Mentors as a Mechanic

[AlexM 30]

How would you feel if mentors were introduced into the game as a mechanic? How they would operate is like this:

• It is a single card of a character, such as Vegeta.
• They start outside of the deck like the mastery.
• They come with their own effect or power that can be used, sometimes only once per game.
• They come with a VERY small side deck that you can draw upon, but you have to destroy the top three cards of your life deck to draw the top card of the mentors deck. This deck size will vary with mentors, so some may have 6 while others have 3, this allows for things like silver bullet cards being a guaranteed draw if you use a 3 card mentor and put the maximum three cards of said silver bullet in the deck. 
• The mentor/ side deck can hold their own named cards! 
• There are no stages on the mentor, meaning they don't have to pay power stages for attack costs. However, they can only perform attacks from their own deck. 
• They cannot be used like an ally. That means no directing damage, no taking over combat, ect.

Here's a thought out example of a mentor

Mentor: Vegeta

Deck size: 4 cards

POWER: (This can only be used once per game.) Stops a physical or energy attack. 

I decide to draw the top card of my mentors deck, so I destroy the top three cards of my life deck to draw the top card of my mentor's deck. It's a Galick Gun, which I normally couldn't use, but it's more like Vegeta is using it rather than me. It costs me zero stages, and I get the immediate and hit affects of the card for myself. 

 

Other mentors would be Piccolo, King Kai, Goku, Roshi, and eventually Whis when we get there. I'm not sure about villains though they don't have many "mentor like" figures. 

 

[Artificial Human 559]

So, a remade Sensei deck?

[Stryyder 1,403]

Guaranteed card draw really goes against the element of random draw for a game.  Yeah, I know everyone wants skill to be the final line, but making it so you can draw a game-breaking card, or the exact card your deck archetype needs as soon as you need it seems counterintuitive to me.  Especially if there's no restriction on what cards can go in the side deck (aside from standard deck rules like named cards and color matches your mastery).

Going back and errataing a bunch of cards to say "Mentor deck" would be ridiculous.  I would mentor decks have a 1 per limit and you MUST have the exact # of cards in the mentor deck that it says on the mentor.  So for your example above the player MUST have 4 cards in their mentor deck and each one would have to be different.

[Denithan 72]

7 hours ago, AlexM said:

Other mentors would be Piccolo, King Kai, Goku, Roshi, and eventually Whis when we get there. I'm not sure about villains though they don't have many "mentor like" figures.

 

Off the top of my head, Master Shen. Then Frieza, who mentored Tagoma/Ginyu Force, Ginyu, who mentored Ginyu, Cold, who mentored Frieza/Cooler presumably, Gero, who programmed all the Androids (and acted as a direct supervisor to 19), arguably Cell to the Cell Jrs though  I wouldn't go for it, Babidi for all the Majins.

[Card Slinger J 196]

6 hours ago, Artificial Human said:

So, a remade Sensei deck?

I've been saying for some time now that they needed to bring back the Sensei Deck mechanic in Pan/FanZ that solely functions the same way Piccolo Sensei did in Retro Z. Swapping random cards from the top of your Life Deck only adds more luck than skill compared to being able to tutor from your Life Deck what card(s) you're going to swap from your Sensei Deck.

In Retro Z you weren't able to run matching sleeves for both your Life Deck and Sensei Deck which made swapping cards out all the more tedious in between matches. The old rules for Sensei Decks were so bad at my LGS that we mainly stuck to just running the Sensei card for it's Power without swapping anything unless someone was lucky enough to obtain Piccolo Sensei.

[Artificial Human 559]

Just give the game a straight Side Deck. Doesn't have to be more than say 6-9 cards. :/

[Card Slinger J 196]

A straight Side Deck would make this game incompatible with Tim Batow's Fusion format where they should've already changed the Sensei Deck rules to begin with.

Even David Fashbinder pointed out the major flaw of the Sensei Deck mechanic in his interview (starts in 9:05) with Erik from Team Badman back when he was still posting YouTube content for this game: