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CCG Importance Dissonance: Difference between revisions

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** For a long time in the game, the second most powerful card ever printed was the Third Hokage, often revered as perhaps the strongest ninja the leaf village ''ever'' produced, who {{spoiler|dies in an epic battle by summoning ''the god of death'' to defeat his opponent}},. The first? Ino Yamanaka, a low-level genin that does almost nothing in all of part 1.
** Many recent sets have introduced multiple filler ninjas in order to try and give the decks more variety in what ninjas they can play.
* ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh!]]'' has countless examples of this trope. The famous Blue-Eyes White Dragon is a 3000 ATK monster that requires two Tributes (monsters removed from the field) and has no effect; in the manga, it was powerful enough that [[Screw the Rules, I Have Money|Seto Kaiba]] resorted to extortion and theft to collect every last one of them, but in the TCG that ensued, it's merely an expensive target. Likewise Yugi's signature card, the Dark Magician, which requires two Tributes but has only 2500 ATK; arguably, it's received more support cards in later years than even the Blue-Eyes White Dragon could ever hope for, but it too is a white (black?) elephant, even if you're dedicated enough to theme an entire deck around him. Not that ''all'' famous cards get this treatment, however; the very first duel featured in the manga included Summoned Skull, a powerful and incredibly playable card for many years (2500 ATK, like the Dark Magician, but it only needs ''one'' Tribute), and Monster Reborn, a powerful card that spent some time on the [[Too Awesome to Use|Forbidden List]]: it allows the player who uses it to bring back a monster from the Graveyard. ''Either player's'' Graveyard. Many of the most powerful cards, in fact, have either never appeared on the show or appeared only briefly. Nowadays it's not uncommon for each new expansion set to feature cards for an entire new deck archetype, which typically dominates the field for about 3-6 months before a new expansion renders it utterly moot: these archetypes are often based off of the decks of one-shot characters, or minor recurring ones, rather than the main protagonists.
** If you play the card game as they did in the show originally (meaning, no sacrifices unless the card specifically says so), then Blue-Eyes is ungodly powerful in terms of straight beatdown. The rules of the real game are based on the second half of the Duel Monsters-era comic, the Battle City Arc; there's a reason that Kaiba relies less on Blue-Eyes White Dragon than on Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon, Obelisk, or XYZ Dragon Cannon in that Arc, even though it's still his signature card and end-all-be-all answer to many duels.
*** Many people, mainly kids played liked that when the cards first came out. And the result? Everyone buying out Kaiba decks to spam 3 blue eyes. So even if you used magic, traps, high attack monsters or some good strategy, heck even if you cheated a bit more than normal with a few cards, if you wiped out one blue eyes, your opponent would bring out another the next turn or revive it, and that makes you out of the game.
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* Tapkar was a gag character during ''[[Dragonball Z]]''s World Games Saga who's in show stint was as a [[Fragile Speedster]], but in Score's original ''[[Dragonball Z]]'' card game his card powers were so over powered not only was he banned, they named a redemption after him.
** The still limping (maybe crawling?) game community (as of 2011) discovered the Supreme West Kai, who only shows up in a [[Flash Back]], was far more superior to all the older strategies.
* ''[[Weiss Schwarz (Tabletop Game)|Weiss Schwarz]]'' is guilty of this in a narrativistic instead of mechanical way. This game runs on [[Rule of Cool]] versus [[Rule of Cute]]; it tries to replicate the awesome (or heartwarming, or sad) moment of the licensed anime in its cards. To do that, it allows itself to [[Crack is Cheaper|print several different version of the same characters]], even if it's just a minor or situational variation. The downside of this, owing to the limit of cards in each expansion, is that characters whose appearances are few and far between gets less cards and decks built around them are less versatile (if building such deck is even possible)-- even if they are far more capable in-story than the spotlight-hogging main characters.
** For example, ''[[Fate Zero (Literature)|Fate /Zero]]'' trial has ''5'' variation of Saber as Character and 1 Saber-related Climax card, while Rider gets 1 Character and 1 Climax. This is despite Rider being the frickin' Alexander the Great (and all around awesome dude) while Saber is {{spoiler|King Arthur}}.
** The [[Persona 4|Nanako in a Yukata]] card is stronger than the 'Naoto' card. Except Nanako is the main character's 6-year-old cousin, whereas Naoto is a detective with a gun.
 
== CCG ==
* In ''[[Magic: theThe Gathering|Magic: The Gathering's]]'' this trope is literally the reason planeswalker cards exist at all. The devs basically said, "You know, it's really stupid that once a character gets important enough we can't print them on cards anymore."[[hottip:*:The in story reason Planeswalkers could be a card type without being incredibly broken or insanely hard to cast is that they're ''much'' weaker than the Planeswalkers of old. This has to do with the "Time Spiral" [[Story Arc]], which ends with {{spoiler|numerous Planeswalkers sacrificing their Planeswalker sparks (the phenomenon that made a sentient being a Planeswalker) to heal the fractures in time and space that could've unmade all realities if not taken care of.}}
** And then there is [[wikipedia:Gerrard Capashen|Gerrard Capashen]]. Plot-wise, he is a pinnacle of ages-long eugenics plan formulated by Urza, a powerful and very intelligent Planeswalker. Gerrard was specially engineered as a "Super-Soldier", to fight the denizens of Phyrexia, also known as ''The Nine Hells''. Gerrard also receives several whole sets of cards dedicated to his (and his skyship's) crew: Weatherlight Adventures (Which is the name of one of the expansions). His card? [http://magiccards.info/ap/en/11.html Utterly unremarkable]. Bonus points for the card flat-out losing to every other card representing opponents that Gerrard defeated or overcame in the novels.
** Karona, who emerges in Onslaught block as a [[Physical God|physical manifestation of Dominaria's mana]] formed from the [[Fusion Dance|fusion]] of the powerful and iconic legends Phage the Untouchable and Akroma, Angel of Wrath, is far less useful than she has any right to be as well--so much so that head designer Mark Rosewater [http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/mr232 publicly apologized] for how lame she was:
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** The actual ''[[Doctor Who]]'' CCG kind of inverted this; virtually all common cards were absolute unplayable rubbish and uncommons weren't much better. Most recognizable characters were rares, and the Fourth Doctor -- at the time the most recognizable and iconic version -- was an ''ultra-rare.''
** The latest incarnation -- ''Doctor Who: Monster Invasion'' -- has a number of oddities. It helps if you reflect that the "Loyalty" statistic doesn't specify who they're loyal ''to'', so while it's surprising that Rory's is higher than Amy's, maybe it reflects his loyalty to ''her''. The fact Amy has a "Bravery" stat of 300, more in line with the average panicky extra than Martha's 600 or Sarah Jane's 750, is harder to explain. And there are a ''lot'' of cards devoted to panicky extras.
* The ''[[Star Trek (Franchise)|Star Trek]]'' CCG by Decipher actually cycled into and out of this trope. At first players only used named characters since the no-name Starfleet [[Red Shirt|Red Shirts]] had usually only one skill and mediocre stats. To balance this out, they made cards called "Lower Decks" and "Assign Mission Specialist" so that these cards would see use. Also, since the game was premised on all the Star Trek races competing, every on-screen Romulan, Klingon and several other characters eventually got cards with skills and high ability scores never demonstrated on screen so that their faction had a viable chance at solving missions. Oh, and Riker's card sucked.<ref>His [[Cloning Blues|clone's, moreso.]]</ref>
** Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's unnamed cameo character is an ultra-rare card. There are about half a dozen ultra-rares in the entire game.
** The second edition of the game fixed this to some extent, leaning more on using multiple versions of main characters. Of course, it had four Trek series to draw from while the first edition kind of didn't.
* The ''[[Highlander (Franchise)|Highlander]]'' CCG was a major offender here, as just about every Immortal from the films and TV series (except, High-Costing-Sean-Connery-Linkness-Rights-Required Ramirez) got a deck based around them over the life of the game. Many of the most powerful cards were one-shot wonder characters.
* In the ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'' CCG, two of the most frequently abused cards in the first set were an empty trunk and a random mausoleum.
 
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== [[Video Games]] ==
* In the ''[[Pokémon (Tabletop Gamegame)|Pokémon]]'' CCG, not only was the first Mewtwo card terrible, but the evolution mechanic was too difficult to pull off in many cases meaning basic pokemon were often more valuable to put in a deck than their evolved counterparts.
** Not only was evolution horribly designed and hard to pull off, but in the beginning they though it was "balanced" to design cards that didn't have evolutions stronger because being able to evolve was an "advantage". The result was that Pokemon without evolutions were almost universally the strongest cards. Combine with the broken retreat mechanic and the colored energy and for a while Scyther of all cards was considered the strongest Pokemon since it had a decent colorless attack, good HP, and no retreat cost, making it an excellent card to simply throw into any deck. Eventually Sneasel came out even more broken: that was when they started banning cards.
*** At the time, there was a [[Fan Nickname]] (that saw great play in a number of magazines such as Pojo) for this type of card, named for Hitmonchan (who was essentially a prototype version of the Scyther discussed above). That nickname? [[Badass Nickname|Haymaker.]]
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