Thanks for the feedback! Wording is the bane of both my entries, sadly. 9/16 missed points were for wording. *facepalm* Congrats on the win, @doofisconfused!
I think that's a fair interpretation, but my point was more that C/O is a two-part category — we often call it "Creativity" as a shorthand, but originality is just as important. While there are many creative ways to adapt a VG effect to the TCG, the most original entries are typically those that come from a place other than adaptation. It's kinda like writing a book versus translating somebody else's book: If your goal is to take a VG effect and translate it into TCG terms, you're imposing a limit on the effects you can put on the card, and no matter how you go about it, the core of the idea will always have come pretty clearly from somewhere else.To be honest, though, I’m not sure what I would have changed about this Energy if someone else had asked for help on this same card and Protean Energy had never existed. I suppose the big takeaway for future CaC’s, since I’m unlikely to make any more Special Energy for these contests, is that adapting effects a Pokémon has in the video games won’t earn as many points as creating a thematically fitting effect that synthesizes information from a Pokémon’s lore, video game mechanics, and other areas of Pokémon world building. Is that a fair interpretation? I would be interested in talking about this some more.