Whiscash · Astral Radiance (ASR) #036

3 comments

1. 

   Nos

   (3 years ago)

   Weird how the tails effect comes first on this card rather than the heads effect.

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     AndrewNos

     (3 years ago)

     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.

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       AmbassadorAndrew

       (2 years ago)

       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.

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