TCG History: The Gym Sets

If the Team Rocket set was a well-meaning set with a few bad apples, then the Gym series was the poison those bad apples were laced with. While the vast majority of the cards danced around between playable and unplayable, a handful of powerful cards all but ruined the metagame in the last few sets of the first generation.

I hope you liked the hand-ripping and non-interactive gameplay that was introduced in Team Rocket, because this is where they dialed it up to eleven and decided that every game should be decided by a coin flip. I'm exaggerating slightly, but only slightly.

The Troublemakers

The Rocket's Trap completed one of the most degenerate combos ever printed. First, you use Imposter Oak's Revenge to reduce your opponent's starting hand size to 4. Then you use Rocket's Sneak Attack to snipe the best Trainer Card out of their hand.

Finally, you play The Rocket's Trap. If you flip heads, your opponent is starting the game with zero cards in hand. Even if you flip tails, you can always just dig through your deck in search of another copy.

It's worth discarding a chunk of your deck if you have to, because being hit by the full combo is practically impossible to come back from unless you hard draw into a Professor Oak.

This is THE combo that defined the format.

If you prefer a different flavor of degeneracy, then there's always Erika's Jigglypuff. It can do 40 damage on the first turn with a single Double Colorless Energy, keeping in mind that most evolving basics only had 40-50 HP at the time.

With a few Pluspowers, this card could knock out just about anything your opponent could possibly have in the active spot. And if that was the only basic they drew? Tough luck. Instant loss.

Since players loved being locked down by Dark Vileplume so much, we obviously needed another oppressive way to counter Trainer Cards, right? Chaos Gym doesn't just stop the card from activating, though. They flip a coin to see whose card it even is.

If they get heads the card plays as normal. No loss. Your gym is still in play. Better luck next time. But if they flip tails? Well now you get to use the effect of their Professor Oak or Gust of Wind or Super Energy Removal or whatever.

The effect is symmetrical, but all that means is that whoever goes first empties out the opponent's hand, donks their starter with Erika's Jigglypuff, and then slaps down a Chaos Gym to prevent any attempts at a miraculous recovery. Clearly fair and balanced.

New Names, Same Old Pokémon

Not all of the cards from these sets were degenerate nonsense. Rocket's Zapdos is certainly a good card, but was really just "good." It usurped the throne of Electabuzz as the new big basic for lightning decks, and was another attacker that didn't care about Energy Removal.

It also paired nicely with cards like Computer Search and Professor Oak. If you were going to be discarding cards constantly anyway, there might as well be something in your deck that can snatch up some of the discarded energy and use it, right?

Erika's Dratini was the counterpoint to Rocket's Zapdos, and is actually a very cleverly designed card. Since big basics were still very much the meta, Strange Barrier allowed you to survive their best attacks for a few turns by reducing all damage done to Erika's Dratini down to 10.

It also doesn't punish evolution decks in any way, which is a fantastic design space to be in during this time. They were struggling enough as-is, after all.

Perhaps the best thing about this card was that it could buy you a few turns if your hand got ripped out from under you. Cards like this and Kangaskhan quickly became definitive "survival mode" cards. It represents a nice halfway point between Jungle Mr. Mime's oppressive stall strategies and Neo Genesis Cleffa's role as a hand extender.

Misty's Wrath promises pure unbridled aggression. Choose any two cards from your top seven, then discard the other five.

Only the most cutthroat quick-kill strategies were willing to touch this card at the time, but as it so happens those just happened to be some of the most dominant strategies in Base-Gym.

Misty's Wrath paired nicely with the trapper combo and Erika's Jigglypuff, slotting right into the "first turn decides the match" playstyle.

There were also such a wide variety of 'mons with such unique effects that you were bound to end up finding something you liked. Several of them didn't actually see play until finding a place for themselves later on, like how Erika's Victreebel became much more relevant once powerful 'mons that were weak to grass entered the format.

Others, like Brock's Ninetales, found homes for themselves right away. There were also more attempts to curb the impact of Energy Removal, with Brock's Protection and No Removal Gym being some of the most blatant counter-cards ever printed.

The set essentially doubled the size of the metagame, at least in the west (where we didn't have the Vending series), so it shouldn't be surprising that it upended large portions of it.

While I already mentioned one Stadium card and kind of spoiled the surprise, this was one of the hot new ideas behind the set. Stadium cards represented places in the pokémon world lore-wise, and mechanically they functioned as passive effects that stayed in play until another Stadium card was played.

This allows for a lot of depth that simply wasn't possible in the game previously. While you could theoretically put the effect of Narrow Gym on a Pokémon Power, it would mean that one of your valuable bench slots is dedicated to that effect. And, crucially, you can't knock out a Stadium.

Closing Thoughts

Admittedly, the "owner's pokémon" which served as the core gimmick of the sets didn't exactly land. Most of the best cards were used in isolation, with no regard for who they belonged to. There were support cards for each gym leader, but they typically paled in comparison to the power level that the game was accustomed to.

The broken new cards introduced in the set were also insanely problematic. While the Base-Gym format has its defenders, it's pretty widely regarded as one of the most dramatically unbalanced formats in the game's entire history. Modern players have newer boogeymen like the infamous ADP and SableDonk decks. Old players had Trapper.

Stadiums would be a fixture of the game moving forward, though, so it would be disingenuous to say that these sets brought nothing to the franchise.

Pokémon Card Design: An Ode to Pack Fillers

It's easy to wonder why pack fillers even exist in card games, outside of "because you have to buy more packs to get the really good cards." Which is one of the reasons, of course, but there are also genuine structural benefits to having pack filler.

Today I'm going to go over some of the most "boring" cards of the Base-Fossil era, and why I think they make the game as a whole better by existing, in ways that a more explosive design simply couldn't.

Seaking is peak pack filler. Two attacks that don't have effects. A middling HP. The attacks are exactly on curve.

But it secretly has several key roles. First, it fits well in Dodrio decks as a counter to Fossil Magmar. Goldeen even has a free retreat cost, so you don't really need extra pivots.

Second, it's a water type that doesn't benefit from being in a Rain Dance deck. Its attacks are so cheap that it seems silly to charge up a few Seaking instead of an Articuno, but that's the point. It's not meant for Blastoise decks.

Third, it's secretly one of the most efficient water-type attackers. Waterfall does damage at a rate of 15 per energy, eclipsing everything except Dewgong and Gyarados in terms of damage per energy spent!

It's also pretty splashable, since its attacks never require more than one Water Energy. Because of these traits, Seaking fits well in low to the ground multitype builds that no other water type can neatly slot into. It's still a middle-of-the road pack filler card, but it's being used as glue to fill in the gaps that the type would have if it didn't exist.

Ponyta is another excellent pack filler card. It's famously the only fire-type basic in the format that can do decent damage for only one Double Colorless Energy.

Despite the measly 40 HP, Ponyta sees niche play as a way to hit opposing Scyther. It doesn't require as much deck space as Charmeleon or Flareon, and doesn't require any actual Fire Energy like Fossil Magmar.

It has become one of the faces of the Base-Fossil donk deck, which prides itself on being able to switch into an attacker for every occasion.

This isn't a role that the more interesting cards of the format can fill. It's strictly Ponyta's job. And its pack filler evolution is the ONLY fire-type with no retreat cost, as a bonus.

These are some of the ways a pack filler card can be meta-relevant or secretly interesting, but what are some of the design benefits from the developer's point of view?

A pack filler card might explore a design space cautiously so that future cards can expand on it. Searching your entire deck for any card has historically been a problematic effect in card games, so they tried to be careful when designing their first search cards.

That's why Computer Search has a painful discard cost (but was still broken), and that's why Poké Ball requires a coin flip. If you think an effect might be too powerful, printing a guinea pig first can put real data on the table for you to work with in the future.

A pack filler card can also be designed to be "tempting." Pokédex makes an interesting offer to the player. You don't actually get to draw any cards, but you do get to choose what order you'll draw several cards in.

This gets the imagination racing, looking for ways to break it. Everything that draws a card becomes a potential combo piece. Arguments can break out on playgrounds over whether the card is good or a noob trap. All while the card itself has an implied meaning; a Pokédex in the context of this franchise represents new beginnings. It NEEDS to be a card.

Pack filler cards can also serve as a mechanical introduction to a game's themes and archetypes. Magic famously has "signpost uncommons" that are intentionally designed to teach players what the playstyle of a certain color combination is in any given set from the modern era.

Poliwag isn't a very interesting or powerful card, but it does make the player immediately wonder how they can get the most out of Water Gun.

What's the fastest way to get Water Energy onto this card? Poliwag's purpose, along with several cards like it, is ultimately to guide the player over towards Blastoise, the flagship of the water type. It does this without ever asking the player to crack open a flyer or a guidebook. That's the power of signposting.

"Bad" cards also exist to challenge the player in some way. A lot of the joy of card games comes from deckbuilding. If every card is obviously synergistic and slots cleanly into a deck without any compromises, you exert no brainpower when putting together your stack of cards.

But a card like Machoke almost reads like a challenge directed at the player. Can you keep damage off this 'mon long enough to make Karate Chop worth using? When do you cast aside Karate Chop in favor of Submission, a move that actively makes the other move weaker?

He reads like a challenge because he IS a challenge. He's meant to make you think, the same way a crossword puzzle or a maze makes you think. And finally finding an application for the card feels almost as good as knocking out Chansey.

For some pack filler cards, being bad is part of the charm of the card. Beating your opponent's Gyarados with Scyther might feel cool and stylish, but beating it with BUTTERFREE of all things? Oh ho, now you're cooking with gas.

Winning with a bad card can give players a rush that they might have not had otherwise. You've beaten your friends before, but have you beaten them with only Magikarp and Caterpie? Sometimes bad cards can present new opportunities for a player to flex a little and show off.

And sometimes a pack filler card just exists to be loved. Look at Cubone. He's crying while staring up at the stars. Are you really going to pick on poor little Cubone? Are you really going to Slash a sad little orphan just for a Prize Card?

The Pokémon TCG, more than any other TCG, is famous for its art and its creature designs. My favorite art piece in the entire Base-Fossil format is Butterfree, an objectively awful card.

And my favorite pokémon? Sandslash. Pray for me, because he never gets good cards. But he's out here trying his best, dammit.

While it's fun to talk about balance, power level, and tier lists, I honestly think there are only a handful of "badly designed" cards in the entire Base-Fossil format.

I tried to make a Kingler deck work because summoning an army of increasingly angrier crabs just sounded funny to me. I still gaslight myself into believing that Beedrill is playable in some capacity, just because he has the highest damage of any poison-inflicting move. I unironically thought Dugtrio was a good card when I was younger, and I still have a nostalgic attachment to this trash card.

Bad cards often fulfill roles that good cards can't fill. They also keep the gameplay simple and make deckbuilding harder, which I personally think is the best of both worlds. It's nice to puzzle through your new deck list at your own pace, and it's nice when games are snappy and quick.

More and more, card games are veering toward a design philosophy that favors cards so interwoven with each other that the deck practically builds itself. Then the challenge of the game all gets frontloaded into the gameplay, which can be more tedious than fun sometimes.

Maybe for some people, that's the way of the future. But I personally don't like watching my opponent play a game of solitaire for ten minutes because their deck is full of synergistic powerful cards that all activate each other. So I can appreciate that Pokémon has kept their TCG simple all these years, helped in no small part by these boring workhorse card designs that people take for granted.

Pokémon Card Design: Energy Costs

Parsing out the formula they used for energy costs in the WotC era isn't super complicated. It's changed a good deal since then, but the core principle of having some objective measure of an attack's value has remained integral to card design. I touched on this design element briefly in a previous post, but let's really discuss how the formula was first implemented.

Ten for Colorless

A single colorless energy gets you 10 damage. That's the first general rule for establishing the value of an attack. Note that it's a general rule, not a universal rule. We'll see plenty of embellishments on this rule.

While there are plenty of exceptions even in the WotC era, a colorless attack that does damage with no additional effect usually costs one colorless energy per 10 damage. 2 for 20, 3 for 30, 4 for 40. There are different ways to express a certain amount of damage, though.

The most obvious example of this phenomenon is coin flips. They went with the most intuitive interpretation possible; attack costs are based on the average damage dealt by the attack.

So an attack that flips 2 coins and does 30 damage per heads is valued as if it always does 30 damage. (30/2+30/2 =30)

This is actually a shortcoming of the WotC era formula. For competitive play, a consistent 30 damage is almost always better than the one involving coin flips, because you can predict the outcome.

Slam has a 25% chance of doing nothing, and over the course of a long tournament, it'll happen to you eventually.

Let's briefly discuss the first obvious exception to these rules. Rattata does 20 damage with Bite and the attack has no additional effects. But it gets to do this for a single colorless energy, half of what it should cost! In theory, this should break our formula wide open.

So why is this allowed? Well, look at everything else about the card. It only has an absolutely pathetic 30 HP and it doesn't have any other attacks. One of the most common reasons for an exception to the formula is that the card will have other upsides or downsides that balance out the card. HP and retreat costs are the main levers that get pushed and pulled in this way.

Fifteen for Non-Colorless

A non-colorless energy buys approximately 15 damage. What do I mean by "approximately," though? Well, an attack that costs exactly 2 or 4 non-colorless energy is easy. That's just 30 or 60, generally speaking.

If an attack costs a single non-colorless energy, there are a few ways to handle this. One is to round up or down. This Diglett does 10 damage, but there's a Machop that does 20 for the same cost. This solution is sub-optimal, but was used several times. Another option is to use coin flips to represent multiples of 15 damage in interesting ways.

Nidoran (male) is one of my favorite examples of using coin flips to represent an approximate amount. It can do 30 damage on the first turn, and that is relevant, but the formula at work here is just 30/2. That's why it's allowed to cost a single energy.

But because it can potentially do 30 damage on the first turn, it has some unique applications that other cards don't have. A Nidoran (male) with a Pluspower has a 50/50 chance to one-shot any 40 HP basic, allowing for some very aggressive strategies unique to this card.

Nidoran (female) takes the opposite approach. Fury Swipes still does an average of 15 damage (10/2+10/2+10/2) But because it flips 3 coins, it's a much more consistent attacker. It actually has a pretty low chance of doing 0 or 30 damage, since each successive coin flip shifts the odds around.

The exact breakdown of the odds is as follows:

• 1/8 chance of 0 damage.
• 3/8 chance of 10 damage.
• 3/8 chance of 20 damage.
• 1/8 chance of 30 damage.

With an 87.5% chance of doing at least 10 damage, this is a more reliable attacker than the coin flips might make you think. What a clever way to differentiate the Nidoran siblings!

Subtraction: Recoil Damage

One of the most common tweaks to the formula comes in the form of recoil damage. There are some really crazy exceptions, but the general rule is that recoil damage is subtracted from the damage dealt when calculating the energy cost.

Arcanine's Take Down is a perfect case study. First let's establish how much damage it should normally do. Two non-colorless energy and two colorless energy should add up to 50 damage. (15+15+10+10)

But it does a staggering 80 damage! The reason this is allowed is because the recoil damage (30) is being subtracted from the damage printed on the card.

I did mention there were some pretty extreme exceptions when it comes to recoil damage, though, so let's actually go over several cards that use recoil damage.

Electabuzz does have an exception, but it's a smaller exception than it initially looks. The energy cost of Thunderpunch should have a "value" of approximately 25 damage, theoretically.

But what's actually happening under the hood? Well, first it does 30 damage and has a 50/50 chance of doing 10 damage. So that brings us up to an average of 35 damage.

But then it has a chance of doing 10 recoil to itself. This brings the attack's theoretical value to 30, if we account for both coin results properly. (30+10/5-10/5=30) If Thunderpunch hadn't been on a 70 HP basic this might have been okay, but as it stands this card is clearly quite a bit better than it should have been.

This Jigglypuff is an exception in the other direction. 40-20=20, so this card's Double-Edge should, mathematically, cost 2 colorless energy, right?

Well, they actually made a very intelligent concession here. You see, Double Colorless Energy could allow you to reach that cost on the first turn. They decided that this would be problematic, since many basic 'mons could be knocked out instantly with 40 damage.

They decided that setting up a donk with this attack was just far too easy, so they fudged the numbers a bit.

Then there's Chansey. It does do 80 damage to itself, but being able to do 80 damage for no energy would have clearly been overpowered. The real strength of this card is that it has 120 HP and only costs 1 energy to retreat.

These traits, combined with Scrunch, already gave this Chansey everything it needed to be one of the strongest single-prize basics printed for years from its release. So when designing the second attack, they just needed to give it something that felt cool and fun. They may have had a little too much fun designing it, though, especially when looking at this card's monumental impact in hindsight.

Addition: Healing

For effects that heal damage from the user, they flipped the basic logic of recoil damage on its head. This Bulbasaur does 20 damage with Leech Seed, then heals itself for 10 damage.

So they simply added these values together, and gave the attack a matching cost. Take note that some healing effects could heal more or less depending on weakness and resistance, but they always based the math on the neutral outcome.

Butterfree's Mega Drain, for example, did 40 damage and would heal 20 damage in a neutral matchup. So the expected "value" of the attack is 60 damage, represented by 4 non-colorless energy.

The issue is that healing effects could only remove damage counters if the user has counters to remove. As a result, they tended to feel over-costed.

The Status Issue

Unfortunately, status effects don't fit smoothly into a purely numerical formula. How much energy is a skipped turn actually worth? Or the residual damage from poison? Or the chaos of confusion?

They didn't have a smooth one-size-fits-all solution for this problem. For paralysis and poison, they generally landed somewhere around treating the status as if it added 50% more value to the attack.

This formula ends up over-valuing paralysis and under-valuing poison, but that's what they landed on. We'll briefly go through the main status ailments and how they were costed.

The issue with paralysis is that it has a higher value depending on which turn you're skipping. On the first turn, you might only be preventing 10 damage. But in the late game your measly little 10 damage attack has a 50/50 chance of blocking a Hydro Pump or a Seismic Toss!

As a result, any paralysis-inflicting attack needs to be very carefully valued. They kind of messed up on Jungle Lickitung and Fossil Gastly, and as a result those are two of the most universally powerful cards in the earliest sets. Attacks that do heavy damage arguably get less value out of paralysis, since they'll just be scoring a knock out in one or two hits anyway.

Poison was costed as if it had the same value as paralysis, but this seems like a misstep in some ways. First, normal poison is much more valuable in the early-game than the late-game. Your opponent can just retreat to cure poison, if they even care to do so.

Second, once the opponent is poisoned, they can't be poisoned again. While it is nice that the status sticks around, this means using Poison Sting on subsequent turns is just doing 10 damage with no secondary effect. The disparity between paralysis and poison is actually pretty noticeable once you start looking for it.

Confusion was the most powerful status in a vacuum, even affecting retreat mechanics back in the day, but because of that they were very conservative when costing attacks around it.

The Confuse Ray on Vulpix only does 10 damage but it has the same energy cost as attacks that do 30 damage, just for a 50/50 chance of inflicting confusion. In other words, they thought that confusion was so powerful it was worth about 20 energy just for a coin flip. As a result, moves with Confuse Ray and Supersonic often ended up being far, far less good than you'd expect.

But the status they clearly couldn't wrap their heads around was sleep. This Paras card would imply that the value of sleep, by itself, is worth inflicting 30 damage. Meanwhile there was a Jigglypuff in the same set that could do the same thing for a cost of 1 colorless energy. And before that we had a Clefairy that needed to flip a coin to inflict sleep, also for 1 colorless energy.

My theory is that the card designers couldn't actually agree on the value of sleep. It only had a 50/50 chance of doing anything, but it also had a very small chance of making your opponent skip several turns in a row. It's hard to assign a concrete value, so at least the inconsistency is kind of understandable.

Darkness and Metal

The new Darkness and Metal-types in Johto introduced one of the earliest major hurdles for the formula. Their energy cards were Special Energy cards at the time, so how exactly do you value that when compared to a basic energy?

If the math for this Steelix is to be believed, then they seem to have landed on a value of approximately 20 damage per special energy. This does make sense when you consider that Double Colorless Energy had already existed with a value of 20.

There were some unintended consequences of this decision, since Darkness and Metal Energy also had effects which significantly bolstered their usefulness. They probably thought the downsides printed onto the cards balanced them out, but in practice the new types took over the game pretty quickly, helped along by their overpowered energy cards.

A World Without DCE

The EX sets began the game's longest run without Double Colorless Energy. It wouldn't be reprinted until the HGSS era.

Perhaps in direct response to this, the card designers immediately loosened up on the restrictions around energy costs. They could now give an attack a mostly colorless cost pretty safely, without nerfing the base power of the attack into the ground.

These splashable costs stuck around, and made multicolor decks much more comfortable to play moving forward.

The energy costs on basic 'mons actually remained fairly consistent, though, even in spite of the changes.

This has remained mostly true across the bulk of the TCG's history. Single-prize basics stuck relatively close to the original energy rules that were established decades ago for quite some time.

They do tend to get more HP in later generations, but this is largely to survive attacks from the multi-prize 'mons they're forced to compete with.

One of the most important advancements in this era was a new philosophy around evolved 'mons. An evolution card's attack would frequently do 10 more damage than a basic for the same cost.

This makes perfect sense, when you actually think about it. You spent an extra card from your hand and needed to have a card with a specific name that only evolves from one other card with a specific name.

Doing 10 more damage for the same energy is well-warranted.

Keeping up with the changes in later generations gets harder and harder, especially as the game moves away from vanilla attacks that only do damage and more toward stylized attacks with unique effects, but there are underlying formulas in every single metagame. Yes, even the seemingly broken modern ones.

The core that keeps it all working is consistency. While exceptions are allowed, establishing definitive rules and sticking closely to them for the majority of the cards in the game tends to keep things running smoothly. You can undervalue a mechanic and things can still usually work out.

As an example, cards that inflict poison were probably weaker than they were meant to be in the WotC era, but did this really ruin the meta? Not especially. The game only centralizes around the strongest cards, so the meta will be balanced if the strongest cards aren't massive outliers.

Speaking of which, let's go over two early cards that completely broke the rules.

Breaking the Curve

Jungle Wigglytuff's Do the Wave costs 3 colorless energy. By the rules of the era we expect it to do 30 attack. And it's easy to see what happened here. They reasoned out that you could have a maximum of 6 'mons in play and decided the "average" number a player might have would be around 3. So 30 damage sounds sensible.

Until you realize that, unlike a coin flip, the number of 'mons on your own bench is something you can freely manipulate. It was so easy to fill the bench that, in practice, this was really just an attack that did 60 damage for 3 energy, likely well above the intended power level of the card.

This might have been fine at 4 colorless energy, reasoning out that you might not always have that 5th and 6th 'mon, but as it was printed this was a MONSTER of a card.

Sneasel has a similar issue, but taken to the extreme. This time they did cost the attack at what "felt" like a value of 40. Two Darkness energy should be roughly as hard to play as two Double Colorless Energy.

But there are several points they missed when applied in practice. First, Rainbow Energy can't turn itself into a DCE but absolutely can turn itself into Darkness Energy. This means you can effectively run twice as many copies.

Second, the upside of Darkness Energy just gives you a flat increase to damage. The "downside" meant to balance this never becomes relevant as long as you don't attach the card to a non-Dark 'mon. The result is a turn 2 attack that routinely does 70-80 damage. Clearly way, way off from the intent.

Remember the Jigglypuff from earlier in the post that was purposely nerfed in order to keep it from having a way to do 40 damage too early in the game?

Well, here's what happens when you completely fail to think about that problem. Pulled Punch can do 40 damage for 2 colorless energy, with the caveat being that the target has to have no damage counters on it.

I can't defend this card. They knew that Double Colorless Energy and Pluspower existed in the format. They knew that you were allowed to attack on the first turn, meaning the opponent would, by definition, not have any damage counters on them.

This is just a textbook example of bad game design. It was designed in a vacuum, completely ignorant of the metagame.

Thankfully, there aren't too many instances of a card being broken or banned just off of how far off-curve the attack is. There are certainly powerful off-curve cards out there, but they usually just end up being top cards in the meta without completely bending it over their knee.

Even Sneasel, as degenerate as it clearly was, wasn't actually banned until the original Energy Removal cards rotated out, since they helped to keep it in check to an extent. It was one of the obvious best attackers, but that alone doesn't get you banned.

A banned card is usually one that doesn't have reasonable counterplay. Wigglytuff is weak to Super Energy Removal and Fighting-type attacks, so it never actually ruined the formats it was in. Sneasel didn't have a type weakness, wasn't naturally resisted by anything, and had a free retreat cost. Losing Super Energy Removal was just the last straw.

Closing Thoughts

Energy costs and damage are still tightly linked to this very day, and I'm sure there's a complex guide to how much each type of effect is supposed to cost tucked away in an office somewhere, hidden from public view. It's a shame they won't ever show it to us.

Even Pokémon TCG Pocket, a much more modern and streamlined interpretation of the card game, borrows from established rules. In Pocket, a single colorless energy is generally worth 10 damage, while a non-colorless energy is worth 20, then 10 damage is added if the card is an evolved 'mon, and the final value is adjusted based on things like HP and retreat cost.

It might not be an exciting system to every player out there, but complex internal rules like this are absolutely integral to the work of game designers. It can even come in handy when playing competitively, since you can eyeball which cards are above-curve with a bit of practice.

These are the kinds of methodical decision-making processes that make or break a card game.

Pokémon Card Design: Complexity

One thing the Pokémon TCG does very well, that other card games struggle with, is a tight balance of simplicity and complexity. They've actually been putting a lot of thought into it since the very beginning. Let's examine how the first generation handled complexity.

Common = Simple

One of the simplest tricks they used was to just keep common cards simple. These were the cards most prone to having a single attack with a focused effect.

"Focused" effects are effects that do just one thing. This Doduo's Fury Attack flips coins to determine how much damage it does, but it ONLY does that one thing. This was the norm at the time.

These were also the cards most likely to have attacks with no effects other than damage. The beginning of a game was fundamentally easier to parse out at a glance than the midgame or late-game.

Redundancy is Key

One big tool that the designers used was redundancy. All three of these cards feature Confuse Ray, and it does the same thing on every card. Flip a coin for a chance of confusion. This allowed players to shorthand the effect of Confuse Ray in their mind, since it always did the same thing.

They even went a step further and kept power levels of moves roughly consistent, with outliers depending on the needs of the game. Flamethrower usually did 50 damage. Slash did 30. Water Gun's damage depended on how much energy it required, but always had a cap of +20 when adding more damage based on additional Water Energy cards.

There are some examples of them failing to practice redundancy, or making exceptions if we want to be charitable. The most egregious example is probably Poisonpowder.

On each of these three cards, Poisonpowder has a slightly different effect, a different energy cost, and a different damage value. On Kakuna, it does damage and flips a coin for poison. On Ivysaur, it does damage and inflicts poison without a coin flip. And on Gloom, it just inflicts poison.

To me, this violates the redundancy principle. Every time Poisonpowder is on a card, the player has to read it carefully to see which version of Poisonpowder is on that specific card. This can lead to misplays, memory issues, and a small amount of frustration as players feel the need to read and reread their cards to make sure they're not mixing them up.

The general principle that they all inflict poison is retained, but it would have been a good idea to give these three attacks three different names. I understand that they wanted most of the attack names to be from the main series, but if that was the case then they should have chosen one implementation for Poisonpowder and stood by it.

Complexity is Isolated

If a card has an especially complex effect printed on it, then it usually does so at the cost of all other effects it could have potentially had.

Take a look at Fossil Ditto as one of the finest examples. Its Power, Transform, requires so much explanation that they opted not to give it any attacks at all, not even a simple Pound.

You could argue that this was partially done to conserve space, but keep in mind that these cards were originally written in Japanese, a language that can fit entire essays on playing cards when compared to English.

This was an intentional design choice, so that players only had to use up so much of their mental space at any given time. You don't have to think about how Ditto's other attacks interact with Transform, because it doesn't have any.

Another beautiful example of this is Fossil Zapdos. While Thunderstorm isn't as wildly out of pocket as Transform, it does have multiple effects all condensed into a single attack.

It flips coins, it counts the number of 'mons on the opponent's bench, it damages the defending 'mon, it damages the bench, and it damages itself.

But it does all of this in one elegant motion. While you may have to read it a few times, you only have to understand the one attack. It's noteworthy, also, that both of these cards were rare cards.

A rare card is a good place to explore complexity, because players aren't coming across them in large numbers. This further isolates the complexity, dividing it up into easily readable chunks.

Types Have Specialties

Going hand-in-hand with the concept of redundancy, types tend to have effects they gravitate toward. This gives the type a sense of unity, isolates core mechanics from each other, and allows players to form associations with the type more quickly.

Fire is the type that discards energy cards to do big damage. This isn't just a property of one redundant move. It's tied to the effects of Ember, Flamethrower, Fire Spin, and Fire Blast, along with dozens of moves added to the fire-type since then.

This sense that a type "does a thing" gives it a personality, but it also forms expectations. We expect lightning-type cards to have high-risk, high-reward attacks, so we're mentally prepared to look for phrases like "does X damage to itself" or "discard all energy cards attached." Knowing what to expect helps us find the keywords that make up the card's fundamentals faster.

Exceptions Serve a Purpose

If your rules are too rigid, they become predictable. Players will start to recognize the patterns and will know what to expect from a given type or rarity or evolutionary stage.

Which is why it's wise to occasionally design cards that go against the pre-established rules of design.

Hitmonchan is a rare card, but both of its attacks are textless; they have no effect outside of damage.

Additionally, Jab and Special Punch are unique attack names reserved for just this one card.

It's because he breaks the rules, that he feels like a rare card, despite missing most of the hallmarks of a typical rare.

Closing Thoughts

Complexity is extremely fun to explore from a design standpoint and the temptation to make increasingly complicated card designs is very real. Who doesn't want to be the first person to come up with an exciting new idea or mechanic that's never been done before?

But a good game designer trusts the fundamental skeleton of their game to do the heavy lifting for them. Lead designers on Magic the Gathering have famously claimed that the game would still be fun if you were only slugging it out with vanilla creatures.

A good card design is not defined by its simplicity or its complexity. It's defined by how well it fits within the larger ecosystem of the set and the metagame as a whole. Sometimes the most important card you can add is the generic basic that just happens to counter a metagame staple by being the right type and hitting the right numbers.