- ↓ 0.59
- ꩜ 1.60
- ↑ 5.61
Flip 2 coins. For each heads, search your deck for a Basic Pokémon card other than a Baby Pokémon card, show it to your opponent, and put it into your hand. Shuffle your deck afterward.
illus. “Big Mama” Tagawa
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Twylis
Per the discussion on Delta Species Hypno, this card has fascinating implications given that in Japanese, there doesn’t seem to be any indication that gen 2 Baby-stage pokemon qualify as Basics — hence this card explicitly omitting them likely to make the effect more in line with the Japanese card.
In gen 4, however, a global errata was issued that any card listing “Basic Pokemon or Evolution Pokemon” refers to any Pokemon in general — see Celio’s Network on this page:
https://compendium.pokegym.net/compendium-lvx.html
I’m not sure how the Japanese TCG handled this — it’s not impossible that in a hypothetical Japanese eCard-onward format, a modern Quick Ball wouldn’t be able to search for an e-era Baby, and many older cards that can search for any pokemon (per the above errata) in English can’t search for things like Lv. X cards, LEGEND cards, or V-UNION cards in Japanese. Probably doesn’t come up often, though, since I think Unlimited-style formats are even less popular there than they are in the west — which is ironic, since their card back situation would’ve made a Japanese Unlimited far healthier than the degenerate solitaire situation that English Unlimited developed into.
Ambassador
My impression is Japan didn’t need the errata in Gen 4*. There are myriad things going on here, but one thing I glossed over on Hypno was actually getting to an important point on Hypno – Gen 3’s EN cards and Gen 3’s JP cards were probably at odds with each other. JP Hypno would be able to find babies, so EN Hypno wasn’t phrased in a way as to match the JP’s effect, it seems more like a legacy thing they borrowed from WOTC. For a brief time, WOTC was translating “「ポケモンのカード」” to “Basic Pokémon and Evolution”, and that worked in some contexts and didn’t work in other contexts. Why did they do this? I have guesses. Why did TPC carry this on at all? I have no idea, but they probably were starting to notice it was causing them problems**, and that the errata is calling out exactly this phrase suggests they did indeed notice it and figure out how to fix it.
I’m actually pretty confident I know what happened here;
· Base – Gym: PCL, with the benefit of hindsight (and an eye to the future), gave WOTC advice to put “Basic Pokémon and Evolution” on some cards that were only saying “Pokémon card”. This was meant ONLY for certain cards, in anticipation of Baby Pokémon, to ensure certain cards would have the right interaction. It was NOT meant to be a standard approach going onward.
· Neo: WOTC, entirely of their own volition, added the “Baby Pokémon count as Basic Pokémon” clause on Baby Pokémon. This undermines the future-proofed wording of Base–Gym cards they had been advised to add (they clearly didn’t understand the intention of the language), and immediately started to be incoherent – why would a card like Broken Ground Gym specify “Baby Pokémon or Basic Pokémon” if they were indeed one in the same?
· e-Card: If you look at the Ball cards as a group example, several are carefully phrased to match the way they would be meant to interact (or not interact) with Baby Pokémon, without admitting the clause they added is stupid – save for Master Ball, which is evidently stuck with its Gym-era text. But, good luck, Master Ball’s JP text has been updated from its previous entries – it now also has “Pokémon card” in its text, and applying the Base-era advice here, alongside the Baby errata, makes it have the same effect. WOTC apparently doesn’t notice any need to stop translating “Pokémon card” to “Basic Pokémon and Evolution”, and players still aren’t noticing that certain cards are clearly implying Baby Pokémon should not always be considered Basic Pokémon.
· EX: TPC did a lot of things right in terms of a clean break from WOTC, but it looks like they did still rely on some old translation shortcuts – so “Pokémon card” is still being incorrectly translated as “Basic Pokémon and Evolution”, but I can assure you they were probably noticing it didn’t really work**. Certain EX era cards probably don’t have the correct interaction with Babies save for the fact the Baby clause exists so they just sort of coincidentally have the right effect.
· DP: Errata issued, and they probably stopped doing the dumb thing.
* They might’ve had some kind of errata for pre-Gym cards that seem to have fumbled with the language. Something to fumble around for on any 1999 archive.org backups of pokemon-card.com.
** So, like, this is probably confusing. I can try and give you an example. If we assume WOTC (and then TPC) were brute-force translating all instances of 「ポケモンのカード」 in a “Ctrl+F and replace” way, Mew (NBSP #040) would’ve ended up reading something ridiculous like “Flip a coin. If heads, choose 1 of either player’s Evolved Pokémon, remove the highest BASIC POKéMON AND EVOLUTION from that Pokémon, and put it into that player’s hand.” Emphasis mine there, but ‘ポケモンのカード’ could occasionally imply ‘Evolution card’ depending on context.
Ambassador
Yeah, it looks like a Neo-era errata did come out, but some Gym cards were affected – so my proposed series of events isn’t *quite* perfect. On their article for Rocket’s Minefield Gym, ポケモンWiki points out the card’s mention of Basic Pokémon was subject to a Neo-era rule change – the way they’ve explained it, it sounds like it was effectively errata’d to say “Basic Pokémon and Baby Pokémon”.
https://wiki.ポケモン.com/wiki/%E3%83%AD%E3%82%B1%E3%83%83%E3%83%88%E5%9B%A3%E3%81%AE%E7%88%86%E7%99%BA%E3%82%B8%E3%83%A0
Twylis
And that Rocket’s Minefield ruling further confirms the suspicion that yes, Baby pokemon being Basics is absolutely a fabrication of Wizards.
Always nice when something weird and confusing can once again be summarized with “It’s Wizards’ fault” :)