- ↓ 0.19
- ꩜ 0.46
- ↑ 7.20
{D} → Shadow Bind : 10
The Defending Pokémon can’t retreat until the end of your opponent’s next turn.
illus. Naoyo Kimura
External: Pokemon.com ↗, Bulba ↗ · #ad / Affiliate Links: TCGplayer ↗, cardmarket ↗, Amazon ↗, eBay ↗
Blob Takeshi
3 of the same Pokémon in a row? Is that a first?
Ambassador
This is actually a pretty interesting card¹. It follows N1 Murkrow, N2 Forretress, Shining Tyranitar, Shining Steelix, EX Tyranitar, and SK Steelix, and comes out alongside Mightyena (RS 10) Sneasel 𝒆𝒙 as a Darkness or Metal-type Pokémon that is structured in such a way that it basically cannot attack unless it has at least one Special Energy Card providing it. That is, aside from the aforementioned, all other Darkness and/or Metal-type cards up until this point had at least one attack that either;
– was not specific about the Energy required (i.e. some amount of {C} as the attack cost)
– was specific about Energy required, but specified what could be fulfilled with Basic Energy Cards (e.g. N2 Magnemite’s {L}{C} attack cost, Pryce’s Sneasel’s {W}{C} attack cost)
This seems to have been a deliberate design decision. The game designers did want these Pokémon to be a little bit trickier to get into play and running at full steam, but probably didn’t want them to be ‘stuck’ if all your Special Energy were prized or discarded – in the case of the latter, I think you only had Energy Charge as an option, and the way that card is designed means it wasn’t the most reliable way of getting them back.
Of the cards I’ve listed off as *not* being able to attack unless Special Energy Cards were attached;
· N1 Murkrow I’m kind of shrugging at and attributing to the fact it was the first Dark-type card printed and maybe they hadn’t considered this design idea yet.
· N2 Forretress doesn’t necessarily need to do any attacking to do damage, because of its Pokémon Power. It’s a card designed to sit on your Bench and deal passive damage.
· Shining Tyranitar and Shining Steelix seem to have been, like all other Shining Pokémon from N4, designed to be pretty hard to get into play (only one copy) and have convoluted Energy costs. Being reliant on Special Energy Cards to attack is pretty fitting for them.
· EX Tyranitar actually has a built-in escape clause to circumvent its {D}{D}{D}{D} Energy cost; i.e., its Dark Aura Poké-Body.
· SK Steelix also circumvents its nominal reliance on {M} Energy with its Rare Metal Poké-Body.
· Sneasel 𝒆𝒙 is clearly meant to be a nerfed version of N1 Sneasel, and now it can be read as that much more nerfed.
So what the heck is the deal with Poochyena and Mightyena? Perhaps the addition of several mundane Dark and Steel type Pokémon meant the writing was on the wall when it came to how much longer treating the type and attack costs of two entire groups of Pokémon would go on, maybe PCL felt the novelty had worn off, or maybe they were finding it wasn’t that big of a deal to ensure these Pokémon always had the Energy cards needed to fire off certain attacks, but I’d actually suggest it’s not quite that – they were just testing the waters a bit at the start of a new TCG block to see how these cards would do, with redundancies built in (there were two other Poochyena cards in circulation and another Mightyena) if it was too much of a problem.
Having said this, we do see these cards followed by DR Absol and DR Skarmory in relatively short order, but it’s not like the flood gates burst wide open after that. Despite the massive influx of Darkness and Metal-type Pokémon in Gen III (and particularly in the PCG era), they mostly stuck to this Energy cost principle because even then only a handful of D/M cards appeared that fundamentally *require* Special Energy Cards attached to be able to attack at all, and this is even after cards like R Energy, Double Rainbow Energy, and δ Rainbow Energy had come out to increase the number of Energy Cards you could have in your deck so as to be able to satisfy the attack costs of cards like, for example, Umbreon δ.
This story ends when Darkness and Metal Energy cards are released as Basic Energy cards in DP1, and you immediately see Pokémon of these types switch over to more conventional attack costs, but from December 1, 1999 (JP-only Murkrow promo was released) through to November 29, 2006 (day before DP1 released in Japan), Darkness and Metal-type Pokémon occupied this very interesting design space in TCG history, one that is probably never going to be revisited.
¹ To be perfectly honest, PK Sharpedo is the more interesting card, because its relationship to this rule and the timing of that cards release raises the interesting possibility of confirming it really was PUSA that designed the Power Keepers set, but the context and preamble to make a comment on that card needed to be set up here. I’ll get around to making that comment relatively soon, unless I completely forget.