A Petition to Ban Tropical Beach

[SMP88]

there are 2 ways to handle this problem in my opinon one way is to ban it -but with a cach they should anounce that they are baning it about a year before they do it giving the card time to slowly reduce in price that way people who the card wont be hit with as much shock. the other way is that make a really common card that you can get maybey even put it in a theam deck, that way just about eevryone can get it not just the rich, it worked with pokemon cacher it should work again.

If precedence takes place Tropical Beach will rotate out in August with the next batch of BW promos. They're also not going to make it a common card. Catcher was reprinted to keep it in the format for another season. Otherwise they would have just left it in Dark Explorers and let it rotate at the end of this season. The secondary market didn't have anything to do with reprinting the card.

 

[LukeRiver]

I agree that it should be considered to release it as a promo, or maybe as a Cities/States/Regionals victory card instead of just for world's. I think we could live with that.

 

[Otaku]

I was avoiding this thread because let's face it; many involved either won't listen to "the other side"... or have listened, come to what they believe is a logical conclusion, and are tired of hearing rejected arguments over and over again.

Should Tropical Beach be banned? I do not know. So I'll focus on a major foundational point that needs to be addressed.

A basic (but not universal) premise for TCGs is that everyone has at least a certain minimal access to cards. "Access" in this case includes "I can always go buy product (on the primary market) for a chance at obtaining a certain card". It is open to discussion what the minimum is... but Tropical Beach in no way meets it, because purchasing it is only an option on the secondary market. So even if Tropical Beach was so useless people were giving it away for free, it should still not exist because of the negative precedent. As cards like Tropical Beach have proven, it is hard to create an effect that can never prove useful; even awarding a card with a purely negative effect carries the risk of a future combo creating a net positive.

I could say a lot more even on this, but I believe this is a long enough post and that more information will overwhelm most and possibly myself. XD Further discussion can happen if someone wishes to pursue it, but in a new post and not this one.

 

[yoshi1001]

Part of me wonders if TPCi is waiting to see what happens at the the tournament in Japan where the card is banned. It's difficult to say what they could be looking for, however. If it does have a significant impact on how the tournament plays out, it could indicate that the card was useful and (in my opinion) should never have been distributed the way it was. If the tournament's results are more or less in line with results in Beach-allowed tournaments, it wouldn't (in my opinion) prove the card is insignificant, just that the card doesn't have that much impact on deck choices.

 

[Otaku]

yoshi1001: Honestly, is even a single event enough data? It may be what the-powers-that-be have to base a decision on, but it would probably take an entire years worth of events (or at least higher level events) to get a good estimate of the impact of Tropical Beach.

I keep reminding myself that knowing what to do now isn't easy; what was easy was not putting the game into this kind of position in the first place.

 

[Shen]

It's too bad that Pokemon is so awful at communicating with their player base. It's announced that Beach is banned in Japan for one particular tournament and no one knows what to make of it. Why are they banning it? Will future tournaments enforce the ban? Will it be a worldwide ban? Now players are unsure if they should purchase this card. It is a risky investment to purchase Beaches right now with a potential ban. We are currently playing CCs this season, so Beach will at least be playable for the rest of those. Granted, they could reveal a card tomorrow for an upcoming set that makes Beach obsolete, and we take that risk whenever we buy any card. Still, when we buy any other card we know it will be playable (in the sense that it is legal to use that card in a tournament) until it's rotated, even if better options become available. There are other reasons why obsolete cards are dissimilar to banned cards but I won't go into all of them. The point is this Japanese ban is something we deserve to have explained.

For the record, I believe banning Beach is an awful decision. They can allow foreign language Beaches (I think this is the best decision), they can limit the amount of Beaches we can play per deck, they can print cards that punish stadium users, they can print alternative T1 options such as Call Energy, they could reprint it (which is quite messy, but it makes the most sense from a business standpoint to get people to pay them for it), but outright banning it doesn't sound like the best choice.