few notables here. The proud tradition of “letting other people make some cards in the set” continue with Cell Saga, so Joshua Minnon, Joshua McManus, and IQ all designed a handful of cards in the set. Joshua Minnon was responsible for a bunch of the Namekian cards, of which most famous is Namekian Strike. Josh liked the idea of recursion, and so you could see that flavor more in the Namekian cards he designed. Regeneration was never really left out, but it was a mechanic we were slightly afraid of because we had a regeneration deck in-house that was already pretty nice. Besides, the recursion archtype is alot more fun than just sitting there and regenerating all the damage you were taking. The way the Namekian style danced was something quite unique when compared to all of the TCGs out there. This is also why the Red Style in GT kept a similar focus – We wanted to keep this deck style of playing off of your discard pile, just find a way to keep it balanced. IQ’s most famous card is the infamous Android 18 lvl 1. IQ actually designed this card based off of the Android 18 mini-flyer that was inserted in the previous booster packs. The idea was to give her a “future sight” ability as the flyer suggested. We knew it was kinda good, but I guess it didn’t get playtested enough to know it was too good (we didn’t have much of that kind of card manipulation at the time). Covering “controversial cards”, I was the designer of the infamous Piccolo lvl 1 in Android Saga. With the exception of very special personality levels, most of the time your deck was the main focus and the Main Personality added a little bit of support. Little did I realize how big of a problem denying people the ability to use their MP’s power was going to wreck havoc, as I thought that there would be many decks strong enough to live without an MP power.

I also designed the Blue Style Mastery. In fact, there’s an interesting little story behind this card that starts to show the beginning of the dynamic that began to change between IQ and I.

So we are sitting in the office one day and I’m answering a few emails and perusing through the rules when I got one of those “Eureka!” moments. At this time, those Stasis decks were still dominating the scene. But then it dawned on me – It says that you can only play a card as a defense if it directly stops or prevents damage from the attack. Up until this point we allowed “Combat Enders” to be played as a defense because it indirectly stopped the attack by ending everything right at that moment. But why were we letting people play it as a defense if it actually doesn’t stop the attack or prevent the damage from it? With this fundamental reasoning intact, I jumped straight into playtesting with it.

It ended up being the straw on the camel’s back on Stasis. An aggressive deck could always initiate combat and sling 1 attack off to a completely defenseless Stasis deck before it could end combat. The Stasis decks would have to add blocking which took up more space in the 50 card deck size, let alone any size it took on, and forcing it to take a really defensive and fightable shape. It was perfect… except for one thing. The new Blue Style Mastery I had just made. It was late in the production of Cell Saga where the final Color Laser Copies (CLC’s) were being passed around. I quickly realized we needed some kind of change to the card. Change it to discarding a blue card to block? No, they already ran some decent blue cards from Android Saga and should continue to play good blue cards if we designed correctly. Well, what about if you use the Mastery you can’t end that combat? Perfect, solves the problem while still allowing it to be used in more aggressive decks like Survival Blue (if it could ever actually be built). But when I brought this before the group, it was a hard sell to convince. IQ argued that this discovery was arbitrary and that he could easily build a deck that was cruxed around the Blue Mastery anyday. As long as they couldn’t end combat as a defense, Stasis was kicked in the nuts enough to handle it. I couldn’t convince IQ of the err, and thus I couldn’t get a large portion of the “Rules Committee” (Joshua Minnon, Joshua McManus, IQ, Myself, occasionally Will, and Chaz to break tiebreaks or stalemates) that it was an issue. While I won’t pinpoint it as the beginning, a rift did begin to form between us as there was a slight love/hate relationship going on. He was, is, and will always be a friend of mine but things didn’t exactly crap unicorns and piss rainbows like it felt in Android Saga and before.

And by special request from the messageboards here on the site, I shall now explain “The Car” and why the Android’s had a fixation on it so much. When the cards were first designed, we wanted to play off of the fact that the Androids were constantly driving around in that damned van for a good part of the series. So, we wanted to give them abilities that, if they have “The Van” in play they could get some extra effect. Well, turns out that FUNimation didn’t like our picture of “The Van” for some reason. First it was the fact that the van looked like a nondescript vehicle, but then we got a better image of the van. When things finally hit the CLC stage, it got unapproved because they didn’t understand the link between the van and the androids. But, we were already in the trap. They still wanted the card to be a vehicle, just one that had an “importance” to the series. The only vehicle that could be was the cars used in that weird episode when Piccolo and Goku were trying to get their drivers license. It was too far into the process to try to give the Androids different new abilities since there would be no time to playtest them. So in the end we just replaced all references with “The Van” with “The Car”. I mean, the idea was kinda neat, and we even had an inner joke on the fact that the reason the card let you discard allies was because you were running them over.

Also, since inquiring minds want to know, I guess I could go into my explanation of level 4’s. When you are designing sets, you have a variety of styles of card designs. Power cards, sleepers, vanilla, and timmy cards are often the biggest categories that you focus on your design. Level 4 personalities were often designed in the Timmy perspective. Gameplay-wise, there’s no way you could use the MP’s ability – If you hit level 4 (the highest level until Cell Saga and then new leveling in GT), you won. So it was more of a placeholder card than a card of use. So if some of them turned out a bit crappy, it was a little ok. We tried to keep strick ratios on a theory called refresh rates, and for every non-great lvl 4 the set was planned to have a great-different card. Personalities that received certain higher levels were usually chosen based on that specific storyline and what we were trying to accomplish. Sometimes a character was passed up on his level 4 or 5 because we knew which later set we wanted them to get these levels (based on knowledge of the storyline). I will be the first to admit that we were not perfect, but we did have a plan the entire time we tried to stick to. This is why, for example, that Gohan and Cell waited to get their final levels in Cell Games (since that’s where they truly where the mains), but other times we went back to give “forgotten” personalities a new level. As for characters in multiple timelines, like Trunks, we wanted gameplay-wise for them to all add to the same character. While keeping them separate would have let us try to make new archtypes with the character, we felt the “mix-and-match” was more important… let alone much easier to pass in approvals.

So the reasons for choosing new personality levels (higher levels and low) were always a mix of the show and gaming preferences. For example, even though he did no fighting, Krillin got a new set of levels in Cell Saga because he was A) a main character B)actually did alot in the story trying to protect Android 18 an all and C) was kinda lacking (we wanted a cool Krillin!)… and D) being that everybody and their little brother knew of Krillin as much as Goku, so he was much of a fan favorite. Sometimes character’s didn’t get levels because of lacklusterness or other various reasons. Tien only got a HT promo because, well, he didn’t do anything. Sure, he came up and blasted Cell with his Tri-Beam until Cell get a little bored of it and “fixed the problem”, but was he really integral to the story? No. Was Krillin, Mr. “I’m gonna use the solar flare on him a bajillion times, and he’ll keep falling for it”? Yes. This is also why Piccolo was rated stronger than Vegeta in Cell and Cell Games. At this time, Vegeta may have gotten Super Saiyan but was a wuss. Sure, he kicked around Android 19, but he got beaten like a red-headed stepchild when he fought Android 18. On the other hand, Piccolo (fused with Kami) stood toe-to-toe with Android 17 (who was admittedly stronger than Android 18). Giving characters power ratings became really difficult, mainly from the lack of power ratings left in the show and having to base things off of context clues (“He’s twice as strong as I am!” or how well certain characters stacked up to each other). And no matter what power ratings we would choose, correct or not, we would never please everybody. So if we got close to the mark, it was good for us.

And since everybody is just fascinated with her, it would be good to note that Supreme West Kai’s origin starts here. When we originally designed Cell, we wanted him to go through each of the different Cell stages, starting with the Larva. Since the Larva Cell never actually fought anyone, we wanted to give him some type of ability where he was super defensive (“hiding” was the goal) while not being able to kill people. So the idea was “Constant Combat Power: You cannot attack. When your opponent attacks, flip a coin. If heads, the attack is stopped.” We even slapped on that you couldn’t block normally so that the Constant Combat Power was the only way to block, but it was still too good for the time period. As the game expanded and we made more sets and promos, we eventually started hitting up the side characters. Characters that appearing in the Capsule Corp Power Pack and similar packages often were the side characters that man hardcore fans wanted. Since these were often Movie Villains or wacky side characters, we often tried to create gimmicks to make these characters a little different. When the Cosmic Anthologies set came around, IQ remember the old mechanic we used for Larva cell and wanted to try it again. But we were also in our “wacky stages” ourselves, so instead of a coin flip we wanted to tie it to a part of the card that nobody had ever touched before – the card number. I’ll get into her “development” more in the next generation, since that is when she was made. But, just to let you guys know, this is where she technically started.

This is also why some side characters got crazy stuff, like Master Roshi being the “better 18” (I mean, he IS Master Roshi. He trained the most powerful characters in the show (namely Goku)). We didn’t intentionally try to make these character’s super broken. We just wanted them to be gimmicky with their own tricks. For most of these characters, you were trying to collect a special promotional set that cost you $$$, so why shouldn’t these characters be off the norm like have Z power stages (I love you King Kai!)? Main characters in the main sets were never intentionally “left out”, as many of them got new levels in almost every set. But any side characters that we introduced through the Capsule Corp Power pack or other promotions (like Cosmic Anthology) needed to stand out. I mean, why would someone by the Power Pack if all the characters were generic? That’s why we tried to think of character archtypes and gimmicks when making these characters. And trust me, some of the gimmicks never made it. But we never intended these characters to be “Top Tier, we shall dominate”, just different. Something to make players say “WoW”.

Time to Move

It was during the Cell Saga that the entire Donruss/Playoff LP moved from the business offices in Northwest Arlington down next to the ballpark, where the company still resides to this day. at the time, our building was a horseshoe shaped business/stripmall looking thing. Donruss actually was in both ends of the horse-shoe, with other companies filling in the middle. The sports half of the company was on the west leg of the horseshoe, while Games, Human Resources, and IT were on the east part. But when we moved onto Randol Mill, we all were placed into 1 big main building. For the games division, this mean going from full sized cubicles in our little cave lit only by the lamps on our desks and computer screens out into a big open Walmart like hall with cubicles only going just above our keyboards. This was a pretty drastic change, but in the end it was more for the better. The game’s division had 2 pods of 6 cubicles that we all filled, and that was the overall limit that Chaz kept things at. After our move the division expanded a little bit. We hired a web writer by the name of Matt Carlson, we had a web guy in the back by the name of Todd Cowden(and his programming co-workers including the very very hot Mikki Ward), Londa Robinson hired an assistant for Marketing (I believe her name was Carly?), and we had a temp that worked on processing all of the capsule corp points and redemptions. We also hired a general “handyman” of the game’s division by the name of Geert Van Slambrock (I hope I got that right). Belgun by day, power drinker by night, he was definitely a fun guy to be around.

Because of the move, we also were under the same roof as many other workers in the production half of the game, which we began to interact with quite frequently. There were the production managers, headed eventually by Stephanie Carlson (sp?), with our main point of contact being the lovely and extremely hard working Kim Davis/Ferguson. When it came to needing something done with production, Kim was the badass to go to and really the main one out of the group that I trusted. Not to say the other production managers were sleazy or lied, but Kim was like a rock. No excuses, she got the work done. Same with Mikki Ward (did I mention she was hot?), Todd Cowden, and Todd Gleason (superman of the IT department).

We also began to get face-to-face with the graphics team, responsible for making the card templates and packaging. While the graphics team eventually expanded to 3 people, the head of the group was Carl Braun (the current head of the games division at Score Entertainment). Carl was a pretty cool guy and a movie nut. If we were crazy about games of all kinds, this guy was crazy about movies the same way. He was also a pretty good artist, although he didn’t exactly take criticism well. I remember many times Carl getting into fights with Chaz because, Chaz being the nitpicky artist and micromanager, he would ask Carl to move things an inch or two in a certain direction or slightly change a color here, curve a line better there. Their discussions were quite amusing. But above it all, Carl held his family first. He had a wonderful child that he was just crazy for, and was one of those “I got pictures of my family on my desk” guys. In fact, many of his decisions for Score (and weither to stay or not) were made purely with his family in mind. But, more on this later. Truly a family man that would never sacrifice his family’s well being for other small, callous stuff that life would throw his way.

Purely because Josh Minnon and McManus had a hard time showing up to work on time,and inability to kept up with the total load of their work (not Minnon’s total fault, as our Organized Play was expanding like wildfire), Chaz hired a Tournament Director by the name of Frank Chafe. Now Frank was an interesting man. He was a complete Legend of the Five Rings otaku-nutjob with previous experience running tournaments for such games and being in “security” in casinos. No, he wasn’t huge or a mean fighter. His job was to watch people playing and catch cheaters over the cameras. He knew a bunch of magic tricks and alot of sleight of hand, so he knew what to watch out for and was paid for catching people trying to rip off the casino. He was also into various other “otaku” cultures, and had a strange introverted personality while he tried very hard to be an extrovert.

This guy was the reason that all Score personnel were banned from playing in tournaments while Chaz was the head of the games division. There was some tournament that he was supposed to go judge and he called in sick. But Chaz has many friends in the industry, and one of them saw Frank… in Seattle. He had called in sick to go to some special Kotei tournament or something for Legend of the Five Rings. He had already made the plans long ago, and the tournament he had to judge at just recently jumped in the way. Needless to say, Chaz was pissed and Frank was almost fired on the spot. Instead, Frank became his b!tch until his eventual dismissal. This even had Chaz bring the foot down on anyone going to other people’s tournaments, under the guise that it would show Score personnel “supporting competitor’s products”. But we all knew better.

Frank wasn’t that bad of a guy, he just was a little weaselly which made people turn off from him. To be honest, just wanting to piss Frank off was the reason Tuff Enuff was started. We were having our normal “Comic Book Wednesday” and we wanted to see if there was some way of making him mad by doing something he really couldn’t control. So we thought of a “fun” tournament type, one that didn’t need rankings and would have a different set of rules. You know, the wacky fun style of tournament. Since Dragon Ball Z was ruthless, we wanted to create the ruthless tournament style as well. So Chaz and I first decided to cut the MPPV win and the Dragon Ball win, and keep it totally focused on the beatdown. Survival only, to the finish! Then we invented a way for you to kill the other guy, just completely knock him out of the tournament. Granted, in DBZ if you die you just go to the Other World, but this was the most brutal thing we could think of. The guy could go undefeated and then in one sloppy match get killed and lose it all. Just think of the reaction from everyone in the tournament! And we should reward these brave killing machines by being able to dip into a grab bag of special goodies and promos! Yes! And there’s nothing Frank can do about it! Mwahahaha!

And the Tuff Enuff tournament environment was born. Mark my words, I will reuse that “killing” mechanic in a future game somewhere. The thrill, the excitement, ever match needing to count and anytime you could get completely knocked out of the tournament… I have to admit at one point I said, “Damn, I wish I could play my own game and play in this.” call me weird, but as a designer just thinking of how cool this mechanic was makes me giddy. Oh yes, I shall have my brutal tournaments once again!

Frank continued to run the tournaments with Josh as his assistant (which did not please Josh one bit). But this became a bit more apparent as…

Let the Circuit Begin!

Shortly after the World Championship that crowned Aik as the Asian Super Saiyan, we rapidly expanded our organized play structure. With multiple people handling the job, we were able to push tournaments across tons of retailer stores and was able to handle a regional tournament structure and a Hummer Tour for stores. But we didn’t exactly have tons of cash to hand out, so we decided to do things a bit differently. For example, what better people to judge the tournaments than the people who designed the game? Their job is to work on the rules and cards, so who would know better? Plus, this gave us a bit of a leg-up on the rest of the competition. You know, all those other TCG’s with pansy game designers who act all aloof and don’t even WANT to go down and meet the players? Did you ever get to meet Richard Garfield playing Magic? How about the head guys at Legend of the Five Rings? Decipher (back when they were still alive) didn’t even like showing up to the conventions and saw it as a necessary evil, from the designer’s perspective.

But that’s not how we were going to be at Score! We wanted our players to have upfront access to our designers. This let you, the players, feel that you were able to have an impact on the game. This let us go back to the office with a ripe new set of complaints to look into. While we played our own game alot, you guys played it more. It was pretty difficult to filter out what were just people complaining and what was a real problem, but conventions and the message boards were our main source of information for how our game was doing. But we weren’t about to stop there. Goodies, Goodies, Goodies were also thrown around like panties at prom. Promo cards, copies of the GBA game, DVD’s, any shwag we could get our hands on was given to you guys. Irwin Toys DBZ figures! Some of Goku’s Chest Hair! If we could get our hands on it, we gave it as a prize.

It was also here where we not only decided to keep the “Top Cut” exclusive cards, but to expand on it. Besides the accidental leak of the cards in Android Saga, the reception to the first batch of cards were received extremely well. While not actual cash that we could put into your hands, the exclusivity and prestige of having these unique cards set the message boards on fire. But, we still wanted some people to eventually get their hands on these cards. So, Chaz came up with the idea that these cards would be “exclusive” for a limited time, at which the next Regional Season they would start to be handed out to the winners. For all the complaints some people made, this prize “mechanic” really set us apart from our competitors. Legend of the Five Rings was the only game doing anything close, and theirs was definitely a different flavor.

Convention season began somewhere around the beginning of February and ended in August to September (Wizard World Texas doesn’t count. I would call my backyard BBQs a better convention than that place). And so I was constantly shipped off on the weekend, only to return back and have to hit the grindstone that monday that followed. To say that this wrecked havoc on a local social life is an understatement, as I was even beginning to get death threats of my D&D; players (I ran a 3rd Ed. campaign for 5 years. Apparently I’m a good storyteller. Who knew?) and keeping a woman beyond a one night stand was neigh impossible.

But for all the sacrifices I made in order to help out the regional systems, it was all worth it. In fact, going to conventions and running the tournaments is one of the things I miss most about my job. Hanging out with you guys was fun as hell! Over my tenure at Score, I was sent to easily over 50+ conventions. The schedule was so fast paced, that the events and dates of them all are really blurred into my head. During each “year” I’ll try to put up the special moments that I remember, but please pardon me if I get the timing wrong. Seriously, all the different MegaCons I went to in Florida (4 in total) all fit like 1 convention weekend in my brain.

Some of the amusing things that I remember:

• Calling the Ultra-Rare – I think it was OrcCon, but we were in the California area, land or Richie Williams, Sean Poestkoke, and Company. We were joking around that I had the “magic touch”, and Richie had spread out a bunch of Saiyan Saga boosters in front of me. he asked me to pick one to have the Ultra-Rare in it… And got it on the first shot. While I know other people were in awe, I’ll never forget Richie actually bowing to the ground for my “greatness”. (In reality, I’m not all that great. I just used my luck up for the year on that pick)
• MegaCon going to 3am – Frickin’ most ridiculously long tournament ever! Aik even had time to nap inbetween the Semi-Finals and Final matches. Stasis was definitely giving things a good show and one player, Ken ??? piloting a surival/stasis Blue Android-18, as the most methodical player I had ever met in my life. His deck was pretty complicated to run, and he thought out every move. I think he was knocked out in the T8 or T16, but his speed of play lingered on for the rest of the tournament.
• Blue Terror – Owner of Wajawant Comics in Georgia, this guy was a character and an inspiration. The guy looked like Splinter from Ninja Turtles! If this guy could get a chick, then it surely would be easy enough for me! This guy was great and one of the greatest retailers that I ever met from his passion in pleasing his gamers. Sure, he was egotistical (aren’t we all?), but he went out of his way for players and enver once really b!tched and moaned outside of rules, unlike…
• Bag ‘O Beans – a “humble” shop in Florida, this was the place to go for DBZ in the SouthEast. I loved the players, including the Father/Son duo of Jojo and Crew. Unfortunately, the owner’s aren’t as cool as thier players. In fact, 70% of all comlaints came from this less than 1% minority. They wanted more and special stuff because they were going through a huge amount of boxes. Us grunties were like “You already are. You’re selling tons of boxes”, but things didn’t really go that way. They were never given any special treatment beyond more tournament kits than normal and a line into Chaz’s ear, but they were the kind of people to take that first step and use it to try to get a second step further. But I just want to put a big line seperating the owners and the players. All the players there, including Walter Cowart, Jojo, and others, were good players and the store had a really top notch scene. It’s just unfortunate that they did not have top notch store owners as well.
• The Bancrofts – Good natured family from rural-ish america that ran DieCon (and DragonCon? I know there’s 2). While Mr. Bancroft was a Legend of the Five Rings junkie, both children were fans of the game. In fact, I could say that the daughter ended up being one of the first Score groupies out there. Even though some people thought they were a little weird, they were actually interesting to hang around. But to quell the rumors, no member of Score has had any more relations with Jessica beyond the backrubs she gave in the tournament area… Ok, I can’t exactly speak for IQ, but I’m 90% sure he didn’t tap her @$$ for 1 white and 1 red mana (and if you got that joke, shame on you).
• The Fanatics Network – Our first, biggest, and I think only major fansite for Score games. While ownership of the site has constantly shifted hands, they have been one hell of a community. While a man named Gamersource wasn’t exactly the straightest in line and helped give Fanatics a bad name, the overall group had some of the best players to grace the game… and gave them a place to yell at each other. Truly, some of the flame wars on those message boards (OKC vs Terra-Haut anyone?) were some of the craziest I’ve ever seen, and its from these boards that I started to give Dudley “FryChicken” and Eric “Kunk” Kunkle respect on just how easily they could rip out a person’s soul on the internet with just a few keystrokes.
• 100+ Man Tournaments – This was purely awesome. Back in my TCG playing heyday the Pokemon TCG was just hitting its hype, and the DFW local scene produced regular tournaments with 50-100 people at some of the hottest locations (I’ll always miss you Rama Llama), and even though it *was* pokemon I had the most enjoyable times at tournaments. The fact that a game that I worked on was able to come anywhere near creating this tournament scene made me a bit proud. I’m sure many local scenes never got this big, but it was really fun running tournaments of this size. Not exactly the easiest thing when you are the only guy running things either.
• Paul and Sandy – If you’ve ever been to any major events in DBZ’s heyday and you don’t know who this pair is, they were the ones with blue and pink hair. while Score fanatics, they were like traveling gypsies that traded their way across America. Their bartering skills are truly extraordinary, especially in the realm of cardboard crack. I would see this couple many times through a single convention season, as they hit each corner of America in trade. I kinda used them as my own personal trading barometer and kept my eye on whatever they heavily traded, Score game or not. When I saw them buy and trade heavy on YUGiOh and then find the right dealer to sell a lot for well into the 4-digits of cash, I had a good idea how strapped in YuGiOh was going to be for the long run. Any other TCGs that were hot they could pick up quick, trade out, and end up with a profit in the end. I actually learned alot about trading just seeing them in action.
• MarsCon – My favorite little convention, hands down. From beating the OKC guys in Warcraft III (Undead FTW!) to just how strangely open the environment was, MarsCon was truly unique. For those that have not gone, it is a Science Fiction convention with alot of emphasis on OLD SciFi, like in the 50’s and 60’s. Only place you’ll see a Klingon dropping brews with a Weird Scientist and some goof in a robot outfit – and no one cared. They would have entire halls completely open for people to roam through, with each room designed around a theme that the person living there had planned easily for the past year. You could go from room to room getting drinks and just having a merry time with the widest assortment of people possible. Ahhh, me loves my Romulan Ale.
• Hanging with Voice Actors – Over the course of my tenure, I met and hanged with everyone that was a major voice and not Canadian. Chris Sabat, Sonny Strait, and Sean Schemmel were the coolest ones to go drinking with. And Meridith McCoy was a hottie, while Tiffany Vollmer was an obvious pothead. Since they were really only at a convention for 4 hours of work (maybe 6 if they signed a third day), we often kept them company after hours. I believe Dameon Clarke still owes me a beer after a bet that he couldn’t get this chick’s number at an airport. I hope to eventually run into some of them again, if fate deems suitable.

There are a few more things, but I’ll save them for later when I think they actually happened. Just purely being a part of such a grand tournament structure was amazing, and I am privilegedd to be able to be a part of it all.

Let the Games Begin!

Cell Games truly marks off an end to an era in Score, as the Games Division went through a few notable changes during this time (although not as drastic as the future would hold). While there were a good amount of changes, the design of the Dragon Ball Z TCG had notably changed at this point.

As usually with the rushed TCG production cycle, we were already thinking of the ideas for Cell Games back when we were still designing Cell Saga. Anything we felt too complex or over the top from the Cell Saga was actually pushed back and saved for Cell Games so that Cell Saga could stay a basic set. There were already a few theme ideas we wanted to try out, as well as new mechanics.

As with proud Score tradition, some of the employees were able to make a few cards and IQ had a bit of imput in the design. During playtesting, IQ felt that unless the block was ridiculously good (like TRASH), you would rather play an omniblock (A card that can stop both physical and energy attacks) or a single block (a card that could only stop 1 kind of attack) anyday. The block would always be able to be used versus an attack, while single blocks can be completely useless if your opponent focused on a single type of attack. So, we had to input something to fight omniblocks mechanically, and focused attacks were born. IQ also started to feel that the game was going stale and wanted to introduce alternate victory conditions. So he went to work and eventually designed what was to be known as Dragon’s Victory and Cosmic Backlash.

If you’ve played the game, you know how contentious Cosmic Backlash is. Often complained as the “cheap victory” and a “luck shot with no skill”, this card had a heavy presence the instant it was legal. While no “Pure Backlash” ever actually won an event, the fact that it existed put fear into players. Many people were wondering what crack we were on, and here’s the behind the scenes. While this card did not exactly spark tensions, it can begin to show how distanced IQ and I were becoming a little bit.

I admit, at first I liked the card, and still slightly do a little. Alot of decks were heading the “way of stasis” and becoming very block-light. Many decks just ran TRASH and pretty much no other blocks. Now if you had any deck that was prepared to go defend against a survival deck, you shouldn’t actually have had to worry about Backlash. You were able to draw an additional 5 cards, and the odds should have been overwhelming in the defending player’s advantage (especially if they knew the opponent was wanting to sling a Backlash). And if you played Stasis? Well, you tough. That’s what you get for playing Stasis. You actually had something to worry about, boo hoo. Besides, creative players would find ways around it (like the new Caught Off Guard Drill). And if someone built a deck specifically designed to get a successful Backlash? Well we just created a new deck archtype in the environment, didn’t we? Plus, it would be of the oft eluded Combo deck archtype since all decks were pretty much Agro (Survival and/or Anger fits) or Control (Stasis). Hooray for combo decks!

But after testing, it did start to feel a little crappy. Even with a purely defensive deck, you could just have bad luck and not have the block with no effort to deny you. Or if they Backlashed after a Gohan’s Kick (another card already planned against Stasis but had overwhelming implications to the combat of the game), because it cut out the part of TRASH you were usually saving. I thought maybe the card should be changed a bit, but I could not convince IQ. While I was the head developer, I still had to get approval from Chaz on anything contentious (aka, anything nobody bitched about). IQ didn’t want his card changed, and Chaz wouldn’t institute the change unless I could convince our Head Playtester that it needed to be. “You two are supposed to the the bouncing board for each other”. Needless to say, the card came to print with the text it was playtested with (and an awesome picture in foil, I might add). This would become a brick wall that I was hard pressed to get around. See, anything major pretty much had to be consented by both of us, and all it took was either of us to be a little dick and say “No” for it to say the same (unless presented evidence was OVERWHELMINGLY in the other favor). This became an even greater issue with Tapkar.

It could have also been how playtesting was being handled at this time at Score. First off, we experimented with outside playtesting with the Buffy TCG (since we felt we could trust non-competitive players like Jeff “Reason” Koeing). IQ’s mentality and the Buffy groups were drastically different, and not exactly purely up to “IQ’s level” while still seeing things that he could not. But since they were “stupid”, IQ would rip the hell out of them. All it took as one interaction and I knew it would be a big problem, so I had to keep them separate. He was still allowed to read everything and give me his thoughts and comments, as I did value them very heavily. But he wasn’t allowed to post or interact with them, as their souls would be shredded at first opportunity. Secondly, I was under alot of burden to juggle both the Buffy TCG and the DBZ TCG at the same time. Chaz had me doing all of the production side of the work that designers needed to do, so my time was always used up. If I wasn’t designing on one game, I was preparing the design on the other. This left me with little time to playtest with IQ, leaving him to playtest on his own or who he could get games with. Now, as crazy as it may seem, the idea of playing a DBZ game by yourself with 2 decks was not foreign to us, as we did this a decent amount in Android Saga testing and beyond while the other was busy. But now IQ was given alot more responsibility as far as developing the list and making sure it was a good set, while having less time to work on it with me. Don’t think that I walked away from playtesting, because I still played many games and we did catch a great deal of cards that never made it to print. But it had drastically diminished compared to the “Quality Playtesting Time” we had in Android Saga with each other.

Maybe it was the fact that we had been working so closely. It could also had just been wear and tear from a clashing of egos. Perhaps IQs life outside the walls of Score was getting to him (his Baby’s Mama is a bit of a loon). To be honest, I don’t really know the cause of it all. I just know that we became a bit more distanced and our friendship was strained. But in the end, we still stuck together through some tough stuff that will be talked on later.

But returning to the set, Cell Games was an arena to let my mind loose and be creative. Aura Clash and Goku’s Farewell can be a testament to to bounds of craziness I was beginning to step into. I also already had Endurance planned. back in Cell Saga we were playing a few of our competitor’s TCGs, or RiFTs specifically. In the game, every card had a number that counted how many cards it counted as when your deck took damage. Immediately my mind changed it and morphed it for DBZ. It didn’t take but a second to change it to preventing damage by removal. This gave players many options as far as using the mechanic. Use the endurance and remove the card, or discard it and allow it to be gotten by recursion? What if a player designed his deck heavily around Endurance to control his discard pile? Plus it would help in the design of later cards to help them be more appetizing and earlier power cards. I already had Defense Shields for every fighting style planned (so there was more of a reason for the rule in the rulebook besides those Saiyan Saga drills!), as well as a few other mechanics. Gohan’s Kick was there to give survival decks a chance to have a 1 turn “breakthrough drill”, but in playtesting the Stasis decks would just hold onto the TRASH until they needed to block Gohan’s Kick. When we tacked on the effects to have it get around TRASH, we knew it would have a bit of an impact. We just didn’t realize how good it would get. The fact that it was an anti-Stasis card we wanted quickly out in the format also changed its rarity, as it was slated to be a rare originally.

Last but not least, the Dende Dragon Balls were introduced in the Cell Games Saga. At this time, we knew that the Namek Dragon Ball set sucked alot, with Namek Dragon Ball 4 being the only decent ball of the bunch. On top of that, the Earth Dragon Ball set was amazing, with most of the cards have multiple effects (if not powerful ones like Earth Dragon Ball 7 being the best combat ender in the game). I wanted to create a set of Dragon Balls that would be able to compete with the Earth Dragon Ball set without overdoing it. This was why the “Dende Search” combo by pulling out the Combat Card search with Dende Dragon Ball 3 was put in. I knew that whatever level that I put the Dragon Balls, they weren’t going to be better than the Earth set unless they were broke. The only way to make a second set “playable” was the have it go faster. We felt the trade off was fine – if you wanted the “faster balls”, you would be giving up a good amount of power that the Earth set provided. This is also why Goku’s Dragon Ball Quest (combat searcher) was never removed from the game – it was planned. In the end, the set was good and made a great splash in the tournament scene. The fact that it got people off of their Earth Dragon Ball addiction was great.

All in all, I was a bit proud of the overall direction of the Cell Games Saga. Even though it had a few problem cards come out of it, I still felt it was a more solid offering than Cell Saga for our players and was a first good test of handling almost all of the design work. I had to do most of the image capturing for this set, as well as more of the production side of things. But hey, wasn’t this what Jim Ward was for? Well apparently…

Cleaning House

Score started undergoing some personnel changes around this time, although not all of them happened during Cell Games. I’m actually a little foggy on the exactly when some of them happened except for one. First off, the Joshes (Minnon and McManus) were let go for frequent tardiness. Since they carpooled together, they were both in the same boat. Chaz had given them a bunch of warnings, and he really tried to get Josh Minnon into gear (unbeknown to Minnon, he was liked by Chaz). But they were both given the pink slip and were sent to fend for themselves. Frank Chafe was terminated a short time later. I don’t remember the exact cause, but I’m sure it was something about him being a weasel. Ever since the stint he did going to his Seattle Kotei thingy, he had been on Chaz’s bad side. Frank would eventually be replaced by a kind man by the name of Rich Vos, armed with basic SQL knowledge and skilled at processes. Many of you have seen him at major tournaments – he was the guy that looked like Slimer that sat behind the computer at our tournaments. Rich Vos is the man that actually got Score’s tournament software up and running from scratch, and I believe they may still use it to this day. He also was fond of non-mainstream MMO’s as well as an assortment of other fun games.

One person of major note that left the company was Londa Robinson, or “Mom”. She always took care of us while playtesting, making sure Pizza was ordered and helped us with expense reports. She very much acclimated to the Motherly Hen role, so it was very sad to see her go. at the time, Score had a few talks with the people that did Barbie. Yes, that’s right, the girl’s doll. Spearheaded by Londa herself, talks were coming along well and it looked like we were going to get the license to do a TCG on it. Trust me, I shuddered just thinking of what I needed to do to cover to “source material”. And let’s not forget pink cards… It is the new black, you know. But the talks eventually fell under somewhere. Word was that Chaz backstabbed the proposition somehow, and Londa was pissed. She thought the Barbie TCG was a great idea and couldn’t stand whatever it was that Chaz had done. Thus, the resignation was turned in. Londa was a consultant after all, and not a marketing person. She could easily find work elsewhere where people “would listen to her”. Londa would be replaced by Johnathan Quesenberry, a tournament director for Decipher. Johnathan (JQ) had a very bright mind for marketing and quickly picked up with Londa left off, although their styles of marketing were much different.

But the main person to leave Score, and the one that I thus mark the end of Generation 2, was the termination of Jim Ward. There was no one event that lead up to Jim’s demise at Score. But, why should a company keep a man who needed to be flown in and out of the city every 2 weeks to do all of the design when you already have someone that knows how to do it that can stay in the city AND get paid less? Over the course of Android Saga to Cell Games, I had learned everything there was to know about being a game’s designer. I knew all of the paperwork, could read all of the production information packets, including COGs and P&L; statements, I was always on top of my headlines, I learned how to image capture (and found a way to bring it in house thanks to Buffy), and it was clearly obvious I knew more about the DBZ TCG and was more passionate for the game than Jim was. Jim got paid twice as much for doing twice as less as I was already having to handle at Score.

I even remember the day it happened. Jim Ward wasn’t even in Texas at the time, since Chaz had chosen to let him go while he was up north. Chaz just called me over to his desk and casually let me know that Jim wasn’t going to be here anymore. He wasn’t needed since I did all the work. And a damned good job I did, apparently. I was learning everything at a rapid pace and keeping up with expectations, in the office and in the market. And then, right there in the big hall of Donruss/Playoff LP, I was promoted to the Lead Game Designer of all Score products. And I couldn’t even legally drink yet…

Talk about this new post here!