Bulbasaur · Supreme Victors (SV) #93

1 comment

1. 

   Ambassador

   (4 months ago)

   It’s nice to see the site’s team add level data to the metadata of cards and make them a searchable feature, thanks :) . Preliminary random searching suggests PCL did less interesting stuff with the continuity of Level data for level cards in the DP+DPt as compared to their Classic+Gym+Neo counterparts, but a little bit of digging on top of that suggests they actually might’ve done so. I don’t know yet.

   For context, I think it was always commonplace (it certainly is commonplace now for JP players who play older formats) to list off their decks and specifying the specific Pokémon by their level. For an example, where an English player might list the Mewtwo in a Haymaker deck as follows;

   1 Mewtwo BS
   1 Mewtwo WBSP 3

   A Japanese player would typically list their Mewtwo off as

   1 Mewtwo Lv.53
   1 Mewtwo Lv.60

   Rather than being solely flavor, these levels acted as unique discriminators. It’s understandable how the difference in approach came about on either side of the pond, as WOTC had deprioritized the presence of the level data to being part of the dex entry at the bottom of the card, as opposed to what PCL had done where it was at the top of the card – like we see left alone for Gen 4 EN TCG, and is why the level data is where it is for XY Evolutions.

   Another thing worth mentioning is that the levels assigned do seem to correspond to the card’s ‘power level’. A Lv.60 Mewtwo typically has more HP, access to stronger attacks, etc. than a Lv.53 Mewtwo. Note that this doesn’t necessarily mean that all cards at higher levels are superior in all regards, though – lower level Pokémon could still be the *better* card, even if *weaker*, by virtue of lower retreat, a gimmicky Pokémon Power, etc. (While the levels do seem to correspond internally, I’m not yet necessarily sure the level of attention they took to levels across monsters – are *all* level 30 Pokémon necessarily stronger than Pokémon in level 20? I would like to do some digging here.)

   For the e-Card era, the unique e-Reader IDs look like they would’ve been poised to assume the exact same role of being unique discriminators (that potentially indicate a relative ‘power level’), but it never really took root in either language, and for Japan when they dropped e-Reader support they lost ID numbers as well, and didn’t replace them with any unique discriminators, so they started identifying cards by set (and set number) as done in the EN TCG. DP restoring levels to cards wouldn’t have been enough to reverse the trend, since the set identifier would’ve continued to be necessary for the mixed Gen 3+Gen 4 formats, and level data was ultimately dropped again at the start of the HGSS block. So there’s only so many cards to look at here. From what I’ve seen so far;

   · If you take the sum of Gen 1+2+4 altogether, several Gen 4 cards use Levels that had already been used before. e.g. this Bulbasaur, at Lv.13, has the same level as BS Bulbasaur. For Japan, it’s not a big deal from a functional/discriminator PoV, because Gen 1+2 are not from the same game as Gen 4, but by this point in the franchise more than enough things have occurred to suggest they were designing with the EN TCG in mind. Maybe because they were aware the EN TCG never cared about levels much they didn’t worry about it, but they wouldn’t have been able to take the same approach.
   · Having said this, with the exception of Arceus Lv.X and Shaymin Lv.X, it does appear that Gen 4 does continue the approach of Levels returning to potentially being able to be used as unique discriminators in the confines of itself.
   · Gen 4’s potential used of Levels as power indicators don’t appear to be coherent with Gen 1+2’s. It’s not a perfect system, but for example, this Bulbasaur, at Lv.13, when compared to BS Bulbasaur (Lv.13) and Erika’s Bulbasaur (Lv.15), probably ought to be capped to 50 HP if there was any intention to maintain continuity with them. Gen 1+2 does appear to break this rule itself sometimes, mind you, so there’s a little bit of wiggle room, but the general impression I have is Gen 4 isn’t ‘coherent’ with Gen 1+2.
   · I’m not yet sure if Gen 4 is coherent with itself https://pkmncards.com/?s=dialga&sort=level&ord=auto&display=images as an example, I don’t get the sense that the Dialga are getting powerful for increasing level – it feels kind of random, no correlation? It’s tough to know how to quantify cards as ‘strong’/’powerful’, but I may find time to do some Level vs HP trends, maybe Level vs Attack, and see how it goes. I’ll probably keep making incidental observations on the way to making such charts.

   Ultimately, I think Level data wouldn’t have been able to be a sustainable discriminator ad infinitum, and it makes sense that it was dropped at the end of Gen 4/start of Gen 5. Like a lot of other things I’ve noticed about the TCG, that’s about when PCL seems to have really pulled everything together and done a soft reboot with “card game that will be able to sustain itself across infinite expansions and several languages” (i.e. try to do for the cards what Gen 3 tried to do for the video games, to varying degrees of success with both attempt).

   Reply