Why the Digimon Card Game FAILED in the West

Digimon and pokemons seem to share a lot of similarities fans of both would be quick to tell you that the two worlds are actually quite different but they both definitely took similar journeys they are both creature battling franchises from Japan they both feature a metamorphosis like powerup called evolution they both have mod in their names in reference to the word monster they both dropped around the same time from the mid to late 90s and they will really blew up here in the United States around the turn of the century despite having an obvious affinity for Pokemon I've got a lot of great things to say about the other mom franchise the early Digimon Adventure II anime had a significantly better story and character art compared to Pokemon and it was just a straight-up better show now while their catalogue isn't as deep as pokemons there are a lot of great Digimon video games out there and I especially enjoyed the recent cyber sleuth titles but one thing is very different between the two franchises for me and that comes with the trading card game I'm a card game guy we literally started this channel by talking about card games one of these two card games is one of the absolute largest on the planet lining hobby and chain stores constantly updating a digital video game client and hosting a worldwide tournament series every year the other didn't even last two years what on earth went wrong let's talk about it [Music] today's video is sponsored by Dollar Shave Club they're helping us get that bread and they're helping me with a problem that I've got the same way that Digimon can grow more powerful and change forms over time I always figured my facial hair would do the same there's just one problem instead what I got was this thankfully Dollar Shave Club has you covered for all your grooming needs shower oral care deodorant and most importantly shaving Dollar Shave Club sent me their ultimate shave starter set which is great way to deal with all things shaving in one spot the set includes their weighty executive handle with high quality six blades one ounce of dr. Carver's prep scrub to exfoliate dead skin cells and help prevent ingrown hairs one ounce of dr. Carver's shave butter to give you a close shave with zero razor bumps and my personal favorite dr. Carver's Poe shave due to provide hydration and refresh your skin at the end of the journey despite how close the shave was the do reduce my usual post shave read this a ton if you're interested in helping the show or maybe devolving your own neck beard visit dollarshaveclub.com slash no J wits to get the ultimate shave starter set for only 5 bucks and round out your personal grooming routine by adding any other high-quality products after that the restock bak ships full size products at regular price in order to understand why the international Digimon card game otherwise known as the digital card game was a complete and utter failure we first need to talk about the original Japanese card game it's based on to this day it's one of the most beloved and supported aspects of Digimon in its home country the original Japanese Digimon card game goes by many names its official title is simply the digital monster card game abbreviated to digi cough or short it's probably most known in the West by its ruleset title hyper Coliseum which I'll be using for the rest of this video hyper Coliseum was made by Bandai and released in 1999 which was a prime time to strike for TCG popularity Magic the Gathering in the Pokemon TCG were the only real global TCG hits at the time and the Japanese market was proving that there was absolutely room for more hyper Coliseum released almost right alongside Konami's u gia which would become an international hit that's still printed today but in an IRA and somewhat relevant twist Bandai actually printed the first yugioh trading card game in 1998 before losing the license to Konami this is right around the time that you geo shifted from a series about all games into one that was just about card games and i's yu-gi-oh card game was to put it kindly absolute trash they didn't have a ton of rich card game based source material to go off of so there you go game pretty much became a game of fancy war you threw down cards high numbers win it's a baby game the reason that Bandai's yu-gi-oh is relevant here is that Digimons hyper coliseum feels like a direct upgrade to it it's still fancy war where two players try and throw down higher numbers at each other to win battles but there's a much more robust system of evolution types abilities option cards and just overall strategy player spend each turn planning cards to evolve or add boosts and then the conductive battle one of the things that makes this game unique is that both players take their turns almost simultaneously instead of waiting for your opponent to finish their turn before you can act it's kind of funny because 20 years later I'm playing legends of rune tarot and thinking wow that's pretty cool why they were doing this back in 1999 the Digimon themselves are generally grouped by their three primary types a for vaccine B for data and c4 virus they fudge the original Digimon rules a little here but in general these three types work in a rock-paper-scissors triangle in hyper Colosseum you and your opponent each fight with just one monster at a time evolving it up or swapping it over the course of the game each monster has three different attack types which changed depending on what type your opponent is a attacks are the strongest and C are the weakest but using a C attack brings your opponent's a attack down to zero so it works as a counter like yugioh hyper Colosseum offers a limited number of slots for setting facedown non monster cards called option cards here your option cards are then sprung into battle one at a time ideally allowing you to boost your attack score or change your attack type in order to win that round of battle the loser of each round of combat loses score which drops some multiples of ten from 100 down to zero just like magics life or Yugi's lifepoint's the player that drops to zero points first loses there's also an interesting clause that promotes resource management instead of losing when your deck runs out of cards look at most major card games here you're forced to devolve your Digimon to its lower stage and then you'll create a new deck from your discard pile since deck size is only 30 cards and you refill your hand to six cards of return keeping a tab of important remaining tech cards is crucial paper Colosseum is by no means perfectly balanced or even perfectly designed but it's quick fun and themed well around the way that battles between Digimon and tamers happen in the show oh yeah this game was a major influence for the Digimon Tamers anime series these cards were so popular in Japan that they became a major part of actual Digimon cannon one of the most crucial things that supported hyper Colosseum right out of the gates was organized play and I ran frequent tournaments for the game in various Japanese hobby shops giving players a system to improve their tama ink and test their strategies against new meta games these old tournaments were surprisingly well documented despite starting as early as the year 2000 and if you're interested in learning more about the history of the tournaments themselves I highly recommend reading this article written at Digimon World org I love the link for it in the description but it's a great read if you're interested in the topic of the Digimon card game whatsoever having a competitive community around a card game is huge giving your players the option to attend two tournaments or events in order to play your card game is what can really push someone from a casual collector into a lifelong fan and participant new hyper Coliseum card sets were printed frequently and were released in a variety of formats including starter decks of exclusive cars traditional booster packs and band eyes very own vending machine system card ass okay I know it's pronounced like cabo da soo in Japanese but when they spell it out in English it's just card ass you cannot unsee it hyper Coliseum ran in Japan from 1999 until 2005 with over 15 starter decks and 25 booster sets that's a respectable run in its own right but even that number is deceivingly low in fact the original hyper coliseum game still gets new cards now almost every year starting around 2013 og green card back hyper coliseum cars have been printed in several promotional packs these bad boys dropped just last year for the 20th anniversary of the game in 2019 look at that brand new cards same old card ass there's this whole dedicated segment of the Digimon community that we never got anything close to outside of Japan while Japan celebrates their card games 20th anniversary it's been almost 20 years since the English card game died before we drop a massive dump on the English card game I do briefly want to talk about the history of the Digimon card game video games at the turn of the century video streaming over the internet was still in its absolute infancy so if you wanted to learn how to play a card game in the late 90s you had two options you can do a bunch of reading and hope you comprehended everything or you could just learn the game through a video game one of these two options is a lot more fun when I was growing up one of the first ways I really started to get into the Pokemon TCG was through the Pokemon Trading Card Game for Gameboy and the Pokemon play at PC game yes it's that game it's so easy to clown on these cutscenes but I promise the actual gameplay was a legit way to learn this game and while early yugioh games didn't quite follow the rules that we know today they eventually made a million different games that did so you might be wondering was there a good resource to learn the Digimon card game through video game plan you bet there was in Japan introducing the digital monster card game it's portable it's got great pixel art and it follows the original rules for a satisfying campaign just one problem Digimon was banned ice thing so of course it had to go on Bandai's exclusive console that's right the freaking wonderswan there's a good chance you've probably never seen this thing in your life and that's because the system never released in the West this obscure portable device was Bandai his attempt to compete with Nintendo's Game Boy it had great battery life and it was more powerful than a regular Game Boy it did sell a couple million units but its market share was virtually destroyed in Japan by the time the more powerful Game Boy Advance dropped because this game is Japan only and on an extremely obscure Japan only platform most Western Digimon fans have never played it there is a chance though that you've played a Digimon card video game this bad boy Digimon world Digimon card battle but we received in the West is technically the second of two PlayStation Digimon card games from Japan both of these games feature a side storyline and campaign that at first glance looks just like hyper Coliseum however when you take a closer look it's definitely its own animal it still uses the one-on-one battling and the rock-paper-scissors attack structure but that's one of the few things these games have in common Digimon monsters have their own individual hit point values in this game and you always choose which of your three attacks that you're going to do digivolve in works differently the deck doesn't recycle when you run out of cards and the wind conditions are also completely different this game had kind of a double-edged sword there's awesome 3d animations for all your favorite Digimon when they battle but the animations are so slow that if you want to plow through the campaign you'll eventually turn them off give me any video game with pack opening kart collecting and deck building and I'll have a good time with it that said this game did not tie into the physical card game or help players play the physical card game in any way and that's gonna help us transition into the final chapter of today's story I've tried to gather every reason that I could find to figure out why the Digimon card game failed in the West despite succeeding in Japan so we can go ahead and drop one reason down already boom no video game tie-in to help learn the game but let's move on to the physical card game itself at first glance the cards seem pretty similar to the Japanese ones but the closer you look the more you'll realize that didja battle is a dark funhouse mirror distortion of hyper Coliseum arguably the biggest misstep for the digital card game comes from the weight of the cards were distributed and I ended up using upper deck as their main distributor for the game in the West especially North America upper deck was a massive distributor of trading cards but they printed almost zero trading card games almost every product that they had handled up to this point were sports cards I'm not sure which of the two companies is at fault here but digi battle had a really low distribution of cards an actual card and hobby shops sure they're easy enough to find it major retailers like Walmart and Target but I never once saw the card game at a game store the way that I did for things like Pokemon magic the gathering in yu-gi-oh by far the largest setback for Digimon card distribution came when Bandai and upper decks split up after just 2 booster packs sets Bandai split from upper deck and said fine I'll do it myself there was a sizable delay between booster set 2 and booster set 3 during the company switchover which absolutely murdered what little momentum the game had very early into its lifespan to add further confusion to it all Digimon cards booster set 3 and onward were redesigned they had a very different look in the front and even slightly different card backs between the delays and card swaps this third series and onward for the Digimon card game was printed a lot less than the first two and they've become genuinely hard to collect today because of it japan's game saw 26 booster packs not including the newer promotional sets in the west they got 6 by 2002 didja battle was scrapped and bandai began producing a completely different casual card game called d-tector and then about a year after that there was the western exclusive and uncreate of lee named digimon collectible card game none of these games lasted very long but it still blows my mind how quickly they struck out when copying that original successful Japanese formula while some players its doors might have had their own decks or their own tournaments there was nothing official to bring fans together here's where pokemons choice of distributor in the West Wizards of the coast really shined Magic the Gathering was practically built on the foundation of hobby shop tournaments and get-togethers and they leveraged that knowledge quickly with Pokemon creating league play and tournaments where players could meet other fans share strategies and collect promotional merch I even saw commercials for them on TV my family went to them all the time and it's a major reason I ended up getting into the competitive card game eventually in 2003 Pokemon cut ties with Wizards of the coast they said fine I'll do it myself but they did continue running leagues like Wizards did and their tournaments and organized play continued to expand year after year and yet another interesting fact bringing us back to a familiar place upper deck got their chance at a new trading card game and 2002 unlike Digimon upperdeck entertainment wasted no time in making sure that you gear was consistently supportive with league in tournament play look at all these tournament reports on POJO calm Digimon had nothing like this yugioh fans today might notice that upper deck doesn't run the game anymore in the West in fact they haven't for over ten years that's a whole video for a whole nother day but oh man they messed up they messed up so bad and then of course qohen ami said fine I'll do it myself did you battle looks a lot like hyper Colosseum and they literally took the card design from Japan's hyper Colosseum but for some unholy unspeakable reason they took a perfectly functional and perfectly working trading card game and they changed the rules a lot almost every change they made of the game makes the game worse in my opinion and it's absolutely baffling the biggest changed by far is that instead of bringing your opponent's life points down to zero to win you collect points and go up to win in this one I have no clue why they completely inverted the main objective of the game but it creates all kinds of wild interactions that weren't originally intended for example some of the strongest Megas in the early Japanese meta game were able to heal your Life Points by evolving them in the English game they score instead you can damage someone to undo a heal in the Japanese game but you can't undo somebody scoring in English another bizarre change is that they did away with the exact same ABC system the new circle diamond Square setup looks the same but it's odd to say the least that old wall that lets see attacks turn a attacks to zero power is gone completely altering the interactions that some of the original cards had in hyper Coliseum you filled your hand to six cards a turn in digit battle you draw up to ten ten freaking cards in a game with 30 card decks you're gonna spend each turn in this game looking like the Auto meme guy with that much draw you're almost guaranteed to excess busted cards every turn and you know how the Japanese game had those three options owns where you picked three and only three spots for your option cards before a battle gone you can play an unlimited amount of options have returned now and instead you and your opponent just take turns slapping them down it's just straight-up card game gluttony like I said the Japanese version of the game is not a masterpiece but it's a fun light game with some strategy elements this game is just chaos literally everything that made this game cherished in Japan from constant releases to official tournaments to video games to actual mechanics of the actual game were lost in translation along the way these two cards might look the same but their stories are a world apart I can't help but think about how things could have been different if they handled the international card game for digimon better but as always thank you so much for watching my content I guess we've got a bit of a trend going on this channel where we look at the history of dead tabletop games and I always enjoy researching and digging up this kind of stuff I'll see you guys next time with more gaming content [Music]

Channel: TheJWittz

Views: 589,002

Rating: 4.8929286 out of 5

Keywords: Digimon, Digimon Switch, Nintendo Switch, Digimon Card Game, Digimon TCG, Hyper Colosseum, digi-battle, agumon, adventure, digimon tri, digimon tamers, digital card battle, trading card game, Digimon Survive, Cyber Sleuth, Pokemon, Pokemon TCG, Magic the Gathering, Yugioh, Fail, History, Fact video, digimon adventure last evolution, cyber sleuth complete edition, pokemon sword and shield

Id: yjyvF5BLByw

Length: 17min 51sec (1071 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Holyrapid]

JWittz does a look into why the Digimon card game flopped here in the west. And to me, it looks like it comes down to some slight bad business decisions (mainly by Upper Deck not supporting the game via tournaments) and the changed rules making it kind of hard to play.

[u/IllusiveManJr]

I remember wanting to play this as a kid, buying the cards and liking them... but there was no tourneys nor even casual get togethers at our local comic shop (which sold a ton of card games as well). They did weekly Pokémon TCG stuff though.

So that part of the video rings true for me personally.

[u/tw04]

Wow I didn't even realize the rules were better/different in the Japanese version. Ugh makes me really want to play, but I wouldn't be able to read the text :/

[u/Call_Me_A_Hero]

I believe many collected Pokémon and Yugioh cards just for the arts. The main issue for Digimon cards was the boring art with repetitive backgrounds.