So, if you've walked into a local card game shop you may have seen a new game called Meta X. It's a TCG based on DC characters, and the property owners plan on adding other IPs to the roster. Whatever you do don't get this game. Panini is a scumbag company. Let me explain. 

Wizards of the Coast has a full time development team, pays for original artwork, and heavily playtests every new set. They charge $3.99 a pack. 

Panini paid its "game developers" around $2000-5000 per set by commision, uses premade artwork, and doesn't bother playtesting anything. They also charge $3.99 a pack. Panini's last game was DBZ. The game's art assets were made by an intern using photoshop. Zero proofreading, playtesting, and rules clarification was done before printing. As a result the rules and CRD are a massive hodgepodge of random nonsense. What makes this even more hilarious is that DBZ wasn't a new game. There was an original print run back in 2000, and all they had to do was learn from over ten years of competitive playtesting. Sadly, they didn't understand concepts universal to TCGs, like hand advantage is king. Panini's DBZ never had an official site, other than a two cent wordpress blog. In 2015 Bandai flexed it's property rights muscle to put a stop to Panini's DBZ TCG by the end of 2016. What did Panini do in response? They printed their final set with a ton of must have chase cards that only came one to every three booster boxes. They then dumped the game like a bad habit. No warning was given to the playerbase at all, even though they knew a year in advance. 

Anyway Meta-X is their next whipping boy. Just warning everybody to stay away unless they want to buy into an untested card game run by amatuers, that will likely end in two years time without notice. 

I'm familiar with that name. They made hockey cards and hockey sticker books I bought as a kid. Sounds like they run their gaming division like shit.

Panini? Aren't those the guys who made the german dubbed version of Naruto? I could kill them for what they did.

Are we talking about this Panini ?

Yes. Specifically the American branch that bought out Score (the old publishers of Score's DBZ CCG).

All TCGs are a scam. To play competitively you have to spend hundreds of dollars. For a kid it doesn't really matter if the game is properly tested.

Exactly. You pay hundreds of dollars just for the privelige of playing a single game. Meanwhile a video game costs $20-$60 dollars, and has real development costs. 

In 2013 I signed the shingeki no kyojin manga by panini, it was a chaos they delivered wrong editions and had months that they didn't delivered, horrible company.

Can you give me some info/sources on the game and its "development" ? I can't seem to find any online...

I'm interested because Panini's headquarters are very close to my city and I just found out they make A LOT of money (631 milion euros in revenue in 2016 alone) but they only do soccer TCG and a bunch of Comics here in Italy so I didn't expect them to be so big on an international level...

Yeah let me give you the rundown. 

Back in 1999 Jim Ward (one of the original MTG developers for Wizards) came to Score Entertainment (a sports card company) with his idea of a DBZ licensed CCG. Score liked the idea and hired him on to produce the first three sets. Jim left Score after that to work on other projects, but other designers kept the Score DBZ game going. By mid 2002 Score's DBZ was the fourth best selling CCG right behind Poke'mon, MTG, and Yu Gi Oh. In 2004 Score rebranded the game as the Dragonball GT CCG. This rebranding included major rules changes, and changed fundamental aspects of the game. Many players didn't like the GT show or game and quit. In 2005 Score ended the GT CCG and closed shortly thereafter. The company was bought out by their competitor in the sports market Panini. Fan focused efforts kept the DBZ CCG alive for over ten years, and every year at Gen Con there was a huge DBZ tournament. Eventually Panini noticed that they owned the property rights to a dead game that had better attendance than most current games. So they decided to revive it. Aik Tongthongaral (One of the old developers to take over Score Z after Jim left) had kept his job at Score when Panini bought them out. He was tasked with putting together a team to remake the old game. He recruited his friends, and family members for development. Panini launched PanZ in 2014 to much fanfair.