You can't have good cards without bad cards.
I always get leery when someone makes a statement like this. Simply put I've always disagreed, but I usually find out that's because they use both terms in completely arbitrary, relative manners. "Good cards" are always the cards that perform best" while anything that performs less than "the best" is a "bad card" by default.
Where as someone like myself will consider a card "good" if it performs at least reasonably well (and what others consider "good" would usually be bumped up to "great" or a similar distinguishing descriptor), while "bad" cards generally need to be especially weak with respect to the game. There is room for "average" cards in my world. :lol: So no, you don't need
bad cards to have
good cards unless you insist on using the terms only as relative descriptors. It is however incredibly difficult, to the point of being essentially impossible, for a game to never release even a single "bad" card over its life. I tend to take issue with cards that were clearly made to be filler: you know, sub-par stats with sub-par, vanilla attacks. When you've got a harder to KO version whose attacks do as much or more damage on top of having beneficial effects... why release the other?
And really, something that is almost, but not quite playable (Cofagrigus) is not really any more use than a card like Slaking when it comes down to it.
Not really; one requires less "assistance" than the other to become a "good" card by your standards, baby_mario. You're an experienced player; you know how a card can go from chump to champ and vice versa all based on the card pool, and sometimes even a single other card. Take
Pokémon Reversal; decks didn't have to run it to do well, but most did better with it... until
Pokémon Catcher, a clearly better replacement to it, was released.
Let us take a seemingly awful card like the new
Slaking. People have tried running it with
Garbodor but that doesn't seem to be working. Okay, any older cards that, even (or requiring) updates for modern terminology/mechanics from the past that would at least make
Slaking go from almost unplayable to a fun (or better) deck?
Sure.
Cessation Crystal is an old Pokémon Tool that turned off Poké-Powers and Poké-Bodies on both player's Pokémon while the equipped Pokémon was Active. Updating it to work on Abilities instead and re-releasing it would make
Slaking at least a little more functional (but since several other established Pokémon could also use it, it is hard to say if it could do more than that).
Battle Frontier was a Stadium that shut off Poké-Powers and Poké-Bodies on :colorless:, :dark: and :metal: Pokémon. Adapted for the modern game by again changing it to "Abilities", it would again allow you to fairly easily run
Slaking as a 150 HP Stage 2 Pokemon that for
colorless::colorless::colorless::colorless
hits for 100 damage and discards an Energy from the Defending Pokémon. Might make it great, should at least make it "functional".
We don't even need to shut down the card's Ability; it is bad right now because we have Pokémon EX (and after those, big, Basic Pokémon) that are some of the best cards available. We've also had cards released to "punish" such things in the past when they dominated a format. We've recently seen Safeguard, originally a Poké-Body, resurface as an Ability, and the new
Bouffalant that hits Pokémon EX harder than other Pokémon.
It is quite unlikely and I would
never recommend trying to do it, but if enough such cards entered the metagame, the number of decks relying on hard hitting Basic Pokémon could drop to the point where
Slaking "decks" would just need a back-up hitter to handle them, and everything else deals with the obstinate gorilla. :lol:
Things like
Boost Energy may also help, but I think I've gone on long enough. Either my point has been made or I should quit digging a deeper hole. All that said... yeah the Pokémon named in this thread are unlikely to be winning a major tournament anytime soon, and would also need some major luck to do well at a small event.
