don()shinobi said:
You say that having a new basic energy adds new gameplay elements. Yet you also say that each type doesn't have its own identity, making it no different from any other type. Please clarify.
And did you not see my previous statement? The Pokemon TCG is designed so that, although Paper can beat Rock, Rock can occasionally beat Paper. It's not completely unbalanced; a lone Timburr isn't going to singlehandedly beat a Dark deck.
Ok let me clarify, what I meant to say is adding more different basic energies does NOT add to gameplay. That was what I meant.
You can take a fighting card and make it fire, and make a Dark card and turn it into Grass, and the interactions between the 2 groups would still be the same. If your Grass pokemon is strong enough to beat a Fire pokemon, it is no different from a Darkness pokemon strong enough to beat a Fighting pokemon.
The point that I am getting at here is how you set up said pokemon. If Dragon types have their own basic energy, just like the 8 types, then the way you set up to your ace dragon isn't any different from the way you set up to your ace psychic. The current way with its multi energy attack is different. The decks these dragons belong to are more specific, and not only that, the way you set up the pokemon is different as well. No longer can you have a dragon in a mono type deck, where you can have all fire energies so you can easily draw them. You need to be able to draw 2 different energies, which is much harder to do.
When I talk about type identity, I mean each type should do its specific thing.
The official rulebook tells us what each type is good for. Grass being healing, Metal being damage prevention, and Fighting having combination attacks for coin flips. So far, in the TCG right now, this isn't the case, each gameplay seems to be on whatever pokemon the makers of this game feels like. I don't necessarily want a tight grouping where all pokemon that heal are grass types. No. But I want it so that most of the pokemon that heal are grass types, and that making a deck specializing in pokemon that heal themselves isn't possible without a few grass pokemon.
Psychic's specialty is special conditions, although other types can give out special conditions. Grass with Poison, Fire with burn, and Lightning with Paralysis, but Psychic's specialty is that it gives any special condition, depending on the attack of the psychic pokemon.
TheBugManiac said:
Your point about not pulling what you want is quite absurd. If there are more types, each of those types will simply have less cards. After all, there is only a limited number of Pokemon they can make these cards for.
The less types, the more of a chance of pulling a certain type. The more types, the less chance of pulling a certain type, much so you have to trade away almost all of your collection. The only viable solution is to play a multi type deck, that involves 3 types of pokemon or more. Even right now, I can pull a maximum of 2 or 3 pokemon of one type per pack, and if I get a booster box, I would get a sizable collection per type. So if I got 100 cards of the same set, and I got each type equally, and there were 10 types, that means I got 10 per type. Make that 20 types, and I have 5 per type, which means I have to obtain 100 more cards to get 10 per type. I'm only using simple numbers here, but you get the point.
For those who have busted booster boxes, you know that there are a decent amount of cards per type. Thinning that amount by making more types is bad for the game as players can't get a sizable collection of pokemon of a certain type to build their decks with.
I also know that decks are based off pokemon and not type. You can't have an ace pokemon without its support, and the supporting crew just happen to be the same type as that pokemon, in the case of mono type deck, or a different type in the case of multi type decks. That proves that pokemon type is important in deck making. If it wasn't the case then there would be a deck that contained every single basic energy type, and every single pokemon type. So far I haven't seen any. There was the truth, but that didn't have metal or darkness pokemon, nor did it NOT have 4 rainbow energies. If the game turned into something where 4 rainbow energies are required to be able to play the game, then that is bad for the game.