Woo, okay. First of all, hi there, Luka! Always glad to see folks make their way over here from Discord, and we certainly hope to see more of you in the future. Secondly, wow! For the folks here on PB who have never seen your work before, this card must surely come as a shock; heck, I’ve seen plenty of your cards over on Discord, and I still feel like I’m learning something new about your format with each one I see.
With that being said — and I do want to acknowledge it; you’ve essentially built up not just a format from scratch, but an entire TCG, tangentially based on the Pokémon TCG but at the same time rejecting a lot of the conventions WotC and Nintendo have established and paving the way with new ones — while that’s incredibly impressive and I applaud the sheer effort that goes into such a feat, I
also want to acknowledge that it may mean this judging isn’t what you were expecting.
I spent a long time — most of August, actually — trying to decide how best to judge this card, because honestly it just comes down to the fact that we’ve never had a card quite like this one submitted before. You’ve mentioned before that your cards are intended for play in the context of your larger set, which helps you balance them by cutting them out of the context of the Pokémon TCG as a whole. But ultimately, if your cards aren’t intended for play with the bulk of real-life Pokémon cards, then they’ve diverged into their own game.
Where that makes judging difficult is that I don’t know all the rules of that game, and tbh I’m not sure I’d be able to learn them all if I tried. You provided like a mini-essay’s worth of context in your OP (which believe me, I super appreciate), but even then there’s a lot of context I’m still missing. Some of it I was able to ask you about separately for clarification’s sake, but I don’t think I ever really had any hope of learning how
all of it works without a lot more time invested in learning to play the set itself. Given that time over the course of a month, could I learn a whole new game for the purpose of CaC judging? Yeah, maybe. Would it be sustainable to do on a regular basis, if multiple people submitted cards like this one? Probably not. The question could be extrapolated to “Can I submit a YGO or MtG card, if it’s of a Pokémon?” And the answer to that would be, pretty unequivocally, no. So the precedent I’m going to have to set here is that while I’m gonna try to keep an open mind and remember that it’s designed for a different game entirely, there are points in this judging where that’s gonna break down, and so ultimately I’m going to have to judge this card, and any hypothetical submissions like it in the future, from the perspective of the real-life Pokémon TCG.
First things first — I like the blank; I think you’ve done a really admirable job of cutting up and restitching a general SUM-era blank for your purposes. The Poké Ball thing below the evobox, the expanded W/R boxes, the added box with the “You can’t put any Trevenant in your deck” — all of it looks like a really natural fit with the aesthetics of the SUM era. I can’t tell if you made the Ghost texture yourself or if that’s one of the things you repurposed from Neo Redux, but either way the integration is seamless. All together, it looks really good.
The art is a nice choice too. It’s a very
dark card; there’s not much in the way of flashy lighting or high contrast effects, but I think some little details, like the purple glow of the eye complementing the purple color of the blank’s texture and the red leaves drawing the eye from the lower-right box, work really well together to set it off. It definitely gives off the impression of being a Ghost-type.
In relation to the card being so dark, though, I’m a bit confused as to why some of the text is blank and some of it white. Cards have (rarely) mix-’n’-matched the black and white text before, as in the case of multi-types like Bisharp STS, or ex-era Darkness-types. But in each of those cases, the mix-’n’-matching is designed to make the text as easily readable as possible against the background, which changes from one part of the card to the next. Since the background behind “Limbo” on Trevenant isn’t any lighter than the background behind the “Put damage counters …” text, it’s jarring to read and (imo) actually gives the appearance of being incomplete, almost like you were in the process of changing all the text from black to white and forgot about “HP 70,” “Final Demise,” “Limbo,” and “(C) 2017 Pokémon.”
There’s some other fonts-n-placement choices I’d also question — I reckon if I were designing the blank, I’d probably vertically-center the W/R icons as well as the text in the lower-right red box — but I think it’s also fair not to; keeping them in the upper-left of each respective box isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Your-blank-your-rules on this one.
Now for the effects — and the first thing that catches my eye, as I’m sure it did for a lot of other folks seeing this card, is the integration of the new Special Condition Doomed. And boy howdy, does it do a
lot.
If I’m reading this right, a Doomed Pokémon (a) has no Resistances, (b) can’t evolve, (c) can’t be recovered after a Knock Out, and (d) might destroy itself and all other Doomed Pokémon on your field on a roughly 1/20 chance whenever it attacks.
And you can only get rid of it through Full Heals, Super Scoop Ups, and similar effects.
Right off the bat, even putting aside the fact that existing Special Conditions aren’t that complicated, I’m thinking it sounds pretty powerful. Stopping your opponent from evolving is huge, as we’ve seen in the case of Archeops NVI, and the fact that that lock continues as long as that Pokémon is in play — i.e. no Switching out of it, etc — makes it even better. Easily on par with Paralysis in terms of how it can completely lock down your opponent’s strategy, I’d say.
And Miasma of the End applies that effect
to your opponent’s whole board. No evolving for them, ever, for [/i]at least[/i] as long as Trevenant remains in play. Furthermore, it’s passively doing chip damage through Poison the whole time, so you’re not even just stalling — you have your whole win condition right there. It doesn’t even need to be Active, so you can park it behind a wall, heal it every few turns, and watch as your opponent slowly succumbs to the Poison damage on their end. I can’t see anything short of a Virizion-EX-style effect beating this.
So then the question becomes, how hard is it to get this Trevenant into play in the first place? And the answer seems to be somewhat, but not very. According to a conversation we had on Discord, Ghost-types in this set evolve through a particular type of Scroll, which is like an Item that fails if you have insufficient Magic to play it (and you can get Magic through the effects of other cards). The particular Scroll you need (I’m gonna call it an Evo-Scroll) you can run up to 4 of, so it ends up functioning like a slightly-harder-to-pull-off Evosoda. Given that you (presumably) are allowed to play Phantumps as normal, I think this is actually significantly
easier to get into play than an Archeops NVI, even factoring in Maxie’s Hidden Ball Trick. You just need a Phantump, a way to get Magic, and a way to draw the Evo-Scroll when you need it — and meanwhile, Trevenant isn’t even taking up space in your deck!
So at the end of the day, while I like the ingenuity of introducing a new Special Condition (and revamping how Special Conditions work in general!), I think dropping Special Conditions all over the field is probably not the way to do it. It’s not a symmetrical effect because you can build your deck around it in a way that your opponent presumably can’t, and it locks down their whole board and introduces an (imo unnecessary) element of swinginess with the 5% boardwipe.
Actually, in light of how good the Poké-Body is (and the fact that it doesn’t need to be Active to use it), the attacks are kinda underwhelming by comparison. Final Demise is basically a vastly-weakened Flying Flip (Tapu Koko SM30), and Limbo is 5 Energy on a 70-HP Pokémon for a singular Knock Out. (Not that an OHKO isn’t good, but the Poké-Body gives you such a winning gameplan, there’s not really any need to bother with it.) I don’t really understand why Limbo puts the Defending Pokémon to Sleep; I guess it’s for the random possibility that the Defending Pokémon can be Asleep but not Poisoned? But in all other circumstances it would just be immediately Knocked Out by the Poké-Body-induced Poison.
There’s probably a lot here that I’m missing, nuances of the card that can be chalked up to “it’s a different format.” But to me, having played my fair share of decks from all the different eras of the Pokémon TCG, that’s just the way I see the card shaking out in an actual game, regardless of format. It seems very easily break-able, and the linearity of the strategy plus the random added swinginess likely wouldn’t make games with it terribly fun to play.
I think your designs in general are incredible, so I absolutely encourage you to stick around and enter again if it ever strikes your fancy. Let me know if there’s anything in this judging I can clarify, and either way, I hope to see more from you in the future.
Wording errors:
My general policy is that custom blanks largely get a pass for wording, because the decisions the faker makes are often specific to their custom era and, as long as they’re consistent, don’t need to adhere to TPCi’s conventions. However, I do still deduct points for grammatical/syntactical errors, for ambiguity, and for inconsistency.
- “Miasma Of The End” should be “Miasma of the End”; prepositions and articles should always be lowercase except as the first or last word of a title. Real-Pokémon examples are Jumpluff DRX (“Leave It to the Wind”), Haxorus PLB (“Strike of the Champion”), etc. [-1 point]
- The Poké-Body needs to specify how many damage counters (presumably 1?) are put on each Benched Pokémon between turns. I figure the reason you left it ambiguous is for Poison-modifying effects similar to Virbank City Gym, but there needs to be a baseline or some other way of resolving contradictions. [-2 points]
- “20HP” and “10HP” should be “20 HP” and “10 HP,” respectively, as HP is a quantity the number describes and not part of the number itself. This follows the convention of more than 60 cards that have referenced such things in Pokémon’s history. However, since TPCi’s own convention is slightly inconsistent on this (see Gliscor DP36), I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and dock no points here.
- For clarity’s sake, since this was brought up in a post later on in the thread, I’m not docking points for metric-system measurements or for the order in which you listed the Special Conditions, because both of those can be chalked up to the “your blank, your rules” clause.
- As for Final Demise, the official rules of the Pokémon TCG indicate that you apply all effects of the attack after doing damage (unless it explicitly says “before doing damage”). Since the game’s rulebook clearly shows how to resolve it, I won’t be docking here either. However, I would advise re-wording the attack regardless; more clarity is always better.
Fonts and Placement errors:
My general policy here is similar to Wording — custom blanks get a great deal of leeway. However, I reserve the right to deduct points for any choices I deem to be too far out of the realm of plausibility, such as using Comic Sans for attack text or having blatantly eyeballed all placements.
- The one thing I’m going to dock for here is the mix-’n’-matched black-and-white text, and that’s specifically because when I first saw it, I thought it was an accident, like you’d been in the process of changing the text from black to white and just missed a few spots. Since then, I’ve seen others of your Ghost-type cards with the same text color style, so I know it was intentional, but the fact remains that my first reaction upon seeing a custom text template should not be “Did they
mean to do that?” [-2 points]
Creativity/Originality: 12/15
(Definitely good use of new design space; the new Special Condition is particularly striking. I would have liked to see the Special Conditions more integrated with the rest of the card, though; as it stands right now, the chip damage from the Poison feels at odds with the design of the rest of the card, and the Sleep in Limbo feels like an afterthought.)
Wording: 12/15
(A capitalization thing and an ambiguity thing.)
Fonts and Placement: 8/10
(The black attack names vs white attack text is jarring.)
Believability/Playability: 1/5
(I have some pretty extreme concerns about the power level of the Poké-Body, and the attacks feel underwhelming by comparison.)
Aesthetics: 5/5
(The blank is very expertly spliced together, and the integration of the Ghost-type background is seamless. It’s dark, but the colors in the art work well to tie the whole thing together.)
Total: 38/50
