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- ↓ 2.30
- ꩜ 3.26
- ↑ 6.60
Flip a coin. If heads, search your deck for any card and put it into your hand. Shuffle your deck afterward. If tails, you can’t play Trainer cards until the end of your next turn.
illus. Ken Sugimori
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feyblade
“If this teleportation device works, we’ll be able to warp Professor Oak into our lab and make him do our bidding! What could possibly go wrong?”
*tails*
“Team rocket is blasting off agaaaaaiiiin”
chipthrasher
“Yeah, and we’ll be able to warp Ash and the twerps in and grab Pikachu and the rest!”
WilliamH.
Some crazy gamble this is!!
DMNBT
For when you didn’t have the money (or didn’t want to spend it) for Computer Search. Glorious plays were had with this card.
Foon-Gus Fring
Was “Computer Search” really so prohibitively expensive at the time?! This card is way worse!
DaneeBound
According to the price codex of the final issue of The Duelist, a single copy of Comp. Search averaged at around $5 (inflation adjusted: $9). Not a lot for the serious duelist, considering that same price codex lists Base zard at $30 and MtG’s Ancestral Recall at $150. But it is pricy for your average 8-year-old, who maybe only got like $10 a month in allowance.
Ambassador
I’m not convinced the card even is that much worse. I could imagine preferring to use this over Computer Search towards the end of the game, when you already have most of the cards you want either already in play or in your hand ready to go – so that you’d be reticent to want to discard any of them, as CS requires. The later a game goes, the less of a penalty that not being able to use Trainer cards during your next turn would be, too.
The Pokémon Card Official Book 2000 has a write-up/commentary on every single card from First Expansion Pack up to the start of neo, and their write-up on this card is something of a mix of both of these views. Of its two bullet point writeup, the first compares it to CS and suggests it could be read as a more versatile form of it, and the second does suggest could be a card you’d end up recommending to someone who either didn’t pull CS or didn’t pull enough. That second point reads more like an incidental “by the way,” rather than suggesting that the card was created *only* to be a poor man’s CS.
DaneeBound
Remember that this card came out during Gym format. A format that was all about playing as many Trainers as you can, or depriving your opponent of doing likewise (thanks to the three regalia of hand-destruction: Imposter Oak’s Revenge, Rocket’s Sneak Attack and The Rocket’s Trap).
And then you have this card, that on a literal coin toss makes you effectively skip not just the rest of this turn, but also your next one, while your opponent still gets to play their Trainers with your face firmly planted in the dirt? Yeah, not happening.
Ambassador
You’ve actually described another scenario where I’d rather have this card in my hand than Computer Search. If my hand is regularly being obliterated down to only 0~2 cards each turn, I won’t necessarily want to, or even be able to, fulfill CS’s discard requirement.
There’s a section in the Pokémon TCG Illustration Collection where Ishihara actually talks about some of the wonkier Trainer cards in the Gym block – he focuses on Chaos Gym in particular, but I think it’s easily read as applying to a lot of the “weirder” cards around this time. At no point was Creatures trying to create intentionally over-complicated-as-to-be-useless cards, nor were they trying to create objectively bad cards. Rather, what they were trying to do was introduce a little bit of complexity and introduce cards with less obvious use cases than what they’d been printing up until that point, and with this card we’re coming across a few of them now.
It’s very much in the same boat as some of the Rocket’s Secret Machine cards that I think have been underestimated, and under the banner of Rocket-themed Trainer cards it seems like they really took the most opportunity to create interesting cards with novel (often situational) utility.
Daniel Brack
Whatever the intention may have been, it did not work (which goes for a lot of things in both the Rocket and Gym sets). Both then and now, we knew that getting one search off is not worth the risk of being a sitting duck for two turns. Not when a better option is available.
It’s the same reason why Poké Ball sees next to no competitive play, while Ultra Ball is a staple card. People like to spend a little more to get a guarantee.
Steely Gilgamesh
While those two scientists are doing experiments, James is in the background probably playing games on that computer.
100000Volts
I always knew misty was evil. That’s what happened after she left ash, she ends up joining Team Rocket.