Lost Points

The first sweeping change to Digi-Battle is the victory condition. In Hyper Colloseum, you reduce your opponent’s point score from 100 to 0 by winning battles with your partner Digimon as you raise it. In Digi-battle, you increase your own score from 0 to 1000 by winning battles with your partner Digimon as you raise it. This seems like a straightforward change, serving to differentiate this game from its contemporaries, which generally involved whittling your opponents life and resources to zero. Aside from the multiplication by ten, its barely a change at all. Unfortunately, the mechanic itself, counting up rather than down, messes with certain card functionality—drastically, in some cases—and fundamentally breaks the game.

In a Hyper Colosseum match, each round is won or lost by determining who is using a stronger attack. The loser’s score decreases by a multiple of ten. Exactly how many points are lost is not fixed, but rather determined by the “lost point” box on the card itself. For example, if the Andromon to the left, a lvl5, loses to a lvl3, Andromon’s controller loses 30 points, since it ought to win against lvl3 Digimon in most cases. Losing to a lvl5 will only cost you 20 points, since most lvl5s are about the same power level. Losing to a lvl6 will cost you only 10 points, since most lvl6s have a higher power level, leaving Andromon outmatched. Cards are balanced around this “lost point” score, with weaker digimon having lower average scores.

Mechanics like this are often implemented in card games to make it more difficult for the leading player to snowball into a win. One such reward for evolving into lvl6 was a 30 point recovery to your score. Functionally, this was similar to certain actions gaining back lost life in Magic: the Gathering. You could lose a few rounds without too much worry since eventually, you’d draw a strong character and gain some lost points back.

In Digi-battle, instead of a “lost point” box, english cards have a simple “score” scale. Generally, defeating an opponent at the same or lower level will net you 100 points, and defeating something higher will net you an additional 100 points per level. While this could theoretically serve as a balancing element for stronger and weaker cards in the same lvl bracket, it is rarely used in this way. Defeating a particularly tough lvl3 would net you the same amount of points as defeating the weakest lvl5. Additionally, it is particularly challenging to come back from an opponent reaching lvl6, since these cards were translated without any changes, meaning they increase your score in Digi-battle, too. It is actually possible to win the game by gaining 300 points for digivolving into a mega (which, RAW, is easy to achieve and might even happen more than once in a match).