Dragon Ball Super Card Game

Dragon Ball Super Card Game is Bandai's 2017 English-language CCG based on the Dragon Ball Super anime sequel. It is currently the in-print Dragon Ball Z franchise card game, following the Score and Panini eras as the third distinct American Dragon Ball CCG.

The game

Designed by Bandai's in-house card-game team, the Super Card Game uses a battle-and-combo system where players build a deck around a Leader character (typically Goku, Vegeta, Frieza, or a Dragon Ball Super-specific character like Jiren or Beerus). The game's design emphasizes combo play and resource-swapping, with stacking attacks and reversal mechanics that reward skilled piloting. It is explicitly Bandai's answer to the question of how to make a modern Dragon Ball CCG that actually rewards deckbuilding the way Magic rewards it.

The context

2017 launched into the Dragon Ball Super anime's peak cultural moment (Universe Survival Saga was airing, Dragon Ball FighterZ was about to launch, and the franchise was in its biggest resurgence since Dragon Ball Z's late-90s US boom). Bandai's release landed at exactly the right moment, and the game has sustained a competitive scene through regular expansion releases.

The context for collectors

As the only currently-in-print Dragon Ball CCG, Super Card Game has a different collector profile from the Score and Panini legacy products in this archive. It is an active tournament game with an ongoing format. The first 2017 Galactic Battle and Union Force sets are the earliest collector touchstones, and specific Special Rare and Secret Rare cards have appreciated substantially.

The collector angle

For RetroTCG's archive, Super Card Game is the modern-active end of the Dragon Ball CCG lineage. The Score era (2000 to 2006) and the Panini era (2014 to 2017) are the retro windows; Super Card Game 2017-onward is the living game. Collectors who want a complete Dragon Ball CCG archive need all three, and Super Card Game's ongoing print cadence means its collector economics work differently from the finished out-of-print retro entries.