There are many decks we wish that we could play that just don’t work for one reason or another. It’s outclassed by other decks. There’s no place for it in the meta. It relies too much on specific circumstances. There are other decks that do the same thing but better. This article is about one such personality that falls into each of those categories and touches on a wider issue with similar physical beats personalities in RetroDBZ. This is the sad fate of Captain Ginyu.
In RetroDBZ, Captain Ginyu is one of many personalities that just quite frankly doesn’t do anything. His powers are vanilla and mostly unremarkable, most can’t even recall what he does. He has no specific or named cards that benefit his personality stack that others don’t have access to. He doesn’t even have a Level 4, let alone a Level 5, to take even the slightest advantage of Captain Ginyu’s Energy Attack, arguably his best named card.
While Captain Ginyu Changes Level 3 has a power that would be decent on a Level 1 card (in fact, the equally neglected Dodoria Level 1 has an almost identical power), the one personality level for Captain Ginyu that has always tantalized me is on his Level 1 Redemption Hi-Tech.
Just look at that beast. Six life cards of damage, available on turn one, for zero cost. Combine that with a physical attack friendly mastery like the Trunks Saga Black Style Mastery and Master Roshi Sensei and you’re looking at an eight life card and one stage MONSTER swing that could take out 10% or more of your average life deck. I have always wanted to do this, but (if you’ll pardon the expression) the deck has always been stacked against physical beats that go for quality over quantity.
Physical beats had a disadvantage in RetroDBZ due to a number of issues ranging from the prevalence and reliance of “Stop Alls” like Time is a Warrior’s Tool to power stage management seldom becoming an issue with numerous playable cards like Pikkon’s Leg Catch powering you up to full(and that’s not even throwing allies into the mix with ridiculous cards like Gathering of Heroes).
With physical attacks mostly dealing damage in power stages and personalities being beholden to a power chart that excludes all but a handful of characters, physical decks had to rely on two of three things to get by:
1. Being able to throw multiple attacks a combat in order to deal the most damage when the opponent couldn’t block or power up.
2. Being able to pump their physical attacks with as much extra damage as possible.
3. Having a very high power level on the chart.
So looking back at our poor Captain Ginyu HT, unfortunately he just doesn’t have access to any tools that will allow him to throw multiple high damaging physical attacks a combat and he doesn’t have the brawn to make any of his other swings count. At best, we can pump his one good attack very high but as we stated earlier there are other decks that do the same thing but better.
Sadly, I think my Captain Ginyu big swing deck will have to stay as a fantasy concept. One good advantage won’t offset multiple disadvantages, with the best options being to construct it as a standard Villain Ally deck with an MP that offers little for the archetype (unlike in Panini DBZ). The Captain will unfortunately have to join the ranks of Uub, Cell, Majin Buu, and Kamikaze Ghost as Unplayable Dreams. (P.S. – Didier has the same dreams with Goten.)
All well, I’m sure there’s more trash for me to love out there. Do you have a deck idea with Captain Ginyu or an Unplayable Dream? Let us know in the comments, on social media and in our Facebook group (links below).
Later BroZ!
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Really enjoyed reading this, thanks for the nostalgia boost to my day. I remember building deck after deck based around personality powers, and this one hits home.
Although, perhaps it would be fair to compare the strength of the cards at the time of their release to previous sagas, because later sagas definitely raised the bar and, and you’ve clearly stated, just were better versions of earlier sagas.
Thanks for reading. Honestly, I just don’t have the memory or mindset to make the comparison at release, but to take a stab at it I’d say Vinegar was available in the same set and was basically Ginyu but better since most “Stop Alls” were already available by Trunks Saga, plus cards that would help it like Gohan’s Kick and Android 18’s Stare Down weren’t out yet and even on the Trunks Saga power chart he was mostly in the “C” bracket unless he was at full power.
My dream was Majin Dabura, Meditated level 3. I had no special love for Dabura but his power seemed like it could be super exploited in some interesting ways. Majin Quickness comes to mind, but in particular there was a card, and I am afraid I have forgotten the name, but it made each player shuffle their hand into their deck and draw the same number of cards after each attack they played. If you started with a big hand and played that, you could easily end up doing +15 life cards with dabura’s power for your last few attacks!