BATTLE SPIRITS SAGA (Tales from the Bargain Bin 2023) 

My locals was incredibly hyped for this game (the owners at least) and the loyal vanguard players there where willing to buy into it, myself included, the product came out most of us got a box and 1-2 decks, started to build, draft, trade, and learn the game, in prep for the first tournament the store would host, 1 tournament in. And everyone was not happy, most players (myself included) switched back to CFV because we had more fun, and now my locals has almost 3 cases worth of decks and sealed boxes that they can’t move anymore because no one plays, I’ve been tempted to buy it off them just to try and move it myself as singles/premade decks, but unfortunately the demand I have seen online has puttered away to nonexistent and now there just stuck and might have to cancel other games coming out because they can’t risk it being as big as a flop at this, grand archive, and shadowverse has been

I really like BSS so I will still hold out hope

Thanks for mentioning my video! This was a wonderful breakdown of how battle spirits saga was handled. It's sad see such a good property mismanaged in the west.

I will say Moist isn't completely agnostic to card games, He's an avid Yu-Gi-Oh! Collector and has been on Yugitubing channels with relative frequency

the funny thing about sending this kit to MatPat of all people is that he HAS played games on hia live channel that have CCG mechanics, and he said specifically that he doesn't play card games because he's bad at them. which is faur enough, but if the BSS team had actually checked, they'd know that

It also doesn't help that the One Piece TCG was launched about half a year earlier, and was having supply issue: being sold out, and hard to come by until only recently. Everyone was buying that, and didn't want to focus on two new TCG's at once. They should have waited till next year to launch.

Shaman King needs to be next in this series.

also with how BSS did nobody can tell me their one piece game isnt being carried by the IP

18:29 - This was saturday / day 1, there were plenty of people playing (415 or so). Day 0 / friday was product pickup and there were still a ton of people building decks and making trades to prepare for day 1. There were probably more people day 0 than day 1 since the amount of product you could buy was limited, so people brought friends to get more product to sell / trade singles. A lot of it were vendors coming in groups to get product to sell early. Something like only half of the people that bought product day 0 participated in day 1. 18:33 was day 2. There wasn't really anything for the non-top cut players to do so no one showed up for day 2. There were like 20-30 of us watching the projector screen of the feature match but that was it.

Would love to see you do this series for Vanguard. I know you hate the franchise but would be nice to see your take.

I'm in this video a couple times. Never thought I'd get to say that about a Kohdok video! 🤣🤣 (I worked the Launch Event in Vegas.) Honestly, I love the game, and I'm actually a tiny bit happy they are winding it back a bit. Now the people playing it are actually the people who enjoy the game, not the no-lifers who are just in it for the money and flipping and couldn't care less about the game. Really informative video! Don't quite agree on every single point, but I'm just happy someone is finally talking about this,

There were over 400 people in vegas...

Never heard of this game in my life but your little fake trailer for it at the end there genuinely got me kinda hyped up ngl

FYI Hasbro has the Power Rangers rights now so they'd have to go through them to do anything outside of Asia.

"Traps work like the Secrets in Hearthstone" - You really decided not to state the obvious 😂

Its an original IP so it's kinda hard for it to grow outside of Japan

"I don't care that it's what one piece did" excellent rebuttal.

Will keep playing no matter what, love the game, the interaction, and the ressource management, so we will see

As both a judge and a player I’m very hopeful and I’m very happy to even be given the chance to be a part of the game like I have been. Set 3 is awesome but the pricing is yeah, and I am excited for set 4 cause of new mechanics. Genuinely idk if it will keep going but I know we have 2 years of support past that idk I’m just gonna remain hopeful.

I think the highest amount of players we had at locals was 6 or 8 for this game. Now none have shown in a month. In a decent size city. Too much competition in the card game space. Heard the other store groups basically failed at launch and we became the only store hosting active tournies

it seems IP's hold so much weight in tcgs at this point truly a shame.

technically they cannot do the power rangers since Bandai no longer owns the franchise. Its a Hasbro franchise now

The funny part about the Critikal part is that he's more into YGO, to the point he could actually be a brand ambassador if he or Konami wanted to (and not that antoine guy)

It's almost bafflingly impressive how many of the lessons from Seven Deadly TCG Sins, Errata Text and many of Kohdok's other videos culminate to show just how atrocious Battle Spirits Saga's launch year was.

Honestly I'm a fan of the game. Even though there isn't really a player base where i am, i still buy into it. I'm hoping to play online or find a way to drum up support.

Love the Crypt keeper reference. I had forgotten this game even came out this year. Nothing about it seemed interesting during the ad campaign and then i just never heard about it after it released.

Slight correction: Digimon has 6 primary colors (and a 7th for the uncategorized). Also, with the exception of the 1 set where they experimented with adding more foils and the reprint set, Digimon always has 2 rares. They continued that past the first 2 sets (the ones that were the first 3 Japanese sets combined).

I feel they needed a show to go along with it.

So far I'm enjoying it at the local casual level. My main concern is that booster boxes are too cheap, yeah I like the price but it doesn't help the game long term. As for the card design/text box, it bothered me a lot in the beginning but now I don't even notice it and have no problem playing the game. My main issues with the game is that I don't like the overall style, I'd prefer different artwork but that can change in time. The reskins for Gundam, I'm on the fence about because I don't mind them being reskins BUT! I do sell on tcgplayer so if they were unique then it would drive the price up of the cards and boxes.

When he described the digimon tcg booster... So what you're saying is the closer the tcg/ccg gets to an ecg/xcg the better.

It honestly feels like it's going the way of d spirits.

I was one of the first who predicted the battlespirits fail, why? Because players need to play games to have FUN! Not bribed by tournament prizes. I still think Dragon Ball Masters is the best new iteration of the Japanese anime card game in theme, mechanics, strategy, deck building, and FUN. My only gripe is that The DB masters community got too obsessed with “meta” decks and this led to them slamming many leaders and colors, and abusing any hyped deck that won a tourney, which led to too many unecessary bans. BUT, if you play like my group and locals, we have our own tiny ban list and we also play casual formats of Dragon Ball Masters. Our competitive meta is so healthy and unpredicatble, almost any deck old or new can win an event and tourney! That being said, instead of Battle Spirits, like you said, the generic fantasy theme is done. Players will always choose MtG or YuGiOh. I chooese MtG.

I absolutely love this game. The game mechanic is fantastic. Set 3 has fixed a lot of what players were complaining about! So Bandai is willing to listen to feedback and make the game better for everyone. Also set 4 will have a collab with Evangelion, so that is something to look forward too.

Jesus christ, I thought I was the only one who thought the text boxes for Saga looked absolutely horrible!! I wanted to give the game a chance since it was probably the cheapest way I could get Siegwurm, a character I've grown attached to by watching the anime by seeing how cool the character was since buying from the first run of Battle Spirits cards would have been way too pricey. I knew that it wasn't going to go well once it was announced last year, but it's sad to know that Bandai treated a well-respected game from its native country so dirtily when rebooting it worldwide, especially since I was genuinely looking forward to finally learning how to play the game years after it was deemed irrelevant. Speaking of the anime, although I want to nitpick that the Battle Spirits anime you referred to at the start was actually its second series I can't blame you for using it as the "main season" since the very first season didn't even bother explaining the game's rules or show how a full game plays out until a couple of episodes in the season.

Yeah I remember seeing a mail in card for the 2009 release in Shonen Jump. I got my free deck but saw nothing else for it later

Also what's up with saying "tolkienest" does Kohdok not realize that fantasy genre existed before Tolkien?

I really liked this video (despite being a BSS enjoyer). Seems the bag was fumbled by corporate decisions. I love playing the game and the cards speak to my lizard brain so I'm going to keep playing until it either gets cancelled or my locals die (at least that part I know won't happen). The thing's they are doing in set 4 should have been done in set 1 and things might be different. Regardless I hope the game finds traction again as it really is a blast to play.

Where did Critical Penguin do the Battle Spirit video? For some reason I can't find it anywhere. Did he take it down?

Wait i know you dont like vanguard but you said me no like to buddyfight which you seemed to be super into before darkness dragon world came out

I HEAR WIXOSS MUSIC LET'S GO

I has never familiar with the original game, and was really excited for BSS when i heard about it. I think the mechanics are really interesting. I moved states the week it was released it it died locally before i had a chance to visit a lgs in my new city =/ To this day I have played 2 games with the demo deck to learn, and 3 games with the starter decks to try teaching people

I honestly dont know why youtube stopped recommending me your videos because they are so well done. I love learning about dead card game and what went wrong.

I love the skit at beginning.

I was all for it, but one thing i noticed was the cards were just hard to find. You couldnt walk into a Wal-Mart and find sets when one pice and digimon were plentiful.

They just came out with a statement that the next couple of events won’t have cash prizing. They will have travel and hotel vouchers.

I think the main thing with Bandai games right now is that they do not emphasize locals and smaller communities. Like with battle spirits, they have these big competitive tournaments but barely any stores do locals for them because the cards don’t sell. I hope one day Bandai realizes that locals are what makes most players buy cards consistently. Why do I buy Pokémon and yugioh cards when they online clients? Because my lgs has locals every week and I like getting new cards to use/trade in the events. And no, promos themselves do not count as advertising locals.Bandai has got to work with lgs’ better in order to grow their games and give each game an equal amount of attention

Either way, I bought every single starter deck, a few promo extras and boosters just to collect. Game is fun and Evangelion collab is coming.

Yeesh, I thought the Gundam Collab is going to bounce back BSS but they fumbled it so hard as they're just a reskin. I hope that the Evangelion Collab will turn things around. Although given that Gundam Collab already burnt people, why engage in a second burn? I agree most parts of what you mentioned, though wanna add on that Core papers still irk me. I don't see that this game will last that long, given that Discord channel that I'm in having discourse about LGSes dropping the game because of the low turnouts of the set 1. I expect Bandai to close this game out to save back cost. I'm gonna warm up my seat and sit down to see it's sunset.

I would love to play this game, but was crushed when they weren't printing the Sengoku Set

They never even did a release for Trickster in BSS... Note to self: If I get my own game into production, have cute anime girls in it. Oddly enough I thought the cash prizes for tournaments would be a major selling point, since a friend of mine keeps telling me how he stopped going most regional and world tournaments for Yugioh since he can't even break even if he wins the whole thing... Just gets product he already has and a rare card which is extremely hard to offload. I'll be honest, seeing what happened to BSS has kinda sent me into all the stages of grief, and I finally accept it's probably dead as a doornail. Either that or I'm still partially stuck in the depression state. But lesson learned, don't do what BSS did, including updating the card frame for the west, yet make the text far harder to read.

Critikal is an avid YuGiOH Player tbf, but you need to be in the right circles to find those videos.

I wonder what marketing agency did they use to do the launch? I feel like this wasn’t done inhouse.

I followed the pack on this one. I would have bought in if others did first. If Chaotic or Duel Masters/Kaijudo comes back, I'm all in.

The tcg communities in my area jumping ship from Yugioh and Magic jumped to.... Shadowverse and One Piece. There's not even a Battle Spirits poster on the walls of any locals in this country.

All six colors are available now with starter decks for each one and a 4th set supposed to be launching in February with a collab with Evangelion. The did a ... meh one with Gundam in set 2.

Might be seeing a Tales from the Bargin Bin for Metazoo in the next couple months.

Also about the only having a portion of the playability with the first re release of battle saga didn't flesh and blood do the same thing with bright lights by only having one hero class

I would literally love the Kamen Rider Battle Spirits stuff it looks so great, especially compared to the BSS cards

I’d be into BSS if it didn’t stretch my budget from One Piece cards which is taken from my budget for Digimon cards

Please make a video of your thoughts on Star Wars unlimited right now.

the gundam cards are just skins of saga cards in the set, with art of japan original cards that are flavorful to products they come from. the gundam exia is literally a face card for the japanese starter deck.

Omg Kohdok said the game that shall not be spoken 👀

They hd six or so anime they could casually localize as either subs or dubs, and cash tournaments was the strategy? Card games were bought because they were attached to tv series. And with so much of a back catalog, this should have coasted as a casual franchise akin to Duel Masters, its original rival. I mean, there was Rush Duel and Shadowverse on the Switch. Online/video game version probably would have exploded.

13:30 Hey, give Raid SOME credit: at least everyone knew from the get-go that they were shilling youtubers, people just tolerated the ads because they paid their creators better than youtube themselves ever did (a fact that apparently was lost on Raid's own Marketing department, but still). I only heard of this card game today, and I _follow_ some of those youtubers!

I liked Brother's War Jumpstart.

This promo was like when MTG used Patton Oswald like.... wow..

Man, I've been a fan of Battle Spirits for years. Never got to play the old english version. And I was super excited when BSS was announced. And I hate that Kodok is right about this game, cuz I had had a lot of hopes. If set 4 having Eva cards included, and the guaranteed Eva dedicated set later next year, dont manage to bring back proper interest, the game is dead.

21:50 suuuuper :D

literally didnt know this had anime tieins until watching your videos i only knew this as the game with prozd promos

It really tried a bit too hard to be competitive. Personally I am a casual player in loving to try out all the different play styles and not just tunneling in on the meta. The very core of the marketing for tournaments did nothing but worry me. The gameplay seemed like that kicked off straight into an already fully mature and mechanically saturated tcg instead of gradually working up into it a tad slower. Although I'm fine with it, some friends were turned off by the deep competitive "OP" cards and swingy nature of them was a bit much. This was done for that dumb competitive and tournaments focusd reason, but it ended up being alienating. For some players it would probably be like jumping into modern day yugioh. At least that seems to be what I noticed others reacting to it like. It just seems they have no idea how to bring this one over properly... they fk it up every time... I kinda hoped they would just bring it over 1 for 1, but with some special sets that introduce staples and such that you may need or want to mix with the modern sets. I liked the original card designs as well... They made it darker and more monotone with grays and such... Even just the text box area is darker for no reason... I know I didn't care for the original attempt because of the foils. They were terrible, but I seen them do solidly with their modern foils. Wish they kept to them... Our locals also got unlucky with players that show up only for big events and then every other local being just 3-5 people at BEST... Alt art gundams was dumb... The moment we realized they were just different art for basic cards.... Lost that interest too. They have nearly just disappointed over and over... Should have just made a good casuals friendly game that isn't too simple or too complex and introduce different IP's as full sets instead of the half assing alt arts that make you wonder and beg for it not to be the full extent we will be getting different IP's...

I’m an avid BSS fan, and a lot of this is right on point (the game is failing for a reason) but much more of it isn’t a fair representation of what’s going on. The first set actually had tons of complexity for how little cards were available, with more archetype variety in set 1 than OPTCG had in 3 sets. And on your comment about the banlist at the very end: the ban came around after very quickly after a degenerate meta was forming, and was extremely positively received. Nobody invested in the game has been asking for ice shield to be banned. Set 4 is looking to have tons of evangelion inserts and was delayed a month to get things right, which is a good sign that Bandai is ready to keep investing in the game after the poor launch.

Bandai certainly fumbled with this game in the early going, but not everything in this video is a fair representation. I think a collab with your channel would have been a better choice.

I mean... FWIW, there being literally NOTHING to go off on on Tilestone is COMPLETELY congruous with the character. Being a member of Galley-La in Water 7 is about as far as his character is developed. Well, if there's a silver lining to BSS shitting the bed so hard, maybe this'll push up the timeline for taking Re:birth for You global? Bandai has all those sweet, sweet licenses that they aren't gonna let into Weiss Schwarz, might as well give us Kirkland brand Weiss Schwarz.

I don't care about the game, I like the card artwork tho, so I'm happy that I can buy them for cheap lol

So I have been hearing about box break downs on how many of each type of card you can get for each game, but I'm wondering if there is an easy way to find out what your own card game box break down would be like before releasing to market. Because something I have been struggling with my card game right now is a faction based game (you can mix and match freely, but me making the set ideas goes for theme) where there is 4 colors to the game and 4 main factions, but my main issue is I want each faction to feel big and like you can make them any color of deck you want, but my set size for the first set might be about 280 and I'm wondering if that would be too big for casual people to want to get into. Also just on a side note I wanna know if the first 8 factions are too sword and sorcery type. In blue we have Mages and Aliens, in Green we have Demons and Spirits, in Red we have Knights and Goblins and in yellow we have Egypt and a western casino

It still baffles me how Avril Lavigne, of all people, would also get swept into all this. Like, Avril is the most random thing in this whole “saga”. Matpat, Moist, and especially ProZD have all made card games content before, but Avril? Why Avril?

Does anyone know where to find MoistCritical's sponsership of Battle Spirits? I cant seem to find it anywhere

I don't think it failed yet though.

Bandai in UK are weird, recently theve been on their own getting Gunpla Kits into UK stores yet they put out some Kamen Rider ones too despite the fact.They is no Legal way to watch that series in UK or buy any Video games on it even though the most recent one has english in it but only sold in Asia and thats including the PC steam version.

9:45 wait what? What was this I had no idea about it

Bandai America hasn't held any rights to Power Rangers for several years now. It was a licensed brand, and the rights holder sold it outright to Hasbro. I'm mixed on doing crossover sets. Yes, it brings more eyes to the game, but that doesn't necessarily translate into players. It's also kind of an admission that your own lore isn't enough to carry the brand. I know there are TCGs that are built on the concept, but for pre-existing games? It kind of comes across as desperate. The crossover push was literally Bushiroad's last attempt to save Buddyfight.

ngl I was super into set 2 when I saw they were bringing over the gundam cards until I saw they were just parallel arts of other cards and then lost all interest. If they banked on crossover properties I'm sure it would have caught on way faster

Just bought two boxes and two starters for 70 bucks. We’ll try it out and see

that's why it has "BS" with an extra "S" at the back. it turned out to be lots of bull

I was a subscriber to shonen jump for most of my childhood, I vividly recall getting the original Battle spirit demo decks and playing them with my brother, I'm pretty sure we lost the handful of little plastic cores within a few days and never touched them again. I was left thinking that the cores just seemed lame as a gimmick that were incredibly easy to lose. tcgs mixed with physical game pieces dont seem to do very well with western audiences. bakugan made a tcg to go with the marble rolling and it also died twice.

Hey this is gonna sound kind aweird but I’m trying to rmember this toy from the early 2000s. I think it kinda had a samurai look to the actionigure and it came with these weird dice that had symbols on them. I think Inremmeber seeing it in a verynold video of your a while back and can’t remember the name.

Funnily enough Digimon was what killed BS (the japanese one) at my locals, and then One Piece came in and did the same to Digimon

My distributor hasforced me into ordering 16 boxes of set 3...and an undetermined number of set 4

Moist critical does actually play card game mostly just yugioh to my understanding and he's done a good amount of master duel streams

I wish gundaminfo actually did a good job of letting people watch the old series. They just stream the same few gundam series on arbitrary time limits over and over again. It wouldn't kill them to throw in some wild cards every once in a while.

Kohdok: You can't brute force the next big thing. MBA: Doubt.

Speaking of Getting people who had no interest on the game to Sponsor the game . Remember that episode in the Anime Gunpla Build Fighters ? 1 Word Kirara

The cards are fine to read and you don't need flavor text, that's just a petty complaint

It also kinda came out around the same time one piece did

Great video, I didn't even know this card game existed or how epically it failed; very interesting stuff.

Man I want this game to be good they are having a cross over with kamen rider my favorite fabdom

nice ❤

One Piece IP is way too strong

As a current player, I and others think that this new upcoming Eva collab set will be the true indicator of whether or not this game will be able to keep going. I think it would be interesting if you examined the landscape of the game after release of this set to see how things are. I know I would be curious to see the results of this latest set. If a full Eva set won't draw in more players, then I'm not quite sure what will at this point. And yes, Absolute Ice Shield was poorly designed lolz.

Game Grumps did a crossover!? Wow! I'm throwing my cards away.