Captain Ginyu: A Set Too Soon

Now that we have our first official CRD and the threat of the Namekian Style has died down, a new scourge has emerged on the tournament scene (not that he was ever absent from it): CAPTAIN GINYU! OH NOESS!

The evil captain has certainly made a splash, and there’s already talk by some to bust him down to lieutenant and take out some of his steam, but does Captain Ginyu need a nerf? Like I pointed out was the problem with the Namekian style, he certainly is consistent for what he does and I would even go as far to say he is the most consistent personality in the crucial early turns. So like the Namekian style, same malady means it needs the same medicine (a nerf), right? Well, not so fast…

The problem with the Namekian style lay in the overall design of the style, whether that means the designers were overcompensating for something with the Namekian style or the other styles just weren’t given enough power remains up to debate. The problem with Captain Ginyu is that he exists in an environment that just does not have the tools necessary to keep him in check.

Captain Ginyu is a Set Three personality released in Set One. And again, we can get a good picture as to why Captain Ginyu seems to be the personality to beat by analyzing what’s in the set.

Again, consistency is the name of the game and Captain Ginyu can hit the ground running on turn one by getting a guaranteed ally out with his power every time (short of you getting a miracle blitz and taking away his power stages before he can use his power). On the other side of the fence, what are your options for getting rid of allies?

Right off the bat we know that there are Critical Effects that can take care of allies. Just about any attack is capable of getting one, but I’m just gonna come out and say that it’s an unreliable method for ally control. It’s basically a conditional HIT effect, and it really becomes irrelevant by the time Captain Ginyu reaches Level 2 and can fish allies out of the discard pile and completely useless once Captain Ginyu reaches Level 3+ and is immune to losing allies via Critical Effects.

So we have to start looking at cards that either Banish or Destroy allies to make a dent in the Captain Ginyu ally machine. Out of the six styles, only three of them have cards that can outright Banish an ally: Blue Betrayal, Orange Stare Down and Red Energy Blast. If you include cards that can Destroy allies, then the Saiyan style can count the conditional Saiyan Surprise in its arsenal while the Red style gets two more cards with conditional/situational Destroy effects: Red Lightning Slash and Red Observation (which is limit one per deck).

Unless you want to count Yamcha – Action Ready, the Black and Namekian styles have no way to combat Captain Ginyu’s powers (though in most cases they only have one less anti-ally card than every other style).

But here’s the thing about the situation and why I believe that overall Captain Ginyu isn’t broken: there is almost certainly going to be more cards that can Banish or Destroy allies introduced in later sets. Right now, some styles can’t run any (non-Critical Effect) anti-ally cards while others can run a max of three and the Red style can get all the way up to seven tech cards. Introducing at least one Freestyle card that can Banish/Destroy an ally plus another styled one means that some decks could have close to 10% of their cards being ally tech, should the meta environment demand it.

It’s just a shame that the meta currently does not have the infrastructure to combat a consistent ally deck like Captain Ginyu. His powers would be perfectly fine (and maybe even on the average side) if he was released in Set Three where we can assume that there would be more card effects that were anti-ally available to all styles. Unfortunately in Set One, Captain Ginyu has few (if any) natural predators. I’m not saying he’s unbeatable, he just has every advantage going for him.

Is Captain Ginyu broken? No. Does Captain Ginyu need errata? No. What he needs is a bigger card pool to find his balanced place in the meta.

Later, BroZ!

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