- ↓ 0.01
- ꩜ 0.03
- ↑ 4.98
{W}{C}{C} → Mud Shot : 80
{W}{C}{C}{C} → Thrash : 120+
Flip a coin. If tails, this Pokémon also does 60 damage to itself. If heads, this attack does 60 more damage.
illus. Shinji Kanda
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It makes its nest at the bottom of swamps. It will eat anything—if it is alive, Whiscash will eat it.
Nos
Weird how the tails effect comes first on this card rather than the heads effect.
Andrew
That is super weird. I’ve never seen that before. Wonder if there’s a reason why. Every other Thrash attack is ordered as you’d expect.
Ambassador
The text of the Japanese card outlines the heads effect first, and then tails. I suspect the English language text was reordered because of how it could read if it had been printed the other way;
“Flip a coin. If heads, this attack does 60 more damage. If tails, this Pokémon also does 60 damage to itself.”
I don’t agree with the assessment that I think someone on the EN team made, but it seems they’re worried about an argument that the way the tails clause is written suggests the attack still does 60+60 in that case[1]. The Gen 8 EN TCG introduced and has been consistent with the language “This Pokémon ALSO does X damage to itself.” vs. Gen 1-7’s “This Pokémon does X damage to itself.”, and it’s the “also does” that the EN team probably felt was causing a problem.
I suspect they’re eventually going to forget to be consistent with this. This search will have tons of false positives, but if you’re interested, keep an eye on || +text:”flip a coin” +text:”to itself” ||.
[1] Think about the way the text of an attack might’ve been translated in the past. It’d be something along the lines of “Flip a coin. if heads, this attack does 60 damage plus 60 more damage. If tails, this attack does 60 damage and this Pokémon does 60 damage to itself.” The JP text was *always* briefer text closer to what we see in the EN TCG today, but WOTC had limited faith in its player base, and PUSA/TPCI was slow to abandon this language convention.