Top 5 Mistake Cards in Panini Z

The Panini iteration of the DBZ TCG ran for about two years and released over one-thousand cards. While a miniscule legacy compared to the Big Boy card games like Magic or Yu-Gi-Oh!, designing so many cards over such a long period of time almost guarantees that not every decision made will be the best one. And I'm not here to talk about bad card effects - I mean cards that had a bad effect on the game. There's a world of difference between a card like Red Pummel whose effect is so bad it has no impact on the game and a card with an effect that actively makes the game worse. Such as... the five entries on this list!

5. Unleashed

    The boogeyman of all of post-Vengeance DBZ! Unleashed receives the number five spot because some individuals of questionable motivation believe that Unleashed was actually a good card for the game. While I vehemently disagree (and this is my blog so I will do as I please), out of respect for what I will generously label "a difference of design philosophy" I will only be putting it at the bottom of the list. Unleashed ramped up the speed of the game considerably. Any deck running it could suddenly leap to their most powerful level in a single action. Even worse, it was a counter to itself. Unleashed mirrors devolved into wild swings with players Unleashing each other up and down. Some will reference the "skill" of the mirror in terms of knowing when to play your Unleashed, but is it really skill to just hold it as long as possible? It's a card that could lose you the game immediately just because your opponent drew it, and for that it belongs here.

4. Namekian Knowledge Mastery

    Knowledge Mastery might seem a bit of a strange choice, given that it's currently legal in Fan Z and was only ever gone from the game during Panini Set 7. But do you remember how Knowledge Mastery functioned in Set 1? The anger gain from rejuvenation was NOT limited to combat. Knowledge games devolved into players simply passing and rejuvenating to passively win by MPPV. And remember, this was the first exposure we had to the new DBZ game. That did not inspire confidence. While this mistake was rectified before the release of Set 2, it was such a profound oversight during the formative years of Panini Z that I cannot omit it from this discussion. Also, remember when Knowledge Mastery milled your opponent for playing their Dragon Balls?

3. Wall Breaker

    I am of the personal opinion that Wall Breaker is not really a good card. It does next to nothing except in specific matchups, and those specific matchups have reliable ways of answering it. But what makes Wall Breaker such an egregious entry on this list is the manner in which it was released. Wall Breaker came out in Set 2 and created the least fun format in the history of the game. Set 2 was slow, a miserable slog of a format, and Wall Breaker was part of it. It was a card that countered Namekian Knowledge specifically, which is fine, but also completely dumpstered a slew of lower-tier decks that were desperate to break into the meta. To add insult to injury, Knowledge Piccolo could play the best answer to Wall Breaker in the format: Focused Assault. Meaning the deck Wall Breaker should have countered was one of the decks best able to handle it, while lesser decks were hit more harshly. The Panini designers made a huge mistake releasing Wall Breaker ahead of its answers, and it wouldn't be until Set 3 that DBZ was actually a good game thanks in no small part to cards like Sagacious Strike and Red Mule Kick that made answering Wall Breaker much easier.

2. Cell - Unstoppable

    Cell is one of my personal favorite MPs in the game, but there is no denying that Set 5 was all but ruined by his existence. The loop between his level 3 and 4 essentially removed MPPV from the game as a viable wincon, and made leveling with any MP not named Cell a poor strategy. He was further bolstered by having access to his own auto-leveler in Cell's Draining Attack and access to the other two best leveling strategies in the game: Namekian Leaping Kick with either Namekian mastery and Saiyan Empowered Mastery. Compounding matters even more, Overwhelming Power had an infinite crit loop with Namekian Restored Mastery that allowed Cell to simply pass and capture a Dragon Ball every single turn. This was in addition to Restored Cell having other powerful crits, and the ability to trigger Overwhelming Power using his level 4 tutor. Cell wasn't just the most powerful MP in the game figuratively, but literally with his then-enormous power level of over two million. This meant in addition to using Overwhelming Power to crit you indefinitely, he could use it to reliably wipe your board. The meta became Cell decks and decks that could win by survival on level 1, with nothing else. The OP loop was hit in a CRD and Cell was eventually hit as well, but the memory lingers.

1. Drawku

    I hate Drawku.

    No other MP single-handedly increased the speed of the game the way that Drawku did. Not Ginyu, not Cell, not Broly. Drawku completely warped the way we thought about DBZ decks thanks to his access to reliable card advantage, something that until this point was relatively policed in Panini Z. His universally powerful bonuses made him playable in any kind of strategy. He also had access to Goku's Kaioken, an insanely powerful Named card that had been begging for a stack to break. The way that Drawku's second and third levels interacted with the discard pile meant that drawing a powerful card once could easily equate to drawing it three or four times. Remember, Unleashed was not BAU at this time. It wasn't uncommon for Drawku to slam down Unleashed on his first action, draw it with his level two, then Unleash again to go to his level four and begin tutoring cards from any zone in the game. No card interacted with the Banished Zone the way that Drawku four did, and this is all ignoring his incredibly powerful damage modifiers that allowed him to abuse cards like Assisted Kamehameha and Red Trailing Blast to a frightening degree. While we aren't really considering Fan Z for this list, I feel compelled to mention that a serious chunk of Fan Z card design was dedicated to helping the rest of the game adjust to Drawku.

    Thus concludes my list. Are there any cards you feel deserved a spot above these? Were these cards in fact reasonable and unfairly persecuted in this article? Let me know in the comments! Later dayZ!

-Seth