Sharpedo · Power Keepers (PK) #38

9 comments

1. 

   Ambassador TCG

   (1 year ago)

   I think there’s a collective misremembering of the way EX Power Keepers was marketed and announced. While, in retrospect, it has notability in being a set that essentially came out before Japan got it in World Champion Pack, and is otherwise primarily understood as a reprint set designed to stall time for the English TCG to line up its Generation 4 TCG debut closer to the release of the English Pokémon Diamond & Pearl video games, at some point the set gained this additional mythos as being the first set designed by Pokémon USA (PUSA for short, and now better known as TPCi¹). I’m particularly interested in the last bit – when did it become “known” that this was the first set designed by PUSA?

   In looking up the history of announcements regarding the set, there’s currently some dead-end links I’d love to see others follow up on, but since I’ve reached the end of my rope and time, the post is mostly going to be a documentation of how far I’ve gotten and not the definitive answer on any front. Here are some of the earliest acknowledgements of EX Power Keepers as a set coming out;

   https://web.archive.org/web/20061108065836/http://pokebeach.com/

   “Will it be a brand new set? Is it a PUI²-created set (like Legendary Collection or Base Set 2)? No one knows anything at this point, other than the set logo and the news story below. However, I do have one theory. We had a Ralts and Kirlia reprinted in our EX Dragon Frontiers, which were originally in EX Sandstorm. Why reprint such old cards? Could these two cards foreshadow the return of many old cards?”

   While this ended up being fairly on the nose, it’s speculation – and it’s also speculation that misses the point. EX SS Ralts and Kirlia were reprinted in EX Sandstorm because they had been reprinted in the Japanese half-decks that released alongside Japan’s last Gen III set (which became the set we know as EX Dragon Frontiers), and nothing about their presence there can really be read as foreshadowing of any kind. However, since WaterPokémonMaster’s speculation ended up being the starting point of conversation for all speculation and anticipation of what the set would include, I think the fact he was right about it being primarily a reprint set ended up sort of making the whole post “right” in the minds of the community, retroactively.

   It’s interesting to browse this brief window of time between the late October 2006 announcement and the set’s early 2007 release to see what the state of TCG discourse was at the time and see what some people’s hopes and wishes were for the set. Here are a couple example threads³;

   https://www.pokebeach.com/forums/threads/news-about-power-keepers.7730/
   https://www.pokebeach.com/forums/threads/power-keepers-revelations.8668/
   https://www.pokebeach.com/forums/threads/eeveelution-s-are-printed-in-power-keepers.8697/
   https://www.pokebeach.com/forums/threads/power-keepers-reprints.10485/

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   • 

     Ambassador TCGAmbassador TCG

     (1 year ago)

     Some observations;
     · It’s not surprising to see fans wonder if this is basically PUSA’s take on a Base Set 2/Legendary Collection, and that’s probably where PUSA got the idea to start with, but it’s interesting to see fans sort of going too far in using that as their point of reference. In browsing these threads, you’ll find some individuals are at the prospect of bringing back Base Set Charizard, others are dreading the idea of bringing back old, competitive cards.
     · My own recollection of the Delta Species block being everyone’s universal favorite is wrinkled by more than a few forum posts hoping to see not a single Delta Species card in the set, as they were by now “sick” of it.
     · You’ll see incidental mention of folks wishing to see some of the Japan exclusives that never made it into the English localization of Gen III as a whole, but you mostly see people wishing to see Jolteon/Flareon/Vaporeon Star show up, which happen to be the cards that did appear in the set. Only a few people were familiar with the fact there were a ton of OTHER Gen III cards which hadn’t shown up yet, and their lack of inclusion seems to have cemented the lack of familiarity with them in the collective knowledge of the fanbase. I obviously won’t be linking to every last card here, but I think FCO Lucario’s comments includes both an example of the lingering lack of awareness of Gen 3’s JP-exclusives, and a number of links to such cards.
     · I haven’t linked to other forums not for a strong preference of Pokébeach, but in perusing other forums, Pokébeach ends up the easiest to look through. Pokégym’s forum system seems to have pruned a lot of old threads at some point and archive.org links are a toss-up, but there’s nothing distinctly different in the tone or direction of conversations – as led by the fans anyways. The staff opening the threads are doing that sort of “Wow? I wonder what’s in the set. Stay tuned.” purse-lipped thing I always find annoying whereas anyone starting a Pokébeach thread is focused on sharing the information they *do* have, but the subsequent conversations go in the same direction either way.
     · This is kind of the first, and kind of only time, a set came out where the English fanbase knew a set was coming out, but didn’t really understand what was going to be in it. Eventually some card previews came out and folks had a stronger idea of what the direction of the set was going to be, but the reaction from people who actually play the game (vs. solely collectors) is really interesting, particularly when they were getting very close to the prereleases and still didn’t have the best idea of what the set was comprised of. About a week or two before release, Pokébeach and/or PokeGym had complete set images up, but it still approximately emulates the sense of surprise/anticipation the Japanese TCG community got to experience the whole time with their new sets, that the rest of the world never really didn’t.

     But the main rason I was looking through these early threads – to get an idea of when “PUSA designed this set” entered the fans’ collective knowledge base – doesn’t come up here. Nothing in any official press release or announcement trumpets this as the “first set designed by Americans!” and it’s almost to the extent I wonder if I’ve misremembered this, but there are traces of understanding this set as something else, such as on this fanwiki;

     https://scratchpad.fandom.com/wiki/EX_Power_Keepers

     As of pulling that page up, it hasn’t been edited in over 15 years, so it represents someone’s understanding of the set c. 2008, and describes it as “It also the first set since EX Emerald to be released only outside of Japan”. This is wrong in so many ways, but as noted above – a lot of English fans really didn’t seem to be aware of how many differences there were between the JP and US TCG, and also were kind of reliant on fansites and the way they reported things. EX Emerald was the first set where it was becoming really confusing to trace an equivalent Japanese set 1-to-1, and a lot of fansites (Pokebeach, Serebii, et al.) made a note of it in this way, but didn’t notice that as early as EX Sandstorm, PUSA was, for whatever reason, mishmashing and shifting around cards from different sets – SS is a weird frankensteining of cards from the second ADV set, Miracle of the Desert, and the first and only ADV EX set, Magma vs Aqua – but just going off set titles, you’d assume Sandstorm=Miracle of the Desert, and not notice it until you got to EX Emerald, which didn’t have a Japanese set with a similar name.

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     • 

       Ambassador TCGAmbassador TCG

       (1 year ago)

       It’s actually kind of weird to have the rose-tinted glasses chipped a bit here, and realize that back then, the rest of the fandom wasn’t doing what I was – regularly checking pokemon-card.com for the exciting new images and info, and then browsing a combination of Pokébeach/Pokégym/Pokémon Aaah/et al. to get translations and context⁴, so that they weren’t already aware of these differences⁵. But, at some point, things did sort of permeate into the collective fan consciousness that Gen III wasn’t a one-off, and PUSA was continuing to adapt sets in this weird, confused way as compared to the original sets, so that by 2010 I can find an example of a post such as this one, regarding cards apparently cut from Japan’s L3 on the way to making the English/international HS Triumphant;

       “Man, I hate PUSA with all my forces!! Why the —- do they cut cards???? Seriously, Is it that hard to make a 117 card set??”
       – https://www.pokebeach.com/forums/threads/which-cards-do-you-think-will-be-cut-from-hs-triumphant.86391/#post-1689243

       In the same way people today get confused when talking about the video games and franchise delays, etc. when it comes to what exactly The Pokémon Company is and isn’t, and how it relates to Nintendo/Creatures/GAME FREAK (and particularly the relationship between TPC and GAME FREAK), there was, c. 2010, the idea that any and all changes to the international edition of the TCG were being done by PUSA. It’s not that that’s not right – when sets are scrambled up to fit a different approach to set size and release schedule, that’s PUSA adapting the source edition of the game to fit international demands, and it’s fair to assume changes and/or deletions are primarily c/o PUSA. But then things got applied across the board, and it seems to have been understood retroactively that PUSA was also responsible for the *additions* that the international game featured – such as the cards that debuted in EX Power Keepers, and Japan only got later as World Champion Pack. And, as mentioned closer to the start of this thread, Pokébeach’s site was one of the first – if not the first – sites to break the news of Power Keepers, and its editorialism/speculation framed the conversation. Any changes were going to be attributed to PUSA.

       So like, I could go on and on here, but we need to get to the point. While Japan eventually got these cards in World Champion Pack, that came out in July 2007. EX Power Keepers released in North America/internationally in February 2007. The cards of the set varied, and I’m grouping them in no particular order here;
       1. Jolteon Star had already been released in Japan.
       2a. PK Slaking is a reprint of RS Slaking with new art, but it’s just Sugimori stock art.
       2b. PK Blaziken is a reprint of RS Blaziken with different art.
       3a. PK Mawile is a new card with new art, but it’s just Sugimori stock art.
       3b. PK Sharpedo is a new card with new art.
       4. Metagross ex is a new card with new art, and seems worth talking about because it’s a playable card.

       The pending question is already obvious – “Did Pokémon USA make EX Power Keepers?”

       I don’t want to get too caught up on the semantics here. For example, Wizards of the Coast didn’t really “make” Team Rocket – for all but one card, they translated a pre-existing set. They “made” Base Set 2 and Legendary Collection, but those sets aren’t really anything new, they’re just rejigged conformations of existing cards/sets. When I say made, I’m talking more like what WOTC did with Dark Raichu – they had the idea of a card called Dark Raichu, they commissioned new artwork from Arita for it, etc. Even though EX Sandstorm is this weird combination of cards from two different JP sets, PUSA probably didn’t make any of the cards in that set, they just rejigged the order of cards.

       Allow me to try and answer the question for each of the categories I just proposed. Did PUSA make these cards?

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       • 

         AmbassadorAmbassador TCG

         (1 year ago)

         1. PUSA obviously didn’t design Jolteon Star, or Vaporeon Star, or any other cards which we can identify as having a JP release prior to the US release.
         2a. I think there’s a general belief that cards in the 2a. group are very strong indicators that PUSA designed this set. They’re reprints of existing cards, they use existing art assets …we can readily imagine an intern at an office in Bellevue, Washington drafting these cards up and easily getting them approved by TPC and/or PCL. The thing is, I don’t think anyone’s ever imagined it the other way around – PUSA requests Japan make a new Gen III set on short notice, and it’s actually an intern in PCL who is tasked with making new cards in short order. Both scenarios are equally plausible, and the latter is a bit more plausible because it’d make the matter of card.
         2b. Even though the card is a reprint, it’s got new art! Shades of Dark Raichu, right? Wrong. I’d suggest looking at another set which seems weird in the context we’re talking about here. Call of Legends has a number of cards that are reprints that featured new art, and most of these cards actually never did get released in Japan. But the second time around things feel a bit more obvious – a majority of the new art for the set’s reprints is being done by artists who illustrated the first card, and while it’s going to be subjective, the art in Call of Legends is typically inferior to the original’s card art – in terms of overall quality, composition, fitting the theme of the set, whatever. I know this could be highly debated, but I feel strongly that COL’s artwork is made up of “rejects”, not newly commissioned artwork. I feel the same about most of the new, non-Sugimori art here – some of it, situationally, seems to have been done as brand new artwork for this set, but when you’re approaching the set in this way, it’s hard to look at, say, PK Wobbuffet as anything but rejected artwork.
         3a. This is a near-retread of 2a, but marginally more complicated (if only by a bit). A lot of these new cards are “safe” in how inconsequential they are – like they’re something PUSA made that’d be really easy for PCL to approve, because they aren’t really introducing anything that’d cause a functional disparity between EN and JP players. Both scenarios are easily plausible – and the fandom assumed, and went with the idea PUSA made these cards.
         3b. This is the same thing as the last question, but new art! New attacks! Surely PUSA made this? Please put a pin in this, because we’re finally on the verge of talking about the card this entire post is supposed to be about – you know, PK Sharpedo – and I think it’s the card that gets us closest to the answer.
         4. I think all the Pokémon-ex in this set need to be looked at individually. Some of them are very weird and seem to have artefacts that suggest they have a complicated pedigree – why does Absol ex have an attack called Psychic Pulse? Why does Flygon ex have a Poké-Body called Psychic Protector? Isn’t Claydol ex just cobbling together Bodies and attacks that already exist? And then, on the other hand, why is Metagross ex’s Scanblast attack unlike anything we saw before, and never saw again? – and I think you can read these cards either way. These are either cards that PUSA designed and went through several iterations of submission, rejection, resubmission, until PCL finally approved them – and rather then go through that process again when they noticed things like Flygon having a Poké-Body whose named didn’t suit it, just ran with what they were finally being allowed to run with – or these are awkward translations of cards PCL designed but decided against. These cards actually deserve speculative comments to themselves, but as my time on this site has come to a close, either someone else might come to it first, or you’ll have to look up my substack (the url is predictable – nothing is posted yet, and no promises it ever will be. After recent events, I’d like a break to reflect on what we’re doing here.)

         Okay, so. Finally. I can talk about Sharpedo. It took a very long while to get here, but I actually intend this entire comment(s) to be read as an immediate follow-up to the comments I left on RS Poochyena 65 – if you’re not familiar, you’ll have to read it before continuing, since I’m assuming you’ve already read it.

         Reply
         • 

           Ambassador TCG [at] proton [dot] meAmbassador

           (1 year ago)

           Sharpedo doesn’t fit the train of thought I outlined for Dark Pokémon in Gen III of the TCG. While this card is coming out at the tail end of Gen III, a time when it had a number of Special Energy card options available to it and a few other Gen III Dark Pokémon cards had broken the Gen II (Neo + e-Card) approach to the Energy costs of Dark and Metal types, this was only early on in the ADV/PCG era, and anyone else who kept doing it after they seem to have backed off from it was doing it as a deliberate gimmick – what I’m trying to say here is that it is weird that Sharpedo doesn’t have at least one attack that doesn’t de facto require Special Energy. Yes, you can point to RS Poochyena and DR Absol, but who else, after that? They seem to have decided they maybe didn’t want to rip the bandaid off quite yet, and exceptions are, I think, doing it deliberately – Umbreon δ, Charizard ☆δ, are kind of saying “hey, look at us! Our typings are off and happen to correspond to the typings that are still *special* in this game!” and the only cards that give me pause are ones like CG Shiftry ex, and a few of the new cards under the Darkness and/or Metal typing in this set, this Sharpedo being one of them. And I’d actually suggest CG Shiftry ex breaking this rule can be explained away in a manner not unlike I explained away N2 Forretress in my comments of RS Poochyena 65 – its Poké-Body gives it a way to do damage even if no Special Energy are available to cover attack costs. It’s attack costs are almost balancing against it.

           If it’s not a Delta Pokémon, a Pokémon Star, or has some other obvious reason to made its attack cost a deliberate ‘gimmick’ of sorts, a Gen III Dark and/or Metal Pokémon – especially of the PCG era – should have at least one attack that doesn’t have Dark and/or Metal in the Energy cost. PK Metang, PK Sharpedo, PK Beldum, PK Carvahna, PK Poochyena, PK Absol ex, PK Metagross ex, PK Shiftry ex, PK Skarmory ex, in my estimation, are violating this rule.

           And I just can’t imagine these cards, had they been designed by PUSA and submitted to PCL for review, been approved. Yes, even though DP was right around the corner, even though when these cards came out in Japan DP was already well under way, they just don’t fit the spirit of the era they’re “meant” to be understood as being a part of. They stick out like a sore thumb and for me, the only way to explain them without violating Occam’s Razor was that PCL designed them while in the middle of designing cards for Gen 4, and from here the entire house of cards collapses for me – I personally don’t believe PUSA designed a single card in this set. I think they either requested something from PCL, or if they didn’t request it from PCL it just became *obvious* some kind of filler set needed to be created to all parties, and the things people take as clues that PUSA made it, I take as clues that PCL made it in short order. The *only* cards to give me pause are some of the more obviously weird ones – e.g. the aforementioned not-Psychic Pokémon-ex with Psychic-themed Abilities⁶ – but the devil’s in the details of these sorts of things, so it’s appropriate that it’s the Dark-types that give the whole thing away⁷.

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           Ambassador Footnotes [1]Ambassador

           (1 year ago)

           ¹ PUSA merged with Pokémon UK to become TPCi c.2009. https://web.archive.org/web/20090413121437/http://worldscreen.com/articles/display/20547
           ² “Pokémon USA Inc.” I think it was far more common to see PUSA referred to as PUSA, so am sticking with it here, and probably always will.
           ³ While I’m not directly providing archive.org or archive.is links, I am pasting these urls into archive.org to be backed up. If you’re browsing this post in the future and the links are down, they should still be available for you to look at in the future.
           ⁴ Babelfish, Google Translate, et al. were awful back in the day, so the few people in these communities who could translate it meaningfully.
           ⁵ This is why I feel so strongly about my comments on Computer Search, which as contentious as they are, document the current state of how the fanbase comes to understand and know of card information. Solely relying on ‘influencers’ to share and propagate information is not great for the health/knowledge base of a fan community! In the case of Pokébeach, he WAS the source and didn’t really have anyone to cite, but in 2023 when we’re talking about old sets, cards, and info – there are tons of sources to cite, and giving folks an opportunity to peruse information for themselves is important. See how confused I am by lack of sources for 2008 content? How convoluted and misled some old forum posts are for lack of folks knowing to do a bit of the heavy lifting themselves? Why are we still doing this in 2023? If you’re reading this in 2038, I’m optimistic the TCG will have harmonized itself across languages by then, if it’s still around, but this kind of problem will still endure in some way or another.
           ⁶ I intend to mull this over in the future, somewhere else, but to make it obvious – we just went through several sets where Pokémon were given off-typings. PK Flygon ex’s Psychic Protector sure seems a whole lot less weirder when you remember we just had a Flygon ex δ, and even though we never had an Absol ex δ to explain away PK Absol ex’s Psychic Pulse attack, is it that farfetched to wonder if an Absol ex δ got rejected, or it’s appropriating an attack from a draft for Jirachi ex or some other Psychic-type Pokémon-ex?

         • 

           Ambassador Footnotes [2]Ambassador

           (1 year ago)

           ⁷ “Don’t these Pokémon not fitting the implicit ruleset prove PUSA made these? It’s not an obvious rule unless you know to look for it, and PCL would’ve approved it because DP was right around the corner anyway.” I really feel strongly that this oversimplifies the situation, and that Occam’s Razor necessarily dismisses this in favor of PCL not caring. The approval process would just work in a way that the person doing the approval can break their own rules for the sake of expediting things, but will never approve someone else breaking their rulesm even if it’s for the same reason, because they’d worry about the precedent it’d set. While I acknowledge the jury will always be out on this one, it’s just less of a stretch to understand EX Power Keepers as “the first attempt at an international filler set that was better realized as Call of Legends” than “ex-WOTC staff who were hired into PUSA get to take another stab at Jamboree/Crosstrainer now that they’re actually part of the company”, and the onus is on someone to prove PUSA ever did take credit for the set in a meaningful way. All the digging I’ve ever done suggests we all just started assuming it. Maybe we took PUSA’s lack of comment as tacit admission, but at this point in the franchise, I think we’ve all learned their silence isn’t especially meaningful in one way or another.

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         ParttimetcgcollectorAmbassador TCG

         (1 year ago)

         Become a youtuber, I will subscribe and inform people at pokebeach and other site.

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   • 

     GaardusAmbassador TCG

     (1 year ago)

     Just wanted to say thank you for the absolute treasure trove of knowledge you’ve brought to readers in your time on this site.

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