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.
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