“Hey! Learn our syntax here.”
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- jpg (131 KB)
- cred: P.P.
3K
- ↓ 0.75
- ꩜ 1.46
- ↑ 3.49
Choose up to 3 Basic Pokémon cards, Evolution cards, and/or basic Energy cards from your discard pile. Show them to your opponent and shuffle them into your deck.
illus. Sumiyoshi Kizuki
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coolestman22
The original Super Rod.
Tatu chín đai
Not as good as Ordinary Rod!
Ambassador
Ordinary Rod can’t let you shuffle 3 Pokémon or 3 Energy cards into your deck, so it doesn’t completely outrank NGR.
Tatu chín đai
Very true — might be useful in some circumstances.
Also, was there some replacement for this card in the meta printed, after TR rotated out in 2001/2002? The “Rod” cards pre-Gen 5 leave a lot to be desired.
https://pkmncards.com/?s=type%3Atrainer+rod&sort=date&ord=rev&display=images
Ambassador
· e-Card had Town Volunteers. It’s a buffed NGR, but turned into a Supporter to keep it balanced.
· EX had some similar but not identical cards (Energy Recycle System, Pokémon Retriever, Mr. Stone’s Project …your opinion may vary on how close those are to NGR).
· DP had Night Maintenance, which is 100% identical in function.
Warnock 2022
Don’t forget UD “Flower Shop Lady”!
feyblade
I can only imagine a supporter variant of the card called “weekly garbage run.”
brken11
Weird thing about the wording. You can’t recover V-Union or LEGEND cards with this card, but you can with Super Rod. (Not that you’d want to shuffle a V-Union back into your deck.) As both cards are neither Basics nor Evolution cards.
Ambassador
The wording is actually more of an artifact of awkward original JP language than necessarily blaming WOTC for this one, but there could be an argument to be made that it should probably work identically to Night Maintenance.
brken11
Ok, my Japanese isn’t the best, but this is very funky wording.
Choose up to three Pokémon (or evolution) or energy cards (other than special engineering energy cards*) from your trash, show them to the other player, and then put them in your deck. After that, shuffle your deck.
*[I feel translated this bit poorly]
I definitely see the intention to let you shuffle any Pokémon back into your deck from the Japanese version of the card.
Ambassador
There’s a little bit of twist here because the term “Basic Pokémon” (or rather, its equivalent) doesn’t exist in the Japanese TCG until the start of the Gym era. I wrote about this briefly in the comments of Pokémon Trader and expand on it a bit more in a blog article I wrote¹, but in this context, translating it as “Basic Pokémon, Evolution card,” etc *could* be argued as reasonable.
I might sound like I’m contradicting myself a little bit, but one of the reasons the idea of supporting the EN approach to unlimited is that it seems like it’d be full of so many “um, actuallys” in terms of gaps in language across eras that wouldn’t be fun, but boring legalese. In the context of the time the card was printed, it’s clearly meant to be able to retrieve every possible Pokémon card in existence, and it seems reasonable to read Night Maintenance as a 1-to-1 retrain of this card, and its refreshed language as instructive.
This chips away at something I’ve been looking into for a while, but it’s worth bearing in mind that that WOTC’s translation of EX Master Ball is incorrect. You see it use the “Basic Pokémon or Evolution card” text, which is faithful for the card’s Gym era print, but for the newback format refresh, The JP card actually re-harmonized their language, so the original text of that card says “Pokémon card”, and this is a common difference in text throughout the e-Card era so that it is a conscious, deliberate decision. What’s surprising is that it continued throughout the EX era (i.e., after PUSA took over from WOTC) and is what led to the series of discoveries in comments like EX Delta Species Hypno, and currently, I think, kind of dead-ends on a question I ask on the DP print of Poké Ball. (Point being, for an extended period of time, “Basic Pokémon or Evolution card” exists in the EN TCG as a flawed translation of “Pokémon card”.)
I think about all of this another way. There’s an amusing phenomenon in the Canadian legal system every few years where a new lawyer or amateur paralegal/etc. thinks they’ve cracked years of long-standing precedent because of something like a comma-splice error or some other grammatical oversight in some contract, law, etc. and they’ll breathlessly rush to the court to declare their discovery and that things must be overturned and re-arranged to account for this obvious oversight. The judge will be completely unphased by this and without even having to read the text or analyze the argument, end the entire pandemonium with one simple question;
“Does this also work in French?”
(Canada is an officially bilingual country. 99.9% of the time, some perceived flaw in the EN text won’t actually align with the FR text.)
So I guess that’s where I’m driving at, here? An “um, actually” where a quirk in the language of a card of a given era seems like it would or wouldn’t work with cards from later eras that take a very automated approach to it just doesn’t seem very fun to me, and you have to analyze the spirit of the card. At the time it was printed, Nightly Garbage Run is able to retrieve from the discard any and all kinds of Pokémon, and it doesn’t seem especially disruptive to maintain the intentionality of that if you really, really want to play this card with cards from later eras. That’s the gist of the defense I’d make in this situation.
¹ The article itself is working towards something else entirely, but I write a few examples of how WOTC wasn’t doing 1-to-1 translations of card text, but implementing translations of cards “as if” they had been written with the Gym~Neo language conventions. Just the first section is relevant here, the example with Marowak is a sufficient example of what I’m talking about; https://ambassadortcg.substack.com/p/is-pokemon-trader-supposed-to-work
Nos
I wish this was considered a Rocket’s Secret Machine. You could loop it indefinitely with Rocket’s Wobbuffet!
Gaardus
Why wouldn’t this be considered a Rocket’s Secret Machine? Was it mistranslated?
Nos
Meant to post that comment on Goop Gas Attack! Oops!