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Squirchampion
97-Year-Old NYC Diner Still Serves Their Revive the Old Fashioned Way
Squirchampion
Originally どくのトゲ, this first appeared as an ability on the Venipede line during the BW era. Of interest, it first appeared as an attack on Togepi, and actually still was an attack as least as late as one of the BW-series Roserade, so there was a brief period where there was an ability and attack with the same name.
Poison Payback was originally
Squirchampion
The idea of a minor yōkai haunting a kid’s bedroom reminds me of the artwork of Mimikyu V.
Whirlpool
Absolutely S-tier artwork. The minimalist background, the adorably grouchy pose, the subtle colors. Old Himeno was GOATed
Squirchampion
It strange that WOTC never errata’d Bill, since the consensus on N1 Slowking is that they intentionally mistranslated the card on purpose because they weren’t happy with and wanted to punish Trainer-heavy play.
You could also consider the timing. About as many P Series cards ever made it over as didn’t, and most of the ones that didn’t were alt arts of cards that already had a functional equivalent in the English pool. When the Supporter version of Bill turned up in 2001, maybe WOTC figured it was functionally the same as the Bill they’d already printed and never added it to the to-do pile. Pokémon Web landed right around then and did much the same thing, even flipping
Pual
The comments on Energy Removal 2 posit the theory that this Bill errata was deliberately skipped over by Wizards to avoid errata-ing any of the base set cards. I’m curious if you have any thoughts on that?
Squirchampion
This errata first happened in 2001!
Squirchampion
Later Japanese prints fixed it!
Pual
Oh my gosh they forgot to make the space under bill’s arm transparent.
Squirchampion
Caterpie won the Spring 2002 Battle Roads. It reportedly took only 25 seconds to win the tourmanent-deciding game. (Who knew that the power of an unevolved Caterpie could be so remarkable?)
Decklist: [link]
Squirchampion
If the English game has been localizing the text in this way for over a decade and nothing has come to pass, it wouldn’t be a great example of what I wanted it to be. Even if I doubt I’m wrong, I wanted to find a circumstance where I could be proven wrong about one of my secondary assumptions in a compelling way. (Short of some serendipity between now and the 30th, I don’t expect to find another example that might suit better. Sorry about this.)
Specific for this case, those are helpful results. The specific language on the Japanese cards in question is 引きつぐ, and is covered in section D-19 of the rulebooks.
The original Japanese language rulebook is available here; [
Charmaster
I need to contact Jason Klaczynski and ask if he won any battle roads. To someone who didn’t follow the game when they still existed, they sound as exotic as a Champion’s League Japan.
Charmaster
Elemental
Discard a [R] Energy,
to Lugia LEGEND.
Blast 200
[W] Energy, and [L] Energy
I love the wacky formatting on LEGEND cards.
Pual
What a terrifying card. If you miss, which you probably will, it’s pretty useless. But IF you just get lucky enough… put the legend into play, throw a bunch of energy onto it… and for Lugia specifically, you get to then use its power to get even MORE energy.
Charmaster
Cards like this have been referring to turns in play in English since Boundaries Crossed Ditto (https://pkmncards.com/?s=%2Btext%3A%22turns+in+play%22&sort=date&ord=auto&display=images). Interestingly Zoroark EVO seems to lack the clause, though. I wonder if there are any other outliers, and whether a Pokémon that Zoroark Phantom Transformation’d into would be able to evolve right away if the Zoroark had already been in play for a turn.
Two things that are worth checking would be the Japanese wording for all those cards and whether this rule book you mentioned explicitly stated that swapping a Pokémon with another Pokémon from your hand/deck/discard pile counts as a new Pokémon coming into play (Or whatever the correct question is). I don’t suppose you could provide a link to this rule book? I’ve found searching for Japanese Pokémon websites difficult in the past. Right now I’m…
Squirchampion
I don’t want to come across contradicting the above posts or suggest they’re incorrect. I think the Japanese name of the set probably explains the Delta Species type assignments for Nidoking δ and Nidoqueen δ, and it’s not like the English set name “Dragon Frontiers” is entirely invented – there are a number of dragon Pokémon in this set. Maybe Dewgong, with its serpentine body and majestic horn, has turned into a dragon.
I’ve thought about all the Delta Species Pokémon quite a bit, and I’ve possibly though about Dewgong δ more than any of them – I have probably now thought about Dewgong δ anyone has ever thought about Dewgong δ. You know, Dewgong sometimes feels so adorably unremarkable that making it a Normal Pokémon seems entirely appropriate. On the other hand, doesn’t Dewgong’s horn remind us of the unicorn? To fetch higher prices, merchants would sometimes sell sawed-off narwhal horns as “genuine” horn of the mythical unicorns. If Dewgong a…
Squirchampion
This is more of a footnote to the Eelektrik business than a thing of its own; a small corroboration on a card where there’s nothing in actual gameplay that would ever be affected by it, but I can put something potentially falsifiable out there and see where it lands. Which is exactly why it’s worth a look: there’s a shadow of a chance I’ve got it wrong, and if you’ve ever found my comments tedious, this is a low-stakes place to catch me at it.
Palafin’s “Zero to Hero” (JP マイティチェンジ) pulls Palafin ex out of the deck and swaps it in for the ordinary Palafin, with the incoming Pokémon taking over everything the outgoing one was sitting under. On the Japanese card, that “taking over” is a single verb – 引きつぐ, to inherit – applied to a short list that trails off in 「など」…
Squirchampion
I was asked to follow up on this after someone on PokeGym asked about this earlier this year. I didn’t really have a nice way to put it, so I deferred it to later. This does serve as a nice tl;dr of all of the above in terms of the outcome of all this.
① On Bulbapedia for both the BW series Eelektrik and this SV series Eelektrik, they paraphrase the TPCI ruling that says the two cards are not functionally identical, and then state “This ruling has been previously announced on the official Japanese Pokémon Card Game website on June 6, 2025.” and then link to the pokemon-card.com page discussed above. Here is the original text of that…
Squirchampion
I would assume the Crystals are deliberately too expensive while not doing anything remarkable – {G}{W}{C} only does 20 and Confusion on a flip…? – on purpose, so as to avoid any of them being viable entities in a competitive format, and avoid a “pay-to-win” meta problem.
Charmaster
Yes, it can remove itself with Area Zero Underdepths. The effect triggers after it has been placed on the bench, so Tera Box players often use it to remove Mega Kangaskhan ex from play (Along with the Chien-Pao and another Pokémon). Just don’t forget to make sure there is a Tera Pokémon in play if you want to play Area Zero Underdepths again! Someone made that mistake on-stream at the World Championships.