- ↓ 1.99
- ꩜ 3.92
- ↑ 7.99
Pokémon Power ⇢ Hay Fever
No Trainer cards can be played. This power stops working while Dark Vileplume is Asleep, Confused, or Paralyzed.
{G}{G}{G} → Petal Whirlwind : 30×
Flip 3 coins. This attack does 30 damage times the number of heads. If you get 2 or more heads, Dark Vileplume is now Confused (after doing damage).
illus. Kagemaru Himeno · LV.29
External: Bulba ↗ · #ad / Affiliate Links: TCGplayer ↗, cardmarket ↗, Amazon ↗, eBay ↗
Perhaps because of their strong-smelling pollen, other Pokémon do not approach areas where Vileplumes live.
Mantidactyle
One of the most broken Pokémon in the Pokémon history
When it is in play, you can only play Energy cards and Pokémon
Stupid combos are so numerous that it would take too much time to list, but here are a faw :
Aerodactyl + Dark Vileplume + Aggron Ex
Murkrow + Dark Vileplume
discarding opponent’s had (easy to do) + Dark Vileplume
[List too long]
TCG ONE
#13 has [R] weakness but this one has [F]. Is that normal?
HEZ
This one is a misprint that’s present on all non-holo Dark Vileplume. They’ve mixed up Fighting and Fire symbols several times in Pokemon’s history.
TCG ONE
It seems that although it is a misprint, it should be played as is (with [F] weakness), according to compendium discussions.
Adam Capriola
This is another weird one:
https://pkmncards.com/card/marill-sandstorm-ss-68/
Some version have free retreat and other have 1 retreat. It’s supposed to have 1 retreat but the ruling was to play the card as is.
HEZ
They were weird with errata back then. When Slowking came out and broke the game due to mistranslation of its Pokemon-Power they ruled that you just play it as is… until it was finally banned!
I’d say if in doubt, consult the original Japanese text.
Blob Takeshi
To be fair, Poison is weak against Rock and since it’s half Poison, I guess it could make some sense?
Dr. λ the Creator of Variables, Binder of Variables, Applicator of Terms, Checker of Types, and β-Reducer of β-Redexes
TCG Fighting Type represents Ground, Fighting, and Rock. Vileplume in the games resists Fighting and is neutral to both Rock and Ground. So his Fighting Weakness makes no sense.
Perhaps they use forms with 1 letter codes for the weaknesses of cards in the production of the cards. And then due to Fire and Fighting both starting with a F people accidentally use F with the intent of specifying a Fire weakness while it actually means a Fighting weakness.
Nick15
Possibly, but I’m almost certain this error was a legitimate design mistake. These cards were (are?) most likely made in something like Adobe InDesign, which allows you to place graphic elements by name. So probably the person doing the actual layout for this card wanted to place “Fire_Energy.file”, and so typed “F” then “I” to select it, but unwittingly chose “Fighting_Energy.fire” instead, seeing as “Fighting” is before “Fire” in the file list. This accounts for how common this error is, especially since every other TCG energy type doesn’t share the first two letters with any other like this.
That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if you started seeing type errors using Fairy energy when it should’ve been Fire or Fighting.
inatspong
I wonder if they’ll start confusing Fairy in the mix as well.
100000Volts
Piss off with the misprint. It took six months for Wizards to print this out (pending approval for the Dark Raichu from Nintendo), plenty of time to double check everything, but put fighting as a weakness. Pathetic, as a collector, I just want to sell it.
Nick15
Well, shit happens. I’ve been designing Pokemon cards for years and mistakes crop up all the time. Kudos to all designers who keep things as clean as they can!
BlizzardLizzard
I am surprise that this comment which use profanity has not been deleted or modified yet.
Tokiwa City Smuggle
I remembered playing this with other players back in the day. We played it as the fire weakness as we didn’t know at the time that misprint was supposed to be played as printed. We assumed it was supposed to be fire and playing it as printed wouldn’t be right. Most of the misprints that I knew were supposed to played as they were originally intended (Talking about obvious mistakes here unlike mistranslated cards) especially Blaine’s Charizard. This whole “played as printed” was never a thing in my leagues or even on the Pojo Magazine. It wasn’t really until Slowking debuted that’s when we started to play that card as printed even though we knew at time it was mistranslated too.
Ambassador
At one point, there were only two cards with a Hall of Fame rank of 4 stars – NG Sneasel, and this card, for the May 2002 rankings¹. For those not aware, Japan never banned cards (at least not in the early days of the TCG), but would instead assign point ranks to certain cards that were disruptive to the format, and your deck could only have so many points – justinbasil.com has a decent explanation of it², but for example, as the point limit was typically 4 stars, you only would’ve been allowed to run a single copy of Dark Vileplume, and if you did, your deck wouldn’t have been able to have a copy of Sneasel, as you already hit the limit.
Sneasel, as many people know, is a card which did get banned by WOTC at one point (though only in Modified, not Standard³𝄒⁴), but Dark Vileplume – aside from WOTC’s SNAFU with printing the non-holo rare as having a {F} weakness instead of {R} – was never banned. Since the folks designing the game felt both cards were equally disruptive, and significantly so, it tells you a lot about the direction WOTC’s interference in the game generally went. That is along with things like their mistranslation of NG Slowking’s Pokémon Power, and so on, there was a general trend of doing things to undermine the efficacy of Trainer cards in the format.
While I’m here, aside from the Base Set Machamp deck, I never actually got any other Pokémon decks or booster packs until Team Rocket⁵. This was the rare card from my first booster pack!
¹ https://archive.is/wip/9pfdM
² https://www.justinbasil.com/league/formats/hall-of-fame
³ https://jklaczpokemon.com/2002-base-to-neo/#misconceptions
⁴ Modified here means “Rocket-on”, Standard is essentially “Base Set-on”. I think this is essentially the reverse of what a modern TCG player would expect, as what was then ‘Modified’ is today ‘Standard’, and what was then ‘Standard’ is essentially what would be Expanded by today’s ..standards. Also: should emphasize, as pointed out in the link above, that no card was ever banned from Standard.
⁵ Not any authentic ones, anyways. There was a corner shop selling packs of packs of cards at a fraction of the price other stores, and in hindsight, all the cards in those packs were pretty obviously fake/knock-offs.