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- ↓ 4.18
- ꩜ 4.75
- ↑ 6.92
Flip a coin until you get tails. For each heads, return an Energy card attached to your opponent’s Active Pokémon to your opponent’s hand. If the Pokémon has fewer attached Energy cards than that, return all of them to your opponent’s hand. Your turn is over now (you don’t get to attack).
illus. Sumiyoshi Kizuki
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Anonymous
Why would you use this when you can use energy removal?
Anonymous
ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
reshikrom64
Worst card ever?
…yeeeeaaaaaaah
Curtis
“If the Pokemon has fewer Energy cards than that…”
No sane person would continue to flip after they’ve gotten enough heads.
Anonymous
It is technically required by the card. It would be awfully funny if someone used this at the start of the game, and dragged it out to sudden death because he flipped a few thousand heads.
feyblade
Imagine:
Duel Decks: Team Galactic vs. Team Rocket.
Team rocket gets minion of team rocket, thought wave machine,and digger. Team Galactic gets Poke Turn, Power Spray, and Energy Gain
HOW FAIR
Joe
I feel like the PTCGi company making these cards always feels like these “flip until you get a tails” mechanics are better than they actually are.
Brian Duddy
You don’t really want to make these kinds of mechanics good. Creates lots of feel-bad moments.
Ambassador
I feel like the people looking at these cards expected Rocket’s Secret Machine cards to be better than they were intended to be – instead, they read as convoluted as the contraption portrayed in Kizuki’s artwork, and that’s clearly deliberate. Even some of the Secret Machines in TRR flirt with being so completely ridiculous as to be useless, and despite the glossy new CG artstyle, a couple of the situations portrayed there feel just as dire.
Ambassador
Following a comment I made on Digger and revisiting this comment, I want to expand on my original comment on Thought Wave Machine – several of the Rocket Trainer cards are essentially ridiculous versions of already existing, very good cards;
– Digger can be read as a risky version of PlusPower.
– Rocket’s Secret Experiment is a risky version of Computer Search.
– Thought Wave Machine is a risky version of [a balanced version of] Energy Removal (and/or [a balanced] Super Energy Removal).
Similar to what I posit on Digger, since you can already have four copies of Energy Removal in your deck, if you’re introducing a card like Thought Wave Machine which would de facto act like another four Energy removing Trainer cards in your deck, you necessarily need to introduce some kind of risk/reward to it so that you are beginning to run into diminishing returns for each extra card like it that you run.
i.e. in response to “Why would you use this when you can use energy removal?” the answer is simply that you wouldn’t. But it wasn’t an either/or situation, it was an and/or, with an emphasis on the ‘and’ part of that equation, and these cards were actually pretty well designed – beneath the absurd surface imagery and first-impression text, they were sitting there all along as interesting options for anyone interested in doubling down on certain playstyles that their meta-defining equivalents formed the cornerstones of.
I’m not necessarily saying these cards were secretly OP all along – while I can vouch for Digger helping enable donks here and there, I don’t think a good deck necessarily wants or needs to run more than four Computer Search, so Secret Experiment is moot, and Thought Wave Machine is overly crippled out of fear another card that’s even remotely Energy Removal-esque might break the game again – but they’re very cleverly designed and I myself am really only coming to appreciate them in full as a result of this reappraisal.