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Bugs: Recent Topics Paging, Uploading Images & Preview (11 Dec 2020)

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× Talk about collectible card here.

Pokemon TCG Appears to Have Self-Destructed

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19 Apr 2013 00:39 #150623 by Sagrilarus
My boys are telling me that the new Pokemon series of cards (which are required for tournament play) are vastly more powerful than prior sets, and my oldest boy has a deck set up to get a card doing 150 points of damage per round in short order. There also appears to be a way to defend against damage and he showed me his method for throwing off the first 100 points. I suppose the game may be internally balanced (simply higher power than the old) but the group they attend regularly is much more interested in playing the older materials that don't result in a kaboom factor, where the game is over after just a few turns.

Has anyone else played Black & White?

S.

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19 Apr 2013 02:00 #150625 by ufe
Haven't personally played pokemon since middle school, but I'm pretty sure I remember hearing about power creep when nintendo took over the game. 150 points of damage? I'm pretty sure the Max health of something like a charizard in the first set was like 100, maybe 120. I remember being surprised at the higher numbers /crazier abilities on some cards my friend's brother had a few years back.

It's no Magic, but I do remember the game being pretty damn good

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19 Apr 2013 03:12 #150627 by dragonstout
Yeah, I think crazy power creep has been happening in Pokemon for a long time. Certainly I've always heard that my brother's cards from 1995 or whatever are completely dwarfed by what's around now.

Magic it ain't.

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19 Apr 2013 11:54 #150643 by QPCloudy
I'm a PokeN00b so I started with Boundaries Crossed. Now we are In Plasma Storm, with Plasma Freeze releasing soon. Yes, the pokemon are getting much stronger. That said, it stays pretty balanced. . . if you keep up with the new sets. Wither way, we still have TONS of fun with it.

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19 Apr 2013 13:06 #150644 by Sagrilarus
Pokemon has a pretty hardcore following, but I think they realized they were competing against themselves. You can pick up cards at yard sales for a couple of bucks and they needed some way to remove that competition. With the beginning of Black & White they turned away older cards at sanctioned events and they upped the ante on dojos to become sanctioned. I thought that was more or less the end of it but it appears now that they're obsolescing all the old cards through sheer power as well.

The thing is, the kids at the local dojo have so much invested in the old materials that they rarely bring in the new stuff. They really love their old decks and likely 80% of the play I see there is largely based in older cards.

I think Pokemon is turning their old players away to attract new. That makes sense for them financially. I'll be curious to see what the longer term vision is though, since you can really only pull this trick once before people start cooling off on it. You don't emotionally invest in a game that makes you start from scratch every couple of years.

Their first run went from about 96 to 2011. Maybe they'll get as long a pull on this one as well.

S.

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19 Apr 2013 14:48 #150657 by Ken B.
It is INSANE how much power creep there has been. My oldest son still kinda collects packs even though we don't play it much anymore, and just the "routine" Pokemon he pulls out of packs--compared to the old ones--just make your eyes bulge. Used to be doing 50 damage with no drawback was a big deal and would leave older Pokemon over half dead. Now? Forget it. My son has BASIC Pokemon (the ones you can just play without needing to evolve them up to a powerful form) that have 180HP and can dish out 100 pts. of damage with just a few energy.

It sucks pretty bad, actually, and even though my son likes the latest Pokemon in the DS games I think even he recognizes what they're doing and makes jokes about the power creep. It has seemingly made him less interested in the game, too, which is weird. Part of it is growing up no doubt but I am positive part of it is just seeing how ridiculous they keep making the new Pokemon and how it makes his old cards useless. He likes several of his old cards and realizing they stand no chance against the new stuff makes him not want to play as much.

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19 Apr 2013 15:16 #150663 by Sagrilarus
My 12 year-old is well aware of what's going on with no prompting from me. In fact he's the one that raised the issue with me in the car last night. His intro for the subject was "what's going wrong with Pokemon?"

He's discussing powers that he can use to shield 100 points of damage (and a couple of trainer cards in conjunction let him power it up in a turn or two) and can issue 100 points of damage from one of his guys base, plus 10 points additional per damage marker on the guy, who has 180 hit points. In theory the guy can dish out as much as 270 points of damage per round, and there's another guy that lets you move damage from one Pokemon to another if he's on the bench. So it's likely you can power the beast guy up and keep him in serious damage range for a significant period of time.

Then again there may be another Pokemon that has a "opponent's head blows off" power for one generic energy. So who knows?

My two 10 year-olds are just complaining that the game isn't as much fun with the new cards. They don't have the maturity to analyze the issue yet, but they've lost interest.

"Magic it ain't" may indeed be the case, but I'll tell you what -- Pokemon has one serious following in the younger set and has girls playing it. There's plenty of adults at the tables as well. This game is generating significant revenue and is without a doubt the #2 selling CCG in a very congested market. Throw in the other parts of the IP (TV, VG and Comic) and you may have total revenue dollars that rival Magic. This isn't some half-assed product employing a couple of guys. We're talking billions of dollars across the product lines.

By the way, older boy is also saying the new 3-DS game has shitty graphics too. It may be that there's a new team running the product and that they don't have the chops.

S.

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19 Apr 2013 15:29 - 19 Apr 2013 15:30 #150669 by Ken B.
Are you talking about X and Y, Sag? The boys are pretty excited about that one and like the new 3d graphics. They still play the shit out of each new release. I pretty much buy the two boys who are into it one each of the new games when they come out--each gets one, they usually decide on their own which of the two they like, but if not, coin-flip time.

Anyway, their love of Pokemon has not diminished. My oldest son is 12 and still watches the cartoon on Saturdays. He's played every game in the series (well, I should say every non-side game as he had no interest whatsoever in that weird Dynasty Warrior/Pokemon combo game.)

What am I getting at? He's losing interest in the cards, and it seems to be because of power creep. The only thing he really likes is seeing the newest Pokemon on cards, but I think it bums him out to think his once-cool and powerful Pokemon have zero chance against the newer cards. One I can think of is Jirachi; used to be a fun Pokemon with cool card-drawing powers (if I remember right) that could take a few hits before biting the dust. Now? That dude dies to one punch to even the weakest of the new cards, seemingly.

So yeah, I'll echo something is definitely wrong, and even the kids who are fans seem to be able to see that.
Last edit: 19 Apr 2013 15:30 by Ken B..

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19 Apr 2013 15:36 #150670 by Shellhead
Power creep is a necessary evil for Pokemon. Any normal kid is eventually going to outgrow the game, and those used cards could easily be handed down to a younger sibling or resold or given away. That would eventually cut into the demand for new Pokemon cards. So they need power creep to keep kids buying the newer cards.

Anyway, Pokemon is basically a kid's game about cockfights, only with cutesy pokemon characters instead of violent roosters. Better for kids if they quickly move on from Pokemon than dwell upon it.

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19 Apr 2013 15:38 - 19 Apr 2013 16:49 #150671 by Sagrilarus
It's funny, we have these counterfeit cards that we bought when we were down at the shore that have Pokemons with 700HP instead of 70HP. Pretty solid knockoffs but at the time we got them we knew they were absurd. 700HP is just crazy in a game where Stage 3s have 120. But now those cards are starting to look relatively reasonable. Some wholesaler is sitting on a couple of skids of counterfeit cards that he can't unload and he's thinking to himself, "hmm, maybe I'll be able to sell these after all!"

I'll tell you what though Shellhead -- until recently there were still cards from the 90s with unique powers that were in demand because they meshed well with newer cards. There's an old Tertwig that was tougher than hell when comibined with a newer stadium and trainer card. Pokemon seemed to figure out how to add capability without obsolescing old cards. When they banned old cards from tournament play I knew it was largely over, but that essentially gave them the opportunity to avoid power creep. If you want to play sanctioned you MUST buy new cards. What's following seems to simply be a bad decision.

By the way, it's not so much the cock-fighting metaphor that I see but one of chattel slavery. Some of the language they use in the cartoon is . . . insensitive. People from Japan likely don't fully understand that.

S.
Last edit: 19 Apr 2013 16:49 by Sagrilarus.

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19 Apr 2013 16:09 #150675 by Ken B.

Shellhead wrote: Anyway, Pokemon is basically a kid's game about cockfights, only with cutesy pokemon characters instead of violent roosters. Better for kids if they quickly move on from Pokemon than dwell upon it.



Well, they like it, and it's fun to share their interest in their hobby, so I have no problem with it. That's the best part of being a parent; you get to make those judgment calls for your own kids.

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19 Apr 2013 17:21 #150679 by dragonstout

Sagrilarus wrote: "Magic it ain't" may indeed be the case, but I'll tell you what -- Pokemon has one serious following in the younger set and has girls playing it. There's plenty of adults at the tables as well. This game is generating significant revenue and is without a doubt the #2 selling CCG in a very congested market. Throw in the other parts of the IP (TV, VG and Comic) and you may have total revenue dollars that rival Magic. This isn't some half-assed product employing a couple of guys. We're talking billions of dollars across the product lines.

Is Pokemon definitely #2? It sells better than Yu-Gi-Oh now? A couple years back, before Magic suddenly made its big gains, Yu-Gi-Oh was the best-selling CCG in the world. Sure, if you throw in the video games and other IP-related stuff then obviously Pokemon as a brand is way WAY on top.

I don't know how it's possible to call it a very congested market: there's Magic, Pokemon, and Yu-Gi-Oh. That's basically it. The FFG LCGs too, but I'd guess they're barely a pimple on the big three in terms of sales.

Anyway, my "Magic it ain't" snark was really just contentless snark; Pokemon serves an important role and is not a bad game either. But as others have pointed out, I'd guess that they expect most kids to grow out of the game in a few years, and I doubt they care a tenth as deeply about keeping players around for the long-term as the Magic designers do; as you even pointed out, they're tied to a massive IP that the CCG is subservient to, whereas with Magic everything is subservient to the game.

I don't totally get why Pokemon needs power-creep when it has a rotating format. Rotating formats, they suck moneywise in the long-term for the player. But they're the only reasonable solution SHORT-TERM for the new player. For the really invested player who has a lot of time to spend on the game, they're also beneficial because they're the most dynamic formats, with huge changes every time a set is released. And theoretically they obviate the need for power creep; Magic does a pretty clever thing where its powerlevel goes in sine waves in different areas, so SOMEthing is always rising in power while something else is falling, and they're able to get the thrill of "wow, that's powerful!" without any overall power-creep. In eternal formats (where you can use all cards combined), it's inevitable that as you introduce more cards into the system the overall power level of the format increases; but each year tends to include just a small handful of cards powerful enough to hang with the rest of the 20 years of best cards, and by banning about a card a year, they can also fight the overall power level of the format rising too.

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19 Apr 2013 17:33 - 19 Apr 2013 17:42 #150681 by Sagrilarus
My local Target store sells a bunch of CCGs that seem to have no traction at all. There's even a baseball CCG. Many are based on other entertainment IPs. Most seem to be junk or at a minimum have zero traction (I've heard a couple or people saying World of Warcraft CCG is actually very good but it doesn't seem to get played very often). I recently played 7th Sea which was one I had never heard of.

I think they're dirt cheap to print so everyone takes a shot at them. With a couple of monsters to compete against I think it's tough to get dug in though.

S.
Last edit: 19 Apr 2013 17:42 by Sagrilarus.
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19 Apr 2013 18:54 #150686 by QPCloudy
The basic Pokemon with all this crazy power are the exs. You can play without ex Pokemon and have the same feeling you have always had. That said, you stand no chance against someone throwing down a bunch of ex dudes so you are pretty much forced to goths ex route.

However, I am currently working on a crobat build with I think aspertia gym that doubles the poison counters applied in between turns. Will probably throw in one ex if possible. Maybe one or two mew two ex.

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20 Apr 2013 03:40 #150751 by Dogmatix
I don't think Pokemon has outstripped YuGiOh purely on the card-game front. My lack of playing history with CCGs is pretty well known. This, of course, never stopped me from *selling* CCGs on ebay, which meant I did follow some of the trends. Yu-Gi-Oh certainly remains a consistent moneymaker [which I take to mean that there's a steady player and collector market for it] thanks to the constant release of new sets and what seems to be a pretty wide-open competitive play format. They seem to have far fewer banned cards and certainly a long-standing history of highly potent rares, so cards from early sets seem to still be considered competitive today. (They certainly continue to sell pretty well.) There's definitely a pretty strong collector market for them world-wide, too. I actually had people pay surprisingly good money for cards I certain were frauds [really bad Chinese copies; I've had some really well-done frauds pass through my hands, but these were almost homebrew-bad] because they were trying to collect full *bootleg* sets to match their complete sets of authorized cards. I was stunned by that--pissed too, as I had already thrown away several hundred of them that I found at a thrift store. (I was clued in when I was selling a big "get this crap out of my basement" card lot. I disclosed that there were a pile of what I presumed were knock-offs in the list and had multiple people contact me about a price for just the knock-offs in the set.)

That said, I had absolutely no idea YuGiOh outsold Magic. I guess it shouldn't surprise me since it's certainly big in the Asian markets *and* has that huge IP tie-in too.

(I always picked up yugioh lots when I found them at thrift stores because they were the single easiest CCG to price and sell. Between the clearly-marked series numbers on the cards and the easy distinction between commons, rares, and promos, they were always quick sales. Plus, as a game that appealed to "tweens", I used to find huge lots of cards in good condition at thrift stores fairly frequently as parents dumped shit out of their kids' rooms when they went off to college/military/jail/whatever. Magic cards, on the other hand, didn't crop up much. I always presumed folks took those cards with them when they moved out. Those that did show up were usually denuded of anything at all of value before they ended up at thrift, which was rarely the case with Yugioh.)

</end rambling>

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