Mary’s Request · Unseen Forces (UF) #86

4 comments

1. 

   jelze

   (9 years ago)

   Your 9th-12th Draw 3 cards supporter in any deck that doesn’t run a Stage 2

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     EverPhoenixjelze

     (9 years ago)

     *a stage 2 tree. Archie’s and Maxie’s won’t trigger this since any stage 2s they drop aren’t evolved.

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       AmbassadorEverPhoenix

       (1 year ago)

       I’m not sure about this. I think that any Stage 2 Pokémon card on your Bench would prohibit you from being able to draw an additional 2 cards, unless it had specifically been put into play with directions to treat it as something else.

       自分の場に「2進化」の「進化ポケモン」がいないなら、さらに2枚引く。

       The Japanese TCG has regular terms 「進化ポケモン」(Evolution Pokémon) and 「2進化」(Stage 2). The English edition had been translating 進化ポケモン as “Evolved Pokémon”. There is a difference in tenses here and it gets a bit confusing – Archie’s and Maxie’s might let you put a Stage 2 Evolved Pokémon on your bench and you would be correct in saying it is not evolved, but it is still an Evolved Pokémon.

       However, the *original* Archie and Maxie cards can come into this conversation here, because while their function is similar, they do also specify “Treat the new Benched Pokémon as a Basic Pokémon.¹” So Stage 2 cards put into play with these two cards would allow you to draw an additional two cards if you played Mary’s Request, but Stage 2 cards put into play via Maxie’s Hidden Ball Trick and Archie’s Ace in the Hole should not.

       As some point during Generation 5 or 6, the English TCG dropped the formal term “Evolved Pokémon”, and “Evolution Pokémon” took its place. While “evolved Pokémon” is still a term in the English TCG, it is not the same as the old term “Evolved Pokémon”, and care should be taken when trying to determine interactions between cards across generations with different lexicon.

       ¹ Original text for reference: このカードによって場に出した「進化カード」は、「たねポケモン」としてあつかわれる。

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         AmbassadorAmbassador

         (1 year ago)

         I’m looking into this a bit more and wondering how I could elaborate on this for anyone who is interested in playing unlimited and is trying to navigate the potential minefield of changes in translation and has no interest in reading my long rambling essays on the matter.. I don’t necessarily think these are “mistranslations” that can easily be sorted out. You can see the painstaking difficulty that even WOTC was trying to make a point that there is occasionally a meaningful difference between evolved Pokémon and Evolved Pokémon on some cards that deal with this sort of thing – for those interested, Devolution Sprays, Omastar, etc. would be a good point to start¹.

         And actually, it’s a good point to start in *both* languages, because while the Japanese TCG has been careful l in its choice of terms across the years, it too goes through some deliberate changes in how certain concepts are articulated and expressed on cards¹… I think the best thing anyone interested in playing unlimited could do is either (1) accept an understanding that ‘house rules’ are in effect and you’re going to get things wrong sometimes, or (2) potentially spend untold hours of your life parsing through the different language and terminology used no less than two different language editions of the TCG and compare and contrast how certain terms are used in different blocks/eras of the game and start compiling some kind of dictionary for yourself along these lines. I think organized play in Japan does an borderline satisfactory job of communicating changes in languages, but organized play in North America is substandard for this kind of thing. I found a ruling on Golurk V² and it does outline there is a difference between “evolved Pokémon” and “Evolution Pokémon,” but, as always, they stop short of elaborating on why this confusion might come about – that players might be confused because Evolved Pokémon used to be a term used that was functionally identical to what Evolution Pokémon means today, and care hasn’t always been taken in the TCG to point out to players that these terminology changes occur.

         That is, where I’m probably telling you more than you care to know, OP is telling you a bit less than you need to know. I think the latter is ultimately more damaging, because it seems to engrain a mentality in some English players that they can’t figure anything out unless there is a compendium ruling on it, and could also drive people away from playing in formats other than Standard.

         ¹ Quickest example of this: the original JP text of WBSP Mew 47 vs EVO Mew. Mew’s Power/Ability is intended to function more or less identically, but the language to express the functionality has substantially changed over the years.
         ² https://compendium.pokegym.net/ruling/1593/

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