- ↓ 3.00
- ꩜ 4.74
- ↑ 19.28
{G} → Mini Drain : 10
Heal 10 damage from this Pokémon.
illus. Yuu Nishida
External: Pokemon.com ↗, Bulba ↗ · Shop: TCGplayer ↗, cardmarket ↗, Amazon ↗, eBay ↗
Its fluffy fur is similar in composition to plants. This Pokémon frequently washes its face to keep it from drying out.
nago
Thank you, TPCi, for these crisp silver borders 🩶
Ambassador
I’ve made a lot of comments bemoaning the lack of alignment between the two, so I feel obliged to comment here – it’s so incredibly nice to see the English edition of the game make such massive strides in being a more faithful adaptation of the primary edition of the game. We’ve gone from not even bothering to adopt something as simple as regulation marks (and so having to mark cards up with nonsensical workarounds – remember the “yellow alternate A”?), to cards with real, silver borders(!), regulation marks, and aligned set symbols. (If only these changes were somehow retroactive and we might be able to magically fix the last quarter century of English cards.)
The only remaining legacy kibble here is the promo symbol on the card – it’s functionally redundant to the SVP symbol. I suspect the localization team at this point considers the promo black star to be a rarity symbol in and of itself. You could even read that as a confirmation that promos should be marked as a rarity under themselves and searchable under rarity:promo rather than appearing under -rarity:*
Qweewfeesh
I don’t understand why people like the new designs so much. The grey boarders look more lame compared to the fun yellow ones.
It doesn’t look like a fun card game anymore, it’s a slab with a picture on it and the Paldean starter art looks really cute but it clashes badly with dreary card design.
The new cards will stick out like a sore- no, a GONE thumb in my binder!
Guess I’ll stop collecting.
Twylis
The primary appeal outside of global consistency — if global consistency isn’t something you value — is that it allows a greater focus on the artwork. This was actually one of the official reasons given for the change, and it makes sense: the artwork is the primary appeal of the card for collectors, and the yellow border throws another color into the mix that often doesn’t mesh very well with the illustration at all. I suspect this change was actually partly due to input from the illustrators, who consider the card’s type when doing illustrations because that will define the surrounding color, but were likely annoyed that an additional clashing yellow would then get implemented during localization.
Personally, I’m overjoyed by this change, and only wish it happened sooner. The holographic borders for holo rares are also marvelous. In a perfect world, we’d have the Japanese backs also, but we kinda missed the boat on that long ago and it wouldn’t be practical to change it anymore due to sleeve opacity issues.
Chiffon
TPC (Japan) doesn’t seem interested in card backing unification in the first place. In fact, they’ve arguably made the situation “worse”. Up until 2019, Japan is the only country with their own backing, and when TPC launched the game in Asia, they did not use the Japanese back. Instead, they chose to adopt the western back for Indonesian, Thai, and Traditional Chinese.
When Pokémon Shanghai launched the game in Simplified Chinese last October, they also went with the western back. They still adopted silver/holo borders though.
Now that TPCi has adopted silver/holo borders (and assuming Pokémon Korea also goes through with silver borders), every language/region should have the same unified card design…from the front, aside from small differences in cardstock and the holofoil treatments.
Sylphoid
The wavy design elements and horizontal divider lines give me B&W 2011-2013 XY 2014-2016 vibes, whose layout aesthetic was the main reason I stopped collecting during that era
Ambassador
Insofar as the yellow borders being “fun”, something I’ve seen mentioned more than a few times in their defense, and I offer a couple important points;
· Pure yellow borders are a WOTC-ism. Many English players incorrectly assume the original JP Base – Neo era cards also had yellow borders, but they were a golden gradient with yellowish tinges. As part of a series of design consultations on how to adapt the TCG, WOTC added the yellow border to the cards – they *never* understood (or just didn’t want to understand) what PCL wanted them to do, and clearly wanted to do something extra to leave their mark on the cards vs. solely providing the translations they were being asked to do. Some of the other design suggestions WOTC had was to use Comic Sans as the primary font for these cards – if they’d gone this way, inevitably someone would suggest “well actually, that just makes the cards look fun!” but it would’ve been an inappropriate font choice that mismatched what the primary edition of the TCG did (the JP cards mostly use the Rodin font family, which has been called the “Helvetica of Japan” insofar as being a conventional and legible go-to that suits all use cases, vs. the “well I guess this is for kids?” font choice WOTC suggested).
· Despite the claims over the years that people prefer the yellow border, most ancedotal evidence – even from people who ~think~ they like the yellow borders – suggests the opposite to me. What I mean by this is that when you ask people who collect English/other intl edition cards to suggest their favorite era of artwork for the TCG, many will say either the e-Card era or the HGSS block. This isn’t a coincidence – these eras represent the 2 (of 2.5 times¹) entire blocks of the English/intl TCG had card borders that were nearly (if not perfectly) identical to the original JP edition, and the benefit is that the visual emphasis of the card returns to the artwork again. Funny enough, the e-Card era border, like a lot of other things about the e-Card era, represents a compromise – elements of the JP borders and Intl borders to that point are evident in its colors and design.
When it comes to stumping for the alternate language editions of the game to better match the original edition I’m not doing it purely because I value global consistency, but because the international localizations have almost never offered anything of additional value as a result of changes they’ve made. I don’t consider yellow borders something up for discussion as a subjective “well, you might happen to like it” – it’s objectively worse design that introduces a conflicting design element that distracts from the card artwork with no material gain otherwise. This is, without question, a positive development for the card game, and the only thing I could gripe about is why didn’t it happen sooner².
¹ The DP era switched to a more subdued shade of yellow and Pokémon-SP had a half-way border that matched the JP border but still faded into a yellow border. Kind of a half-adaptation and ended up looking just weird.
² When NOA took over in 2003, I assume the changeover didn’t happen for two reasons: first, that the JP ADV era’s silver borders might not have played well with the EN/Intl editions of the game, which were still printing e-Reader barcodes. Second, they might also have been worried about losing their audience by making a very obvious visual change so suddenly as some WOTC employees had been lying to the dedicated playerbase that the EX series cards were going to be a new TCG that wouldn’t be compatible with the cards they had been printing and translating. A hard change in the color of borders might’ve indicated such a shift to those players being true after all. So the EX era seems to just have been stuck with yellow borders for its entire run, followed by the DP and Platinum years which seem to have kind of half-adapted it, HGSS which matched(!).. so you would’ve thought that the Black & White era would’ve finally completed the transition process being described here, but (other than Plasma cards) reneged on the process and returned to hard yellow borders. I wonder if we’ll ever find out why they did that.
Twylis
Regarding the clashing design elements, it’s also worth noting that the Japanese card borders almost always matched the illustration borders and dex information boxes. Once you notice the mismatch of WotC cards pairing a garish primary yellow with a subdued gold, it becomes pretty hard to ignore. The modern cards’ yellow borders are actually *less* offensive in that respect, since the silver design elements are more neutral.
Qweewfeesh
Nonetheless, I don’t plan on collecting the new cards anymore. I don’t want odd-one-outs in my binder and also on principle. If people are gonna make a big deal out of this now, the boarders should have been sorted out from day 1 but that’s Fantasy Land talk.
Are the illustrators high or something? There’s nothing wrong with the yellow boarders, they just have sticks in the shade! In fact, I think I’m done with modern Pokémon at this point, I don’t recognise the series anymore, it’s such a cold-hearted stranger, I shouldn’t interact with it and save myself the heartache.
Ambassador
I mean, of all the changes in direction the changes have made over the last decade and change, this is such a ridiculous one to pick one – it’s a good change. It’s a shame the foreign language editions of the TCG can’t magically have their cards corrected retroactively somehow, but what happened happened. I’ll happily entertain conversations about how the monster design direction has drastically deviated from its original concepts, the video game series becoming stagnant and uninteresting (with only a few notable exceptions worth discussing), the anime retiring Satoshi/Ash at this point in the run seems like an ill-advised and so-overdue-it’s-too-late-to-ever-do-it idea.. but even if all other pillars of the franchise seem to becoming alien to me, the TCG has been fairly consistent in its direction over the years. The way you talk about the borders suggests you’re looking to make a mountain out of a molehill for something you want to walk away from anyways.
Personally, I don’t plan on collecting most of the Gen 9 TCG for the simple fact that after sitting out most of Gen 8, there’s not a lot pulling me back into physically collecting the cards anymore. I save a fair amount of cash just viscerally enjoying and appreciating them thanks to this site, and programs like TCGOne and the GB games let me relive my favourite eras of playing the game itself (and PTCGO exists to play modern). That doesn’t stop me from being able to be excited for new/continuing players and collectors for a hugely positive change that I can’t help but read as the TCG wanting to embrace the fact it’s a Japanese franchise that’s successfully gone international, with fans across the globe, for over a quarter of a century.
LightYearLiam
Yeah, I despise the BW/XY card layout too. I’m not crazy about the fact that SV seems to be mimicking it to some extent, but at least it looks a lot better than those cards did. It’s still overall a step down from SM and SwSh, EXCEPT for the duo-tone style with the area under the card text being lighter – I quite like that, it’s aesthetically pleasing and contributes to legibility.
As far as the borders go, I prefer the yellows generally, but I can see the arguments against them and in favor of silver, so I’m OK with the change. The fact that it goes with the silver elements on the card is not a good thing to me because I don’t like those silver elements being so prominent. But overall, it’s OK.