TCG History - Team Rocket Set

Team Rocket brought with it a slew of disruptive and degenerate cards. The TCG faced a turbulent few sets in the back half of the Kanto sets, with this being the beginning of some very questionable design choices by Creatures Inc.

A Set of Cheap Tricks

Adding to the short list of floodgates in Kanto, Dark Vileplume was an absurdly powerful card that could largely shut your opponent out of the game with Hay Fever, since trainers were otherwise the most powerful card type and had gone uncontested until now.

This was probably an attempt to balance the dominance of trainers, but it ended up just being an arms race to see who could get out their floodgates first.

This is also our representative for the new "Dark" pokémon, with their gimmick being that they have lower HP and stronger effects than their normal counterparts.

This ultimately made most of the new basic and evolution cards unplayable, due to a general mishandling of their power levels.

Imposter Oak's Revenge was a brutal card to play on the first turn of the game. Instantly setting your opponent back three cards is a powerful effect, and the discard cost is well worth it.

If the rise of floodgates wasn't problematic enough, hand-ripping became a premier strategy of these next few sets, reducing the chances that your opponent could set up or find answers to your threats.

The fact that this can all happen before your opponent even gets to play the game is a big no-no in terms of modern game design principles.

Likely another innocent attempt at balancing trainers, Rocket's Sneak Attack could be used right after Imposter Oak's Revenge to start your opponent with a hand of three cards by snatching a trainer straight from their hand.

Since Dark Vileplume was an evolution card, trainers that were powerful on the first turn were at a premium. This pushed these problematic cards even further into the limelight, though they would have undoubtedly been broken either way. They would be joined by another hand-ripping card in future sets and only become even more broken as a result.

Goop Gas Attack is an interesting addition to the format. This gave players a way to punish Pokémon Powers on demand for a single turn, and could be pretty effective.

One especially noteworthy option is turning off Mr. Mime's Invisible Wall and then one-shotting it with any attack that does 40 damage. There are other uses for this card, such as blanking out a Fossil Aerodactyl temporarily to let your 'mons evolve, but deleting Mr. Mime is my favorite trick.

At least it's not all floodgates and hand destruction, though. This is the set that introduced Nightly Garbage Run, the first card to shuffle any combination of 3 basic, evolution, or energy cards from your discard pile into your deck.

Modern players may recognize this effect from Super Rod, but this is where it started. It was an immediate smash hit and became a staple of gameplay, reducing the issues the game had previously had with stall strategies to some extent and allowing aggressive strategies a little more wiggle room when discarding cards.

But Rainbow Energy might just be the real star of the set. For the first time, multitype decks were easier to build and play with. The one damage counter taken was well worth it if it meant fixing your energy.

While not as flashy or impressive as some newer takes on the "provides any type of energy" concept, this was the original and it paved the way for multitype energies going forward.

The other Dark 'mon to see play right away was, fittingly enough, Dark Gloom. Dark Gloom could be combined with Snorlax from the Jungle set, a bulky 'mon who was completely immune to status.

The strategy involved simply getting Snorlax in the active, then getting as many Dark Gloom in play as possible and flipping coins until the opponent is confused. Since Snorlax can't be confused, Gloom's Pollen Stench could be spammed safely with no real fear of the downside.

Other Impacts

The rise of Dark Vileplume made any cards that could deal with it more appealing, and this was especially true of Fossil Muk, a previously printed floodgate that had only seen sporadic play before this point.

For the first time, countering a Pokémon Power was a critical way to enable plays. This also meant that decks relying on Pokémon Powers saw a significant downward trend in viability. Damage Swap fell off a cliff and even hard-hitting decks like Rain Dance and Buzzap dropped a tier.

Dark Vileplume hindered stall decks far more than it hindered anything else, though. Now that access to cards like Scoop Up and Pokémon Center was no longer guaranteed, it was a little harder to justify these more methodical playstyles.

Some of the other Dark pokémon would see a new lease on life in later sets, but at the time of the set's release it was mainly "The Vileplume Set."

Dark Alakazam, Dark Golbat, and Dark Weezing were among the lucky few who would pick up steam in later sets, where they would find new partners and new enemies.

The Kanto sets following Base-Fossil, including this one, were noticeably underpowered, but that may have been an intentional attempt to de-escalate after a wildly imbalanced start. It was ironically the cards designed to solve older problems that would end up causing the most issues.