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{C}{C} → Cat Punch
Flip a coin. If heads, this attack does 20 damage. If tails and if your opponent has any Benched Pokémon, he or she chooses 1 of them and this attack does 20 damage to it. (Don’t apply Weakness and Resistance for Benched Pokémon.)
illus. Kagemaru Himeno · LV.13
External: Bulba ↗ · Shop: TCGplayer ↗, cardmarket ↗, eBay ↗
Adores circular objects. Wanders the streets on a nightly basis to look for dropped loose change.
Mantidactyle
In Japan they got a cool Dragonite with the Game Boy game.
In the rest of the world, we got this.
Twylis
This artwork is an interesting sequence of copying. It originated as a card in the Game Boy TCG game featuring sprite artwork copied from Meowth’s RB artwork by Sugimori, with that RB artwork likely being based directly on Meowth’s Blue sprite (since artwork typically came after spritework back then), and to promote the TCG Game Boy game, that in-game card artwork then got copied by Himeno into a real-life card. Himeno is an incredible artist, but she kinda lost a lot of the Sugimori piece’s dynamic pose, despite the Game Boy TCG sprite managing to retain it:
https://archives.bulbagarden.net/media/upload/4/4d/Spr_1b_052.png
https://archives.bulbagarden.net/media/upload/2/24/052Meowth_RB.png
https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Meowth_(Wizards_Promo_10)#Release_information
Twylis
Of course, it also raises the question of why have Himeno copy the artwork in the first place, rather than just using the artwork Sugimori made for Blue? That’s what the Dragonite card Mantidactyle mentioned above did — just a traditional Sugimori-on-stock-art-background piece. Having Himeno essentially trace traced artwork of traced artwork seems like a silly amount of steps.
Ambassador
There are 6 significant releases of this card;
1. Meowth Lv.14 GB (JP), a virtual card in Pokémon Card GB1 [JP] (Dec 1998)
2. Meowth Lv.13 (JP), a CoroCoro promo card (Feb 1999)
3. Meowth Lv.13 GB (EN), a virtual card in Pokémon TCG GB [EN] (April 2000)
4. Meowth Lv.13 (EN), WBSP 11 (April 2000)
5. Meowth Lv.13 (JP/EN), an English card released in Japan for JR Stamp Rally (Aug 2000)
6. Meowth Lv.13 (JP), a virtual card in Pokémon Card GB2 [JP] (Mar 2001)
A few stray observations;
[#1] Is a card with a few problems – as Twylis gets at above, its sprite art is based on the artwork Sugimori did for Blue Version, but flipped horizontally. Why flip it? Perhaps on short notice they realized it was redundant to the artwork of a Meowth promo released for the Rocket expansion¹, and flipped it to make it unique. Not that the early days of the TCG didn’t have a bit of redundancy with use of Sugimori artwork, but that’s what I suspect occurred here – a desire to distinguish itself from that card.
Why else would they have Himeno draw the artwork of [#2] instead of just using flipped Sugimori artwork? Another interesting tell here is that the level was also changed, from Lv.14 to Lv.13. Why change it? Probably because it had the same level as that aforementioned promo Rocket Meowth. This would confirm a few things in my comments of Articuno (WBSP 48). It seems to me like PCL wasn’t taking care to track the level data of their promos, hence the redundancy of two Lv.34 Articunos, and two Lv.14 Meowths. The correction of this Lv.14 Meowth to Lv.13 all but confirms what we already knew – that levels are meant to be unique discriminators, and these are isolated errors. ([#6] confirms the change to Lv.13 was intentional, but it doesn’t help us establish which Articuno should have been “fixed”.)
[#5] is the most interesting thing here, for me; it’s a non-holo, English language print of this card, released in Japan for the JR Stamp Rally of 2000. The JP TCG releasing English cards was not at all unprecedented, but this Meowth was released in this way alongside 2 other cards – a non-holo print of WBSP11 (Eevee), and a print of WBSP12 (Mewtwo)². Eevee and Mewtwo both have something in common, the artwork of the English prints released in the English TCG before they released in Japan, so they make sense in their market as “English variants”. Meowth doesn’t fit in with that same logic, though, at least not as far as we know. Could there something about this card that makes it “English” in character that we aren’t aware of? It’s possible. All its releases came around an interesting period of time where we got a bunch of EN-first artwork (Chris Rush Mewtwo [April 2000], Dark Raichu [April 2000], Eevee WBSP 11 [June 2000], Articuno/Zapdos/Moltres WBSP 22/23/21 [November 2000]. However, there don’t appear to be any staff of WOTC (or NOA) in the original JP credits of Pokémon Card GB, so there’s no ready evidence for it.
¹ https://pcg-search.com/card/1st/1stp025.php
² https://pokumon.com/release_event/jr-pokemon-stamp-rally-2000/