aroramage |
Yes, that's right, we're talking
about a card from the Neo Genesis era of card games,
Slowking! Back in the early days of Gold/Silver/Crystal,
ahhh...so glad they'll be hitting the Virtual Console.
Anyways, Slowking here is actually
just a victim of misunderstanding. In the Japanese
version of this card, he's virtually identical - Mind
Blast still did 3-for-20 with a coin flip to potentially
add another 10 damage and Confuse the opponent. Back
then, Confusion was a lot harsher to Pokemon - if you
failed the coin flip on attack, you took 30 damage
instead of 20, and retreating meant you had to discard
Energy THEN do a coin flip to see if you were
successful. It wasn't a dominant Status Condition, as
far as I know, but it was definitely more powerful than
it is nowadays.
The main problem with Slowking
though came from his Poke-Power, Mind Games. Whenever
your opponent used a Trainer card, Slowking gave you the
chance to flip a coin, and if it landed Heads, the
Trainer card did nothing and got placed back on top of
the opponent's deck. That in and of itself is a pretty
powerful effect to brandish - a 50/50 chance to not only
foil the opponent's strategy but even limit their
options for the next turn? Hopefully there was some way
to draw around that! At the very least, shutting down
the Power with a Status Condition could be done.
But there was a huge difference
between what the Japanese version was and the American
version. See the Japanese print added the clause that
Slowking had to be ACTIVE to actually use his Mind
Games, but when the time came to bring him State-side,
something got lost in translation, and he no longer was
required to be Active. This meant that ultimately,
players could have multiple Slowking out on their Bench,
causing their opponent to wait a while for the owner to
flip FOR EVERY MIND GAMES IN PLAY!! That makes the game
frustrating, knowing there are only so many little
successes for the player facing it, and ultimately this
resulted in the card getting banned from organized play.
The next time a card would get
banned? Lysandre's Trump Card. Think about that.
Rating
Standard: N/A (I mean, how crazy is
it that a misprint basically caused this guy to be
broken?)
Expanded: N/A (At the very least,
you KNOW Lysandre's Trump Card was meant to work like
that)
Limited: 5/5 (but Slowking wasn't
even intended to be like that!)
Arora Notealus: Take note, dear
children - if you are ever in a position to be
translating cards from English to Japanese, from
Japanese to English, or maybe from a pair of different
languages to each other, remember that PHRASING is
EVERYTHING!! And that even one small misprint can change
the way a card is played entirely. Such is the fate of
the poor Slowking...
Next Time: Let's take a rest at the
local pond.
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Otaku |
Hail to the king baby! As you’ve long since
figured out we are not looking at one of our
runners-up today, because it’s Throwback Thursday.
We’ve had so many Trainer cards, I thought we could look
at an old card so capable of shutting them down, that it
was banned! Slowking (Neo Genesis 14/111)
officially released in Japan back on December 10th, 1999
and in the U.S.A. on December 16th, 2000. Early
releases of the Pokémon TCG were spotty, so I have no
clue when Neo Genesis reached other locations.
It was banned from Modified play (what we now call
Standard) late in 2002 when the format has shifted to
Neo Genesis and later releases. Let’s find out
why.
Slowking
is a Psychic Type, which at the time was “iffy”.
There wasn’t much in the way of Type counters or
support, but they weren’t needed because of how
Weakness and Resistance worked back then: -30 (instead
of -20), Psychic Resistance was found on all
Darkness-Types and Colorless-Types (but not
Metal-Types), and damage output was far lower across the
board back then, with Psychic-Types being known more for
their attack effects than damage… with actual damage
often struggling to break through that Resistance.
Being a Stage 1 was better back then, mostly because the
game was slower and there was a serious effort to
nerf non-Evolving Basics by the design team, but also
because this was back when you could attack first turn
and few things had reliable, damaging attacks you
could use first turn. Wait, how does that work
out? Your first few turns (at least in Standard
play) were about using attacks that help you set up, and
sometimes even re-set up mid-game. Slowking has
80 HP, which was functionally higher back then; this was
back when 60 damage was the cutoff between “possible
OHKO” or “probably safe”. Psychic Weakness hurts
because it made 2HKO’s easy, which was good enough for
the time. A few can score a OHKO via Weakness, but
only a few. No Resistance was typical back then,
just like now, but given that it would have been -30 if
present, it probably would have made a big
difference. The Retreat Cost of [CCC] was
harder to deal with back then; this was a format
with Double Gust, and your only answer was
Warp Point (undoes your Double Gust if you’re
not careful), Balloon Berry (basically a one-use
Float Stone), and Switch didn’t rejoin
Standard play until halfway through 2002 (missing the
entire 2001-2002 Rocket-On! Format).
We are going to start with the attack on Slowking
because it doesn’t really matter. For [PPP] it can
use “Mind Blast” to do 20 damage and flip a coin.
If “tails”, the attack just does 20 damage, while
“heads” means +10 damage (30 damage total) and the
Defending Pokémon is Confused. This was weak and
pricey at the time, but not too far below typical; for
the Energy required, it probably needed to do another 20
damage. So with that out of the way, we come to
the Pokémon Power. First, we’ll go over what a
Pokémon Power actually is. Basically, it is an
Ability, except it doesn’t count as an Ability.
You would go ahead and declare you using one (if it is
one that isn’t always in effect), in almost the exact
same manner as you would go about using an Ability
but effects that target Abilities don’t apply to
Pokémon Powers (and vice versa). So Hex Maniac
does nothing to Pokémon Powers while Goop Gas Attack!
won’t do anything to Abilities. Possibly with an
exception or two, all Pokémon Powers stop working when
the Pokémon in question is affected by a Special
Condition. Why doesn’t the text actually say that?
Instead, it just says that this Pokémon Power stops
working if Slowking is Asleep, Confused, or
Paralyzed. Which is how it worked until the
Legendary Collection expansion released, when
Confusion, Paralysis, Poison, and Sleep were assigned
the collective label of “Special Conditions”.
Burned would join them in the next full set
released, Expedition, because that was the first
set to feature Burned. Both of these sets are from
2002, so for most of its legal time, Slowking
only had to worry about Confusion, Paralysis, and Sleep.
So with that out of the way, what is this Pokémon
Power? The aptly named “Mind Games” may be
activated anytime your opponent plays a Trainer card. Yes,
it means all Trainers: Items, Supporters, and
Stadium cards. If you choose to flip a coin and
get “tails”, your opponent is able to play the Trainer
card normally. However, if you get “heads”, the
Trainer does nothing and your opponent places it on top
of his or her deck. At first, that might sound
good: you’ll draw it again, so you may try again next
turn. It often was bad because you were
essentially locking down your own draw; if all you
needed was an Energy, you’d just get the draw Trainer
you tried to use last time and had to hope you flipped
better this turn. Okay, so a 50% chance of each of
your Trainers failing is rough, but it is better than
guaranteed failure, right? Well, that is true,
but there’s more. Mind Games stacks!
Each additional copy of Slowking was an
additional chance to activate Mind Games, so with four
Benched, you got four chances to stop your opponent’s
Trainers cards! Getting four Stage 1 cards into
play wasn’t fast or easy, but each Mind Games in play
made it harder for your opponent to make progress,
ultimately helping you get the next Slowking to
the field. Now, some of you might be thinking
“That can’t be right! How can it work against
Items, Supporters, and Stadium cards? Why would
they let it stack?” In a sense, you’re right, because
the card text is wrong.
Officially, it was a mistranslation: the text on its
Japanese counterpart states that Mind Games only works
while Slowking is Active. That is a huge
difference! Sure, half the time your Trainer cards
still fail to work, but that is a lot better than having
as little as a 1 in 16 chance! So they banned it
because the text was wrong? Nope. Slowking
wasn’t banned until it nearly monopolized the metagame;
for competitive play, you had to run a Slowking
variant as 2002 drew to a close. Honestly, I’m a
bit surprised it didn’t happen sooner; I am uncertain if
it was due to particular cards being lost to rotation or
added by newer sets, or if players were just slow in
obtaining/accepting they needed to work Slowking
into all of their decks. Slowking was released
while Wizards of the Coast owned the Pokémon TCG
license, and they did have a policy of “play as
written” for all but the worst card errors, so errata
were rare. WotC may have preferred a ban instead.
There is a rumor, though that it was an intentional
change to the card. WotC did not like the
direction the Pokémon TCG was taking; before
implementing set rotation, they tried another alternate
format called Prop 15/3 that restricted players to 15
Trainers, and no more than three copies of any card
other than basic Energy. It didn’t work.
Even with Slowking, most players were running
decks with Trainer counts akin to the present day.
Do I believe this? Yes, yes I do; honestly, it
wasn’t that bad of an idea. It didn’t work as
intended, but I can see how someone may have thought it
would. While WotC had some great people on staff,
as a company they misled players on a few other matters,
like eliminating the 15+ age bracket and claiming it was
on orders from TPC. Yet when asked about it, TPC
representatives were puzzled by the question, and of
course, once WotC lost the Pokémon license and what
would later become TPCi took over, we almost immediately
got the 15+ age bracket back.
So Slowking began its reign of terror. Even
in the Unlimited Format, it was quite strong, providing
protection against some of the most potent Trainer cards
ever released: Chaos Gym, Energy Removal,
Double Gust, Gust of Wind, Imposter
Oak’s Revenge, PlusPower, Rocket’s Sneak
Attack, The Rocket’s Trap, and Super
Energy Removal. It also messed up potent cards
that were not being used directly on your
opponent, like Computer Search (which wasn’t an
Ace Spec back then), Erika, Item Finder,
and Professor Oak. What is more, the player
using Slowking could still access these cards: I
remember many using Chaos Gym and accepting that
while it messed with your own Trainer cards as well, it
added one more coin flip for your opponent to overcome
and you could try to play it first turn. So what
about present-day Unlimited play? Thanks to
several other potent cards released over the years, I
don’t know if Slowking is still used. You
see, even with the current first turn rules, there are
decks in the Unlimited Format that win on a player’s
first turn! Before these decks, Slowking
was one of the strong plays; Broken Time-Space
(like Forest of Giant Plants but works for all
Types) meant a Slowking player could try and get
multiple Slowking into play on his or her first
turn! This card is, of course, not legal in any
current format but Unlimited, which I don’t trust myself
to score, and Limited play, if you want a very
expensive game (those older booster packs tend to be
quite valuable). I believe it is an “okay” pull
for Limited; you’ll need a little luck to get it out
before your opponent can use whatever Trainer cards he
or she has pulled… and since there won’t be many, who
knows how much it will matter?
Ratings
Standard:
N/A
Modified:
N/A
Limited:
3.25/5
Conclusion
I still want Slowking to receive an erratum.
I know it seems weird, but it just irks me that this
mistake was never corrected. If we got a surprise
re-release of this card, with the only change being Mind
Games as an Ability and not a Pokémon Power, it would
immediately take over the game. Unless it was
using the Japanese wording for Mind Games, in which case
it is a hard call. Remember, it affects all
Trainers, so while the attack is horrible and the
HP not much better, a good hit-and-run style attacker
can do its thing and then your opponent will struggle to
use any Trainer cards.
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