Super Divers has one battle engine and several very different ways to use it. Knowing which mode to grind is most of the practical knowledge a new player needs.
The stage-clearing mode, and the closest thing the game has to a campaign. You work through stages in order, each with its own conditions and rewards, with the deck you bring. It is the natural home for a beginner: the stages are designed to teach, the difficulty ramps predictably, and it is where you learn how the strike battle actually resolves before you take it to a ranked lobby.
Arcade Mode is the ongoing story mode — your own original storyline rather than canon Dragon Ball. It runs on the same engine as Dokabaki Dive but continues past it, with new chapters added as the game updates. For players who want the narrative rather than the ladder, this is the mode that keeps giving.
History Dive drops you into the Dragon Ball world across its eras, with each era adding its own characters to the game. It is the fandom-facing mode — a way to play through the timeline of the franchise with cards that span it, and a regular source of the older characters coming back into the pool.
Challenge Dive is the super God difficulty mode, and it is where the score attack lives. It is hard by design and it is high-score ranked, with the results feeding the watch apps reward program — meaning your performance on a machine can be tracked and rewarded. It is also the mode where the community runs its own score-chasing events, which is a good way to read a new set's power curve: someone will post a very high score within days of release.
Strike Battle Rush is a seven-player knockout format, and its defining rule is that card effects and skills do not matter — it is pure timing. That makes it the ideal place to train your avatar and your hands without spending your good cards, and the format around which the 13th set's Strike Battle Rush event was built.
The competitive mode, available daily from 10:00 to 23:59 JST. It is where you earn rank points and climb the ladder. The window matters for planning: it is a long daily block, but it is not 24 hours, so the late-night crowd is playing against a smaller pool.
Casual Match is the unranked option, and the official line is precise: your rank and your win streak are unchanged. It is the mode for testing a new deck without spending ladder points, and for playing when you simply want matches rather than consequences.
Up to four players can form a team. The team is created with a team code that others join. In team rank matches, the team's points are the total of its members' wins, so a strong individual carries the group. A team disbands when it reaches zero members, and the team name cannot be changed once set. There is one restriction that catches people out: a Trial Diver Passport cannot join a team — you need a full Diver Passport to play with others.