Concept
Recently, I feel TPCi is guilty of using Basic and Stage 1 Pokémon only as stepping stones for their evolved forms, giving them uninteresting attacks and, usually, no Abilities. On the one hand, this makes sense but it's a missed opportunity to widen the pool of competitively viable Pokémon; hence I settled on
Seedot as my entry for this month's contest. With Seedot I've tried to strike a balance - equipping it with a useful Ability, without being meta-shiftingly overpowered.
A
Rock-type acorn Pokémon falling from a tree, booping you on the snoot and ending up on the g
round (and with a little
fight in it along the way). Thematically, discarding Seedot from the hand mirrors the acorn falling from the tree, whilst the attack can be used to get it into your hand (i.e. the "tree"). I've used the Pokédex entry from
Pokémon Emerald, which fits this theme.
There are not many Abilities that can activate directly from the hand and I see this as an area for potential. However, as it's easy to get a Seedot into your hand and activate 'Falling Acorn', I was careful to add a drawback in the way
both Active Pokémon are damaged. The intention here is to encourage strategic play, whereby a player must weigh up the short-term gain of damaging the opponent's Active Pokémon (maybe putting it in KO range) versus softening up your own Active Pokémon for a possible revenge KO later on. The current metagame is well equipped to deal with the potential for spammability - there are plenty of Ability-locking cards, such as
Silent Lab,
Wobbuffet,
Garbodor and
Alolan Muk - so this serves to keep it in check.
All in all, it was a lot of fun coming up the concept and designing the card. I hope you like Seedot!
Credits
Thanks to those below for their contributions!
Card Blank: Cscdgnpry @
DeviantArt
Artwork: Autobot Tesla @ DeviantArt and Twitter (link to permission, HERE)
References:
Pkmncards (see
Audino BCR #126 and
Gourgeist XY #57 in particular)
General Guidance:
@aschefield101 & PokemonCardResources @
DeviantArt