Crystal Energy · Aquapolis (AQ) #146

3 comments

1. 

   Nos

   (2 years ago)

   Kind of not awful? I’d still rather take the 1 damage counter or the 10 less damage from Rainbow or Double Rainbow energy. Works well enough for singleton decks or draft situations with decks that have more than one type.

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2. 

   Ambassador

   (1 year ago)

   I have a surprising amount of things to say about this card but somehow it’s getting lost in the matrix so I’ll split this into seperate comments.
   · The JP print of this card has a vertical long e-Reader strip. ポケモンWiki notes that the two strips correspond to e-Reader data for ブロック崩れ(天井)(D-53-a) and ブロック崩れ(壁)(D-53-b). I don’t know what the single, short e-Reader strip for the EN print corresponds to.
   · Crystal Energy has, alongside the other Special Energy cards from Aquapolis with D-##-# IDs, a special JP-only holographic print that was given out during their 2002 Battle Road tournaments. I have some absolutely delirious conspiracy theory about the artist of those cards being the same artist as the standard print, despite the cards crediting a different artist. https://archive.ph/2dMVJ#Shin-ichi_Ishikawa_and_Kai_Ishikawa
   · The standard print of Crystal Energy also received a special reprint for the Creatures Half Deck celebrating the 25th anniversary of the TCG, representing the year 2002. The card features the e-Reader strips on the print of the card. This is absurdly interesting to me because;
   (1) e-Reader dot codes require a special printer, and most of the digging I’ve done the past couple years suggests PCL and/or TPCI no longer have access to the same printers they had, and don’t have the means or know-how to print the dot codes anymore¹, and
   (2) I would’ve assumed they’d have to pay Olympus a royalty. Indeed, according to Pokumon, the card isn’t scannable. That can primarily be attributed to the fact the card is holographic², but their article notes that the correct printer wasn’t used³, which presumably circumvents any question of having to pay Olympus any royalties almost 2 decades later. https://pokumon.com/pokemon-card-game-25th-anniversary-creatures-corporate-history-deck/
   (3) All things told, this is effectively the only direct recognition the e-Card era got for the TCG’s 25th anniversary. For 2001, they chose Lighting Energy from the JP version of Neo Destiny [not sure about this one], and for 2003 they chose the special holographic print of {F} Energy that we ended up getting in EX Emerald. By 2003, Japan had dropped e-Reader for their edition of the TCG, but picking Neo Destiny for 2001 feels like a deliberate dodge.

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   • 

     AmbassadorAmbassador

     (1 year ago)

     ¹ There’s a lot to say about this, but I’ve always rolled my eyes at the idea the e-Reader died for lack of an audience – Nintendo could sell ice to an eskimo. Nintendo *let* the e-Reader fail because they weren’t happy with the terms of the contract with Olympus (who they licensed the dot code technology from), and also weren’t happy with their reliance on third parties for printing cards with dot codes. Even though it’s not really a well-known part of their reputation, Nintendo is a fabulously stingy company and paying royalties to other companies probably sat really poorly with them, so they let the whole thing die. (They’d done similarly in the past – letting the Nintendo PlayStation die was a fabulous case of something blowing up in their face, apparently because of some squabbles about the price-per-unit fee Sony was requesting. The sunk cost expense of scrapping the e-Reader would be nothing by comparison, and is very much in character.)
     ² The fact the whole card is holographic would do it under, but note that even during the e-Card era, a card having holofoil at all seems to mean it would have problems with being scanned by the e-Reader; this is why a card like AQ Ampharos #H1 doesn’t have a dot code, and its non-holo variant AQ Ampharos #1 does. (This is also why reverse holofoil cards of the e-Card era, as well as of the Generation 3 era of the EN TCG, do not have dot codes printed. I suspect it’s a mix of incompatibility, especially on reverse holofoils, but also concerns about durability. As noted on the pokumon article, they did a lot of ‘durability’ testing on how many times cards could be swiped on an e-Reader, and holofoil paper probably makes the card relatively more fragile to this end. Removing dot codes from being there at all, even on a card like AQ Ampharos #1 where I think it probably would’ve worked, circumvents calling attention to durability issues with those cards.)
     ³ They don’t really say how they came to this conclusion – Did they compare scans against an e-Card era print of Crystal Energy? Do the dot codes just look off in general? – but I would trust this is the correct conclusion.

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