- ↓ 2.44
- ꩜ 3.51
- ↑ 5.00
{C}{C} → Poison Barb : 10
The Defending Pokémon is now Poisoned.
illus. Naoyo Kimura · LV.14
External: Bulba ↗ · Shop: TCGplayer ↗, cardmarket ↗, eBay ↗
A proverb claims that happiness will come to anyone who can make a sleeping Togepi stand up.
MarxForever
Always bugged me that Togetic wasn’t a basic in the TCG. Because in the actual games Togepi is a baby Pokemon, and can not breed.
MarxForever
It dawned on me recently why Togepi is a basic Pokemon in the Neo era of the TCG. It was for the sake of consistency. Togepi’s first card was a Corocoro Promo released before the Neo sets even came out, and thus before Baby Pokemon were even a thing. This Togepi even has the pre-neo card template. So Togepi was of course a Basic Pokemon card. And since Togepi was already released as a basic Pokemon, they kept it as such once Neo was released.
Blob Takeshi
Wasn’t Togepi’s first card a part of Southern Islands?
Twylis
Bit late, but that would mean Lucario and Toxtricity being basics too, and multiple generations with no sign of Togepi, Riolu, and Toxel.
An iconic pokemon like Togepi might force them to keep baby mechanics relevant, but you could say the same of Pichu, which hasn’t been seen in the TCG for almost a decade now.
feyblade
Togepi’s menacing, poisonous powers were never spoken of again. In fact, it would later go on to be a pokemon that is explicitly weak to poison, and even its newly introduced final evolution,togekiss, would never be able to learn any poison move beyind the universally available (and trainer-exclusive) toxic.
Mantidactyle
http://www.pixenli.com/images/1417/1417484399044817900.jpg
Ambassador
Poison Barb seems to be a hold-out from some of the original flavor surrounding Togepi. The Pokédex entries for both its previous cards (Southern Islands and WBSP 30) both talk about it being able to release poison from its head, and here, rather idiosyncratically, it has the attack Poison Barb¹. What would be interesting to figure out is the provenance of the Pokédex entries of those cards – they do not match the entries in Gold and Silver.
I have a mess of various builds of Pocket Monsters 2 and/or Pokémon Gold/Silver saved on an external hard drive somewhere back home, but finding it and sifting through it again would take some doing. If anyone else is up to the task before I get to it, it’d be interesting to find out which was the last build to retain this bit of Togepi esoterica (assuming it was in there to start with).
¹ Originally どくのトゲ. This translation seems fine to me (or at least certainly close enough for this conversation).
Jiří z Poděbrad
This is my favorite illustration of Togepi :)
Warnock 2022
I agree — the warm colors on Kimura’s WOTC-era illustrations are really nice. Perhaps because of how the cards were printed? The colors seem to turn more dull starting in RS base set.
https://pkmncards.com/artist/naoyo-kimura/?sort=date&ord=rev&display=images
Ambassador
At least some (if not all!) of that dullness seems to be owing to the scans hosted on the site. This isn’t my forte at all but the scans currently sourced from Pokémon Paradijs really don’t appear to have the extra level of attention to matters such as color correction as in the scans credited to JP*. So when you compare the current set of scans for EX Ruby and Sapphire and EX Sandstorm (both PP) to those for EX Dragon (JP) you should be able to notice it.
*The person, not the country!