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Poké-BODY ⇢ Dragon Lift
The Retreat Cost for each of your Pokémon (excluding Pokémon-ex and Baby Pokémon) is 0.
{R}{C} → Flame Jet
Choose 1 of your opponent’s Pokémon. This attack does 40 damage to that Pokémon. This attack’s damage isn’t affected by Weakness or Resistance.
{R}{W}{C}{C} → Bright Flame : 120
Discard 2 Energy attached to Salamence ex.
· Pokémon-ex rule: When Pokémon-ex has been Knocked Out, your opponent takes 2 Prize cards.
illus. Hikaru Koike
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quiarados
OK, weird: why does this card explicitly exclude Babies from the ruling of its ability? Were there any Babies in the format in 2005? And also… all the Babies that saw play (your Cleffas et al) retreated for free, didn’t they? Just a really weird carve-out on this one, as far as I can see.
Ambassador
Yep, it’s weird. Same thing with RG Dodrio.
Twylis
The RG Dodrio comment section gives some further context (and Babies are very conceptually messy to begin with), but some quick notes and my own theory.
— This explicit mention of Baby pokemon also exists in the Japanese version of the cards, and is the only case of Japanese TCG mentioning them in Gen 3.
— Japanese TCG wouldn’t have had to worry about the Neo-era babies you’re referring to — they had a different cardback and the two cardbacks generally weren’t played together, so the only relevant Babies this card (and Dodrio) would generally refer to would be the e-Card babies.
— e-Card Babies all have a retreat cost unlike the free-retreat Neo Babies, but like the Neo Babies, they have a special Baby Rule that forces the opponent to flip a coin for their attack to have any effect.
My suspicion is that this card and RG Dodrio explicitly exclude Babies specifically to prevent any potential combos with cards like TR Misdreavus, DR Forretress, or SS Dunsparce. These cards have attacks that switch with a benched pokemon, with the e-Card Babies being a very good option to switch to due to their coin flip effect. Salamence and Dodrio would allow those Babies to be switched back to the attacker on the next turn at no cost — especially notable with Forretress, which would be at an energy deficit otherwise.
None of those cards are especially powerful, mind you, but some bad luck with coin flips could still potentially lead to some uncomfortably chance-based matches.