Design Exercise: The Bulbasaur Line

In order to demonstrate my personal design philosophies in practice, let's do a quick thought exercise. I'll redesign the original grass starter line based roughly on the power level of the Wizards of the Coast era, but with a slightly updated outlook.

Note that I gave the entire line a resistance to the Water-type, and reduced the resistance number from the -30 of the actual WotC cards to -20. If you've ever played Base-Fossil, you should know that -30 resistances were a little overpowered at the time, due to the low damage output.

The resistance is partially there to reinforce the starter trio's original purpose, but having at least one line that resists each type in a format also decreases the odds that one hyper-aggressive deck will become too dominant. *cough* Rain Dance *cough*

Looking at the original Bulbasaur as a jumping off point, the first thing  I notice is that Leech Seed was a terrible design decision. A healing side-effect implies that the player should stay in this form instead of evolving, which encourages bad play patterns. Basics should teach the player the importance of evolution.

40 HP is also inexcusable. HP should only be that low if there's either a strong lore reason or a defensible balancing reason. Any Fire attack that does 20+ damage is an instant KO.

Since Bulbasaur is a starter Pokémon, it makes sense that it would literally be a starting active. "Roll Call" allows you to start setting up immediately. This also matches the older brother vibe Bulbasaur had in the anime's early seasons.

Note that the 50 HP cutoff is very meaningful in set design. If I were designing a whole set, I would purposely design the Basics to be just over or under this threshold, when relevant.

Vine Whip is inefficient, but purposely inefficient. The real purpose of this move is to encourage you to evolve right away. It's nice to have the damage as an option, but encouraging intended play patterns is important.

Base Ivysaur has similar issues to Bulbasaur. The high energy costs of its attacks discourage evolution instead of encouraging it. The actual effects of the attacks match well with the card's purpose, but we absolutely need to address the costs.

60 HP on a Stage 1 should also be avoided unless it can be justified in some way. It brings the power level of the card too close to unevolved Basics, which is just silly. 

You may be surprised that I only gave Ivysaur 70 HP, since this was a chance to bring it up to the same health as Base Charmeleon. But asymmetry is important. If you copy/paste qualities that work from one card to another, you'll eventually end up with a bunch of type-shifted versions of the same five cards.

Razor Leaf has been made cheaper and has a Colorless pip in the cost to add some flexibility when deckbuilding, just in case you want to build a two-type deck.

Poison Whip maintains the card's compatibility with Double Colorless Energy. Importantly, I'm operating under the assumption that Jungle Mr. Mime still exists, so we need a way to get under Invisible Wall.

Base Venusaur is actually a very well-designed card. The only issue I can really find with it is that its utility effect is so powerful you're encouraged to preserve it in the back instead of attacking with it.

To be honest, this isn't really an issue we need to fix, but in the interest of discussion we'll try to come up with a more thematically appropriate version of the card, with the mindset that your fully evolved starter should be your main attacker.

Venusaur has undergone the most drastic transformation, losing its Pokémon Power in favor of an attack that can perform a similar role, but without being so passive about it.

One minor issue with the design of the original card is that it doesn't specifically encourage you to attack with Venusaur itself, even though you would normally think of a Stage 2 as the central ace of your team.

This redesign forces you to engage and offers a more interesting decision tree on a turn-by-turn basis, but it does reduce its compatibility with Pokémon Center. This isn't automatically bad, though. Game design is ultimately a process of trading gains for losses, so changing a card drastically will inevitably come with some sort of cost elsewhere.

I went over the gist of my reasoning, but there's actually a lot more for a card designer to consider. For example, you may not have noticed that the Pokédex entry for Bulbasaur was purposely written to explain the reasoning of Roll Call to the player. Being a "natural born leader," it's only natural for Bulbasaur to have such a move.

Even something as simple as a move's name can be critical to how a card is perceived. Why is Bulbasaur's attack specifically named "Roll Call" of all things? Well, the most similar attacks in the game are Call for Family and Call for Friends. "Call" should function as shorthand to tell the player that this is a deck-searching effect.

Poison Whip's name was also chosen for a reason. I could've used Poisonpowder, like the original designers did. So why didn't I? Because powder moves do not deal direct damage in the main series. If one of our goals is to make the card game "feel" like Pokémon, then minor nods to in-game continuity go a long way.

The new cost for Solar Beam also matters. While the two Colorless pips help with flexibility, they also crucially mean that you won't be wasting a Double Colorless Energy if you attach it to Ivysaur for Poison Whip. This is WAY more important than it looks on paper.

This also isn't the only way these cards could be designed. "Role Call" could've had an energy cost of zero, but I decided against it because it felt "too modern." I could have kept "Energy Trans" and designed Venusaur to be the centerpiece of a control deck. Card design is both an art and a science.