Incoming Changes to P-028 Frieza/Bionic Strike Mecha Frieza

Thank you for your continued support of the Dragon Ball Super Card Game.

We’d like to make a follow-up to our initial announcement on March 3rd about P-028 Frieza/Bionic Strike Mecha Frieza.

※You can find the original announcement here:

http://www.dbs-cardgame.com/strategy/cross-worlds/mecha-frieza.php

It’s been about a month since the release of Cross Worlds, and we’ve received a tremendous amount of feedback about Bionic Strike Mecha Frieza via release tournaments and social media. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for contacting us and relaying their thoughts and opinions on the issue. We take this matter very seriously, and want to make sure that we do everything in our power to address it in a fair and reasonable way.



As of this moment in April, 2018, the two most popular deck archetypes are the previously posted turn two kill deck and decks that use P-028 Frieza/Bionic Strike Mecha Frieza to search for specific cards using Extra Cards to build a powerful board position in the early game using little or no energy.



Looking at things from our perspective as the team behind the game, both of these deck archetypes have failed to achieve overwhelming win ratios compared to other decks that don’t use Bionic Strike Mecha Frieza, so we don’t consider the current environment to be degenerate.



Our reason for thinking this is that multiple decks and strategies exist for countering the two types of Bionic Strike Mecha Frieza-based decks mentioned above, and decks featuring a variety of different leader cards are still being played. There are also decks that we’ve confirmed to have 80% win rates against Bionic Strike Mecha Frieza decks.

*Example decklists can be found below.

That said, we felt that the existence of Bionic Strike Mecha Frieza might make it difficult to deliver our intended play experience in the future for a variety of reasons.



Reason 1: Bionic Strike Mecha Frieza offers a generally useful ability that, going forward, may make future expansions less fun/interesting to explore.



Reason 2: The existence of Bionic Strike Mecha Frieza will always demand our consideration when designing future cards, potentially limiting design space.



Reason 3: There’s no easy solution to help starting players and those still learning the ropes to deal with the deck archetype. New players forced to play against the archetype may stop enjoying the game, lose interest, and quit.



Reason 4: Competitive players will always have to keep the card in mind, limiting deck building freedom and affecting future enjoyment of the game.

To resolve these issues, we’re going to be making changes to Frieza/Bionic Strike Mecha Frieza’s [Permanent] skill.

P-028 Frieza (Front)

Current skill text:

[Permanent] When you activate an Extra Card, you may choose 1 card in your life and add it to your hand. If you do, reduce the energy cost of that Extra Card by 1 for the duration of the turn. If this reduces the energy cost of that Extra Card to less than 1, you may activate the card without paying the specified cost.

Errata’d text:

[Permanent] During your opponent’s turn, when you activate an Extra Card, you may choose 1 card in your life and add it to your hand. If you do, reduce the energy cost of that Extra Card by 1 for the duration of the turn. If this reduces the energy cost of that Extra Card to less than 1, you may activate the card without paying the specified cost. If you use this skill to add a card in your life to your hand, negate this skill for the duration of the turn.

P-28 Bionic Strike Mecha Frieza (Back)

Current skill text:

[Permanent] When you activate an Extra Card, you may choose 1 card in your life and add it to your hand. If you do, reduce the energy cost of that Extra Card by 2 for the duration of the turn. If this reduces the energy cost of that Extra Card to less than 1, you may activate the card without paying the specified cost.

Errata’d text:

[Permanent] During your opponent’s turn, when you activate an Extra Card, you may choose 1 card in your life and add it to your hand. If you do, reduce the energy cost of that Extra Card by 2 for the duration of the turn. If this reduces the energy cost of that Extra Card to less than 1, you may activate the card without paying the specified cost.