Another year, another DBS TCG Nats article! It is kind of wild to think that that DBS Masters is 7 years old and our friend group has stuck with it all this time. There is just something that keeps pulling us in, set release after set release; the magic, old friends, new friends, the journey, the testing process, the conversations, the vibes – as it stands… it can’t be duplicated.
The Preparation
DBS has been on the backburner for most of the year with the increased responsibility at work and all the adventures I got to take with the wife. This led to the Florida regional in November being my first event of the year in hopes of obtaining the round one bye at Nationals. To accomplish this I played a budget build of Green Gohan and went 5-2 to earn the bye – not too shabby!
With that out of the way, and Nats not being until late January, the 3xG boys had plenty of time to test… or so we thought haha.
Between the holidays and living our grown-up lives, the nerding was condensed to roughly 2 nights per week for about 2.5 hours, which in DBS Masters we know that means that you’re getting at best, two games per night.
This led to us ultimately choosing the “work smarter” approachtowards the end of December and having Frisco and I play the same exact deck for the event since there was only a limited amount of time to collect data prior to traveling to LA.
The Meta
The community narrative always seems to play a huge role in determining what the Meta is. This along with some data from the other National level events gave us some decent indicators of what the most popular choices may be heading into US Nationals.
For me personally, this was my list in order of what we thought would be most prevalent:
1.) Mono-Yellow U7
2.) Green Gohan
3.) Android 21
4.) Cooler
5.) Jiren
6.) Gohanks
7.) Mechikabura
8.) Pan
9.) Expert Deck 21
In hindsight, we were close to correct – with the only changes being that Gohanks should have been higher than Jiren and Cooler, and Mechikabura should have been lower on the list.
With this list and some early results from National events rolling in, I updated my build of Green Gohan and purchased the cards for Jiren and U7 Goku as all three of these decks were the ones I was most drawn to playing based playstyle.
The Decision
Deck selection in DBS Masters is always so difficult since the Meta is wildly unpredictable and with 400+ players in attendance, you just have no idea what you’re going to see in the first few rounds of any event. You could roll into the event with the best deck for your predicted matchups and find yourself losing the opening round to Raditz. For this event, there was no clear-cut absolute world beater of a deck that existed, so ultimately you had to play something you felt could keep you in any game and didn’t depend on high-rolling each round – this led to the early dismissal of Jiren.
Now that I was down to Green Gohan and U7, I did a ton of work while at the office to figure this out from both sides of the table. I would bring my deck boxes to work each day and run the matchup repeatedly to find the exploitable weaknesses on both sides. This paid huge dividends in Frisco’s top 16 games against Green Gohan to get him into top 8.
Here were some of my findings on the Green Gohan side:
1.) Universe 7 hates 15k swings – a 2/2 split of King Vegeta and Meta-Cooler Unison was most optimal in the pre-side BO1 environment and you should side the 3rd Meta-Cooler.
2.) Fated Rivals Son Goku is a 2 of in your 65 due to how well it plays against Syn Shenron and Mutaito.
3.) If you don’t open Vegeta/Trunks, holding up Uneasing Awakened Rage and negating their first swing to draw a card does a ton to set them back on developing Z-Energy.
4.) 3-4x King Cold in your 65 feels mandatory as once you get your Z-Extra online you’ll stop their turns with ease and have a 15k body to swing with.
5.) Always play around Vegeta combo by attacking with non-barrier cards first and then swinging with battle cards as soon as they’re played.
6.) Bardock Unison is a trap, along with thinking Koitsukai can be your out to Mutaito – Focused Breakthrough is better if you’re going that route.
7.) 2x Cooler Counter main and side the third to interact with 4 drop.
8.) If the U7 player is highly knowledgeable of the matchup, they will attempt to leave you at 5 or 6 life. If you have the option, use Hyperbolic to take you to 4 life.
9.) 1x Golden Frieza Unison in the 65 as an out to the 6 drop if needed, and a great threat to win the late game.
With all of this in mind, you could get to a spot where Green Gohan was favored against U7 Goku. And with all this knowledge I was super close to playing Green Gohan for the event; I just knew that with the time I had to test with Zapp and Frisco, having us play 2 different decks would not allow us to get as much data as possible.
Here were some of my findings on the U7 side:
1.) If you’re Mono-Yellow U7, plan to awaken on the opponent’s turn 3 and stagger your combo to get out of 15k swings unscathed. Also, be intentional with getting an Omen of a Comeback down going into their turn 3 to aid you in reducing your need to take the -2 for Nimbus.
2.) If you have Mutaito for Vegeta, use it. Making Green Gohan expend more resources to get additional Z-Energy is worth it. In addition, if the Trunks is stranded under Hyperbolic then the Gohan player has to either tuck a Goku to awaken without going to 4 or tuck a Gohan and take themselves to 4 life.
3.) You don’t have to win the game, they do. Green Gohan has a small number of cards that threaten you. If you spend the game removing their board and killing their Unison you reduce their ability to combo for free on their leader skill, netting them cards, and reduce the number of ways they can kill you.
4.) If they don’t take themselves to 4 life, let them starve. This ties to the item above as well, but if the Gohan player camps at 5 or 6 life, then their hand size is greatly reduced. As you continue to disrupt with Mutaito, Android 17 counter: play, Syn Shenron, etc.; you’ll run them out of cards quickly. From there you can start burning with 4-drop to keep their hand size low, and then chipping them for 1 damage a turn with a Battle Card until you win the game.
5.) SS4 Goku, Absolute Annihilation > Swift Retaliation Cooler. With Uneasing Awakened Rage, King Cold, and Bursting Rage, Green Gohan has a ton of defense to stop from losing to Cooler. If they aren’t tapped out and they King Cold, you can Cooler them but if you’re not swinging for lethal you’re just going to get Uneasing on the next swing. On this same play if you have Annihilation and they King Cold negate, tapping themselves out, you can swing through the floodgate and they have access to none of their other defense.
6.) When in doubt, tap them out. This more so applies to the specific version of U7 that we played for the event, but still rings true in the matchup. If Green Gohan is chilling on one open energy and you can tap it down, you dramatically decrease their defensive ceiling.
These specific items, combined with the findings on the Green Gohan side, led to me feeling that U7 was the pick for the event, just not the stock build of U7.
“Wait… you charged a blue?”
How we ended up getting to the variant of U7 we played is a great example of our teamwork, creativity, and our ability to identify a particular style of play that would bode well in the majority of the matchups we planned on seeing.
Early inspiration came from when Richard Zapp tested the theory of adding a second color, testing out a Red package that included Gohan Counter: Play which would function as a 20k Double Striker that we could play for 1 one offense, and also the Frieza Swap package featured in Red U7 Gohan. This deck ended up being cool, but still had a bit of the problems we had noticed from Mono-Yellow U7, with the upside of having more efficient threats that you could play.
We ultimately felt that Mono-Yellow U7 was too predictable and very easy to sculpt a gameplan against. The main and most popular one being that the deck cannot deal with a board of 15k swings a.k.a. Jiren, Gohanks, Pan, Green Gohan with Meta-Cooler Unison, and Mechikabura. These decks also share a similar weakness – they hate being tapped out and often leave 1 energy up to defend themselves.
These data points led to Frisco jamming 7 blue cards, 4 being Senzu Bean, and the rest was a ton of work put in by the whole crew to get us to where the list ended up for the event.
Here is the list we ended up on for the event:
Stats for the deck:
Only 2 copies of the deck in the event
16 rounds played
12 wins (1 being an exact mirror in round 5)
4 losses (1 being an exact mirror in round 5)
75% win percentage overall
1 made top 8 #FrisGoat
1 finished 57th #scrubfam
Not too shabby!
Decks like this are in Frisco’s wheelhouse, especially with all the reps he has from playing Launch, which funnily enough everyone expected him to play again at Nats. Does it really all boil down to Senzu Bean? Hmm.
In the meta game at the time, a lot of the decks, including Mono-Yellow U7, that choose to be proactive all have very similar points of failure. All their plays are scripted for the most part and they all rely on 1 or less energy to defend themselves.
That was the biggest issue with standard U7, you fell into that trap, and you also had no way to punish the opposing decks outside of Bergamo, Ferocious Roar – which you only have one of. What we did was dial that up to 100 and always give ourselves the ability to play on the opponent’s turn. Whether it be Syn Shenron, Goku Black, or Bergamo we always had something that could threaten to steal tempo in the early stages of a game.
Being on the play with a Goku Black to start was just devastating to a lot of decks, especially when you then warp it the next turn and always have access to it for the duration of the game. Once this happened, the opponent could never feel safe and as the U7 player if you just happen to leave permanents in play, you can just activate the card without having to combo which always felt awesome.
Frisco and Zapp picked up on this early on – you can’t be a Swift Retaliation Cooler deck. This led us to lean into Absolute Annihilation and boy… did it annihilate some folks’ tournaments. With the way the deck is played and our ability to keep opponents tapped out, dropping Absolute Annihilation into 6 drop usually forced a scoop.
With this removal of Swift Retaliation Cooler and our lack of love for Bursting Rage, mostly due to it only being good at one specific spot in the game, we turned our attention to other SCRs and with Frisco’s testing we ended up on Piccolo & Son Gohan SCR – which was completely correct for the event.
Another brilliant thing about the blue splash for Bean is that we got to trim on negates by a substantial amount. As most U7 builds run 7 to 8 negates in their main deck, we got to cut that down to just 2x Time Magic in the main, with a third in our sideboard and ZERO Flying Nimbus… what an amazing feeling.
In hindsight, the only thing I think we would do differently is dedicate a lot more time to testing against Android 21 and finding a surefire strategy to win those games post sideboard. That was our biggest issue between the three of us testing, just not having the time or bandwidth to learn how to play Android 21 effectively and also beat Android 21 – which led to us essentially being okay with losing to the deck and instead making almost every other matchup be favorable, including Cooler (hint: side out battle cards for Unisons, focus on using 4 drop burn, and rely on big leader swings plus Goku’s Kamehameha to pressure them).
Conclusion
The event was amazing overall, but more so the time with friends and the community. The game is in such a great spot, and I couldn’t be happier that Bandai is keeping the momentum going with this upcoming set release and by already announcing events for the next organized play season. As life continues to go on and the number of games we play becomes less, I don’t think I will ever truly be able to let DBS Masters go. Right now, the game is in this place where it is so rewarding to play and get better since ultimately skill plays such a large role in someone’s success – which is a beautiful place for this game to be. Complexity may be high, and the number of new players might be lower than we’d like, but if you’re a lover of TCGs and competitive gaming, DBS Masters is at the pinnacle of games that offers such an awesome tabletop experience for those looking to be rewarded for the amount of time they invest.
I truly can’t wait to go to more events this year and of course to see you all again at Nats/Worlds next year. This community and this game are forever goated. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this and I wish everyone the absolute best – can’t wait to meet again!
3xG Productions 