I have to say Yoshi-, you're making it a challenge to remain civil. I say this because
we agree on many points. This may not seem so based on many of my posts, but I find myself playing devil's advocate to counter the panicking I see many players doing or the sloppy arguments, because both do more harm than good.
Sounds great unless you realize pokemon isnt chess. Even "great players" cant change their opening hands, I love how people always act like if you play enough consistency youll never have shaky openings.
You can build your deck as tight as you want, sometimes you have very little resources and then catcher murders you. Catcher also hands close games to the player who gets the first attacker up because he can just prevent his opponent from doing stuff. Catcher increases the advantage of going first by a ton, it also increases the advantage of having a better opening hand yb a ton
Perhaps some act like that. Most just accept that
luck of the draw is an inherent part of TCGs. You can build your deck to improve consistency, but you can only do so much. Bad hands happen. This is why players periodically push for Pokemon to adopt a best two of three style of play, but as has been pointed out, that is too time consuming for large scale tournaments.
Perhaps it is time to revisit the mulligan rule. Either upping it to a minimum of two Pokemon in the opening hand, or another page taken from the Magic: The Gathering playbook, allowing players to declare a mulligan, shuffle their hand back into their deck, and draw a new one, with an appropriate penalty. The "appropriate penalty" has been the best reason for
not including this rule which seems to be the best way to decrease extreme luck in the opening hands. In Magic, it is my understanding that player's draw one less card each time they use this rule, but with the raw draw power of Pokemon that might be too negligible a penalty.
Now here is some food for thought: if you have a bad hand and
Pokemon Catcher "murders" you, is that better or worse than say an opponent winning because they
got heads on Pokemon Reversal in the same situation? Has it occurred to you that
bad luck is bad luck and this is just getting it over more quickly? We are not talking about a virgin format where we had no sniping or cards that could force the opponent to change their active. In fact, both are fairly common and most decks will run one or the other. So while I will not dismiss your point entirely, I will counter by saying that in such a sad state most players are hoping for extreme luck on their end after the fact, or an opponent bungling things or being plagued by their own bad luck.
Yes, it is most tempting to say
Pokemon Catcher removes all chance of a comeback but before we lament and groan about it being introduced, how much hope was there really? Is it as one-sided as some claim? We have ample "revenge" cards that make an aggressive opponent charging head first slam into a brick wall.
Thicker lines make decks more clunky which, against catcher, will come back to bite you anyway. Watch me play a 312 alakazam-clone-thing or a 3-1-3 magnezone line because I want to get ONE! copy up. Great deckbuilding indeed... You can either be effective and pray or clunk your deck up to the maximum at which point it becomes totally unflexible and stuffed with deaddraws.
You realize you have to justify your point if you want it to matter, yes? Stating that a player can no longer try to TecH a Stage 2 Pokemon so their deck can run with a single copy
requires convincing us this is both part of the intent of the game and good for the game. I allow for it on occasion, but based on my experiences it
should be hard to do!
So what does catcher do:
increasy reliance on opening hands - check
increase advantage of going first - check
kills any sort of tech / bench sitter - check
forces players to build incredibly clunky decks - check
Decreases reliance on coin flips - check
Increases advantage of going first - check (now explain why that is bad!)
Forces Bench Sitters to be a real part of the deck - check
Forces players to follow good deck building - check
Yes when we only take our own opinions into account, it can dramatically alter an argument.
I agree Pokemon Catcher makes going first more of an advantage... but I also disagree about how much of an increase this truly grants, and whether a balanced opening is possible within the Pokemon TCG. All the same stuff you can do with
Pokemon Catcher, you could do with
Pokemon Reversal so long as you flipped "heads". Reliability in these combos is a huge deal, but I know when I build a deck I already had to take most of this into account; all I've lost is the occasional "lucky" open when an opponent would fail at these coin tosses. You will encounter it much more frequently because it no longer depends on a coin toss, but it wasn't the kind of thing you could rely on no one playing and thus not prepare for anyway.
I'd also point out that its the current damage output of
certain Pokemon that makes a first turn
Pokemon Catcher so devastating. Think about it: if we didn't have the likes of
Zekrom or its ilk, most of the time using
Pokemon Catcher to force up something like a
Tepig and go for the FTKO would require drawing into and using up
several PlusPower. What happens if a player doesn't play or can't draw into those
PlusPower. Its almost funny when you think of what it would mean to the game.
"Oh no, you forced my
Tepig meant to Evolve into
Emboar Active. It is never meant to be Active unless I am desperate and/or need to attack with it for game. I guess I'll just use
Switch to force it to the Bench and Evolve it anyway since you'll have to burn a second
Pokemon Catcher and attack at a later turn to finish it off. Plus you ignored my opening attacker who will now last another turn and probably take another Prize because of this."
Now, while the "problem Pokemon" were released in the US
first, I thought they came out at the same time as
Pokemon Catcher in Japan and either way, it would just be an act of incompetence for TPC to have designed all the "problem Pokemon" and then randomly said to themselves "Let's reprint
Gust of Wind, or actually just release an Item with the same effect but a new name!" on a whim. They have to have tested this and if they couldn't remember what the game was like 12 years ago, that's a bad sign. With the strong Basic Pokemon that are good to go first turn (albeit usually with a combo) that can OHKO most any Basic, it does make me worry a little.
But I guess with great players you mean those players that stack thewir decks to prevent non-great opening hands, right? In this case I absolutly agree, great players will love these changes.
The thought that people think "great players" can prevent bad opening hands gives me a headache...
As do people that resort to petty insults instead of arguing the substance. There are most definitely reasons to be concerned about
Pokemon Catcher, and instead of voicing them I end up putting down the bad arguments that would, by their existence, distract from the real issues. It is clear reading your words that what I consider solid deck building, you consider bad, "clunky" for example. Where as I do allow for innovative Pokemon builds where someone might include a 1-0-1 line of a Stage 2 or something similar, I do not feel a player should be able to rely on a build that uses less than three of the final Stage Pokemon. That is to say, if you run a 2-X-2 line (where X varies depending on things like
Rare Candy usage),
you should not consider it a reliable part of your deck but a daring risk. Now if you are arguing that it isn't even a daring risk anymore but a wasted effort, I can see your concern but notice I have had to put words in your mouth
and assume to get to this point: your hyperbole has muddied your point so it is unclear.
IMO the game should be as un-opening hand focused as possible. If I have a bad hand Ill have a disadvantage but Ill be able to fight myself back in. With catcher, catching up (HA HA HA) is way way harder cause your opponent can just control you at will. Opening hands will decide even more games.
I am not sure I follow your point. A TCG is a TCG: the luck of the draw is there. I agree that a well designed game shouldn't find a good opening hand unbeatable or a poor one a death sentence. You really missed your shot at reviving the old "optional mulligan" discussion, ya know?
Of course
Pokemon Catcher can totally ruin a good player's set-up as well, it is just naturally harder for the struggling player to do that
as it should be. The game is no fun when anyone can top deck into a "power play" that reverses the game. Your statement that opening hands will decide even more games is unfortunately true, but again the question is
how much of an increase will it be?
Reversal is a bad card for the format either but its flippyness prevents it from being played in every deck and makes it somewhat unattractive, people know they cant rely on it so they try to go without it.
Catcher is just unfair and stupidly broken.
Like many, my main (perhaps only) problem with
Pokemon Catcher is the lack of
cost in using it. Otherwise the nature of Pokemon requires something to disrupt the Bench that can be easily run in most decks.
Pokemon Reversal tried to do this by being based on a coin toss, and
was still very nearly a deck staple. Did every deck use it? No. Does its unreliable nature make it less attractive? Yes. Was it still widely used and rare not to see in a deck, unless they had something that was a viable alternative?
Yes. It really is hard to tell whether it is better to have a this kind of effect based on a coin toss or not. I used to think it obvious until I experienced it. Realistically you shouldn't build your deck assuming your opponent will rarely or never succeed with
Pokemon Reversal, but in doing so you leave yourself vulnerable to other problems, so at least with
Pokemon Catcher the changes are justified and odds are will become standardized.
Pokemon Catcher is overpowered, but if you want "stupidly broken" remember Yu-Gi-Oh. If
Pokemon Catcher were on the power level of the worst of Yu-Gi-Oh cards, you'd gain control of the Pokemon targeted until the end of your opponent's next turn. Or the
Gust of Wind like effect would be tied to a Stage 2 Pokemon... and while it might have a big cost it would have even bigger bonus effects, like discarding attached cards to your opponent's Pokemon instead, all on top of a Stage 2 with 150 HP, reasonable Weakness, a Retreat Cost that ultimately won't matter, and solid-to-great attacks. Odds are it won't Evolve normally, but that the unusual way it does Evolve would be built into its lower Stages and actually make it
faster. Think
Change of Heart or
Chaos Emperor Dragon - Envoy of the End, respectively. Not perfect analogues but the fundamental differences of the game make that all but impossible. Anyway, that is the "stupidly broken" level of power that began and seems to re-appear every few formats in Yu-Gi-Oh. :thumb:
- A good and skillful game has as little of a luckfactor as possible.
- Catcher makes opening hands extremly important because you can punish subpar openings so hard and will always be a step ahead
- Even good players with good and solid decks cant prevent bad opening hands, they might be able to fight their way out of it under normal circumstances but catcher can (just like sp) crush every chance of a comeback.
- A good portion of cards will become completly unplayable because they need some sort of build up time / preparation, this isnt possible with catcher and pokemon like chincino / donphan / yanmega / etc.
Not sure how much I agree with any of these.
- I don't have to have luck reduced to an absolute minimum, just make sure it doesn't win entire tournaments or lose them for players not running the cards. I have no problem with, for example, a coin toss heavy deck that allows a Pokemon League newbie to challenge a vet. If that kind of balance proves impossible, then I do agree and the luck not inherent to the design of the TCG should be minimized.
- Pokemon Catcher makes going first a greater advantage and makes it easier for a player with a good opening hand to establish a broad lead against a player with a poor opening hand. So far I've been given one example of it legitimately enabling a win first turn (and thus having no counter), and that requires Seeker and setting up at least a single strong attack, and doesn't work if your opponent opens with at least three Pokemon.
- Your third point is false, or at least only true in select circumstances. I saw players fight their way back from bad hands in Unlimited facing down Gust of Wind. Until I see the opposite regularly happening in Modified, I am not going to assume it to be an impossibility.
- This point is true, but doesn't prove Pokemon Catcher bad in and of itself: there are many cards that if we remove them, cards that perform poorly suddenly become better. I feel it good to discuss, just be careful not to assume too much or overly rely on it.
Just imagine this:
I play an incredible good deck against some sort of beatdown. I have a bad hand but I can make a comeback after saccing 1 or 2 pokemon and taking some damage. I sac some stuff then fight back and can still prevent him from running over me with my strategy. Not imagine the same thing with catcher.
lol comeback *insert trollface*
I imagined it with
Pokemon Catcher the first time. :thumb: In fact it was
Pokemon Catcher that allowed you, in part, to make your comeback. You see your opponent was running a simple beatdown deck so that by using your
Pokemon Catcher defensively, said opponent had to either pay to retreat, wait for a
Switch, Bench,
Shaymin, or abandon their current attacker and build up the new Active. You fed your opponent a few Basics, and while sure enough your opponent took them down, you got your deck's main hitter underway. In the mean time, you also used cards like
Twins as well a
Bouffalant with Revenge, a
Double Colorless Energy, and (admittedly lucky)
Black Belt (obviously multiple Supporters stretched out over multiple turns) to catch (pardon the pun) your opponent completely off guard since they were only worried about the Stage 2 you were building.
In the same scenario without
Pokemon Catcher, you win if they get "tails" and you "get heads" and you might still win if you both get "tails" all the time. If you both get "heads" all the time or just they get "heads", you lose.
So what does this fanciful imagining "prove"? Mostly that creative thinking and deck building, as well as outsmarting your opponent makes a comeback feasible. Against the opponent's you faced at Worlds this might not be so easy, and honestly I normally skip signature "titles" because they are so untrustworthy. If you really are a top player, I suggest you look at the flip side: lesser players won't be able to luck into a win so easily. I know it might not seem like it at first, but please ask yourself: if I get a great hand and my less skilled opponent gets a bad hand, shouldn't it be a blow out? If I get a poor hand and a more skilled player gets a good hand, shouldn't it be incredibly hard for me to win outside of them making mistakes?
Catcher will make opening hands incredible important, it will also make comebacks really hard and ruin a big part of the card pool. Trainer lock is clunky and absolutly no fun but will be the only option.
I disagree with most of this. Opening hands are
already incredibly important. It will "ruin" a hunk of the card pool, but
Pokemon Reversal already existed so a large portion was already out, and some of what is "ruined" was
too powerful without Pokemon Catcher! You know, like Pokemon that hid behind Sweet Sleeping Face. I would have preferred
other solutions (like reprinting
Warp Point) but that doesn't detract that
Pokemon Catcher still deals with that particular issue. I just flat out disagree about Trainer lock entirely, but I tend to enjoy such decks.:lol:
And yes, people will adapt, but what does that even mean? People wouldve adopted to sablelock as well, by playing sablelock, "people will adapt" is such a no-argument. If everyone plays sablelock everyone will have adapted so everything is fine I guess...?! Thought so.
People will adapt, everyone will play beatdown because with overly powerful basics/cheap attacks and the concept of a bench completly gone you dont have much of a choice...
Many of us saying "players will adapt" already
saw players adapt to Gust of Wind. You are correct that we can't just hand-wave people's concerns, but the truth of the matter is
our current way of playing is how we adapted to what came before. There are many things done now that were ridiculous in the past, and that not everyone finds fun as a part of the modern game. We are unfortunately dealing with extremes: either a format where slopping deck building becomes an asset for what it allows you to include in your deck and luck-based plays rob the better player of a win, or a format where decks have to adhere to fairly static ratios and tend to be dull or "cheap" in how they score their wins with brutal efficiency.:frown:
Rare Candy nerf was a GREAT step in the right direction, stopping the powercreep from the sf-pt sets was a great step, and one card will nullify all the effort. I wish I knew what those people in japan think when they decide this kind of stuff.
If
Pokemon Catcher makes the game worst than all those changes,
its the player's fault. No, really: I learned this watching what dominated at a small league, and then larger and larger metagames. Sometimes what is
popular isn't what is the
best. The game is designed so that cards are checks and balances for each other, so when Card A is ignored, Card B (which it balanced out) becomes dominant and Card C (which Card B was to balance out) becomes unplayable. Cards D, E and F which were to be the foundation for a second triad of good decks also see less play because with the imbalance, playing Card B (and it's decks) are so far above and beyond them in terms of results.
So in the end we all have to accept that pokemon will become pretty basic and beatdownish for the next 2 years (cause I doubt theyll release anything that could counter this, looking at the last few sets).
I mean, maybe, and Im serious about this, this is the way they wanted this game to be played, short beatdown matches and prize races, some things really make it look that way. But I also know that I started playing pokemon back then because the game was the exact opposite of this, the exact opposite of ygtopdecko, a game with incredible consistency, incredible teching and "this might be a nice trick" options and a game with a good balance between beatdown and setup.
Maybe delta was a fluke, idk, if you enjoy this beatdown style then thats good for you, but its absolutly not what I want to play. But I guess it took people 2 years to realize that sp decided a lot of games with opening hands because it did exactly what I described above.
It took the Pokemon SP format to remind me of Yu-Gi-Oh. Well, and what the Unlimited format has become with the rules changes and some more recent card releases. So yet again, I think you're getting yourself worked up (and trying to work up others) for nothing. Well, perhaps not nothing but you're making a mountain out of a big hill. Even if
Pokemon Catcher is a problem, there are potential counters that could be made, and hoping for them isn't a vast religious undertaking but simple "well that was stupid, but if the company wants to stay in business they'd better fix it" thinking.
"Well I can try this and put down my 1 magnemite, I cant get a second one right now because my opening hand was bad so I guess Ill just pray he cant ko it immediatly and I can actually draw some cards. Its not like I can do anything else"
Yeah thinking ahead, great idea...
Remember a bad opening hand isn't entirely the fault of luck. A good deck is consistent, and for
years Pokemon has had cards that allowed players much leeway, perhaps far too much leeway, in how they built their decks. Decks that were once considered sloppy in their design became "daring builds" because of the safety net the different formats (and cardpools) provided. A good deck is going to drop multiple of an important Basic meant to Evolve on their first turn. If they can't,
it is a bad build or bad luck and that is that. You'll also notice your mock example ignore that indeed, your opponent can have a bad hand too, and before we had
Pokemon Catcher it would have been "pray he gets 'tails' if he (or she) has a
Pokemon Reversal". Decks may not be able to rely on
always getting their Stage 2 Pokemon out by their second turn, but is that bad?
Could it a problem? Yes. Is it as big a problem as you make it out to be? I doubt it. It is certainly no
Magical Scientist FTK,
Cyberstein OTK or spamming
Umbreon* with
Scoop Up in Unlimited. We are talking about a player who had some bad luck loosing. Not a player who lost because they didn't draw into the one counter card that could have saved them.
How does GoW make you think ahead more?! You cant oredict if he can kill yout stuff, you can play with the thought that he might do it in mind, but if you cant do anything about it, whats the point of thinking about it to begin with. If your opponent has all the catchers and kos youre dead, no point in thinkign ahead, once youre behind you can only get out of it if your opponent whiffs on the catcher.
Thinking ahead because you know you'll have to actually
work at stuff taken for granted the last seven or so years of the game, but that players dealt with (even if while grumbling) the first five years, even during early Modified formats. I must be careful not to sound so harsh, because
I do worry that Pokemon Catcher is bad for the game but the hyperbole I see so many resorting to confuses the issue, and there seems to be a general dismissal or the level of strategy required in past formats.
Build better decks as in, "build incredible clunky decks with tons of twins so I can atleast atempt a comeback, therefore stripping my decks of all clever techs, cute plays etc because theyre a liability"?!
Work harder on playtesting as in "well this game was worthless because I couldnt fight back, the game before you did the same too me so wel have to play 100 games so that we can get some results that arent obviously decided by opening hands. Awesome, I love testing for 4 hours and get 2 real games down...
Build a better deck by acknowledging what used to work reliably doesn't anymore, and that perhaps it never should have. That if I run less than a 3-X-3 line of a card, I shouldn't count on it showing up all the time. Work hard by making sure to acknowledge when a shut out happened because I tried something fancy with my card ratios that made me too vulnerable to the inevitable bad hand, and that it may no longer be a valid approach to the game, just like for
years a classic Haymaker style deck and most of the skills it taught were wasted time and useless to players who started with that kind of format.
