What bugs me is that they started applying a more universal weakness to everything, rather than the actual weaknesses of the specific Pokémon. In turn, they've also made Resistance practically nonexistent. Like, why does Swampert and Seismitoad have a weakness to Lightning in current cards when they're part Ground-types in the game, while previous sets had them weak to Grass?
Game balance. Grass types have almost always been okayish and mostly defensive. Electric almost always has a major offfensive role in the meta and some big fancy new offensive card. As such, making it weak to electric rather than grass is a good way to make it weaker.
@@meeb_consumer Which is funny, because the one time a Grass-type card (Jungle Scyther) helped deliver a major disruption of the game, TPC made sure to never give that Pokémon or even Grass-types that kind of power again.
The odd thing about Dragons is how TPC avoided the issue of their disappearance for those 2 years. They ONLY printed dual-type Dragons, and ALWAYS as their secondary typing.
@@beunjoris No, from Sword & Shield Base to Evolving Skies (Sword & Shield 7). For SWSH 1-6, the only Dragon-type Pokemon they printed were dual-types, and always as the second type. For example, they printed Salamence V as Colorless (Flying), and didn't do a single-prize Bagon or Shelgon in order to dodge the issue of whether they were going to do Dragon again.
@@kstanni87 That's how I remember them being (or at least the notation on the card having the potential for them being that way) back when the card game initially launched. I think I stopped playing before the expansions, or at least never got any of the expansions.
I haven't touched the card game in a long time. But an idea did come from seeing how they handled Dragon types. They could have done the same with every type and just not given every type their own energy. So flying types can resist ground without resisting rock, maybe even some could be weak to rock, psychic types could be weak to ghosts without being weak to themselves, etc. But ground, rock and fighting could still share the same energy type and maybe even color, so using them together would help for synergy.
just do something like MTG and have five "mana" types, but pokemon be separate. i.e. fire, water, psychic, lightning, colorless. I think it'd be pretty great.
At the time Fairy cards were made, I really liked the colour pink so I used to collect them but when I see the psychic card Fairy Pokémon now, I feel disappointed.
same here except i wasn't interested in cards back then. but i thought it was cool. now i buy cards sometimes and it's sad there's no pretty pink ones.
This might sound silly, but it's actually the reason I stopped collecting and playing. I mean, I started when the fairy type was added, so I guess it made sense that I would leave when it was removed.
Removing Fairy Type from the card game honnestly made the cardgame typing more confusing than it was before, since they shuffled around Poison Types to shove Fairy types in with Psychic and Ghost types. Hopefully it comes back, since Mimikyu needs more Fairy type cards ;-;
The poison type shift was confusing, but I kind of like it. Dark is my favorite type but there's not enough dark type pokemon to make decks out of. The new poison dark types more than doubles the number of pokemon than can be dark type, and add a status-theme to the type, which is fun to play with. Clodsire-Ex decks are so great
@@Kmn483 fair, I would think Ghost would've worked better for the switch though, since Dark and Ghost are more similar, and Ghost is weak to itself too, so it'd work mechanically too.
And let’s be fair, it made no sense for poison types to be considered psychic. At least I can kind of see the connection between poison and dark, or fairy and psychic, even if it’s not totally accurate.
@@VinTheDirector True, the only reason I think Poison matches better with psychic rather than dark is the coloration. Fairy does match pretty well with psychic, so even if the Fairy energy doesn't return it isn't too bad. Ghost works with either purple or black, but fits better with Dark types as a whole rather than psychic. (Poison in general is hard to fit into any of the main type groups lol)
Fascinating stuff. I played 1999-2001 and got back into the game last year. I love the historical recap so I know how we're at the state we are. Playing Kyogre Lostbox at my local card shop on Sunday thanks to you!
They fucked up with the weaknesses and resistances. Instead of using the in-game type effectiveness logic, they started to treat all Pokemon of a TCG type as the same exact game type. For example, all dark Pokemon were weak to fighting at one point, even poison type Pokemon even though poison resists fighting. In the past, poison type Pokemon were either grass or psychic in the TCG, but were still weak to psychic, not to either fire or dark. But then they go absolutely crazy and make Houndoom as a dark type weak to GRASS?! When it's actually weak to fighting, they make him weak to grass of all types because bug is a small part of the grass TCG type. OK. Houndoom isn't even weak to bug because he's also fire type. He's weak to fighting, ground and rock, which are all fighting type in the TCG. The perfect weakness and they screw it up. They also made Swampert weak to lightning instead of weak to grass and maybe even a lightning resistance. They used to have water Pokemon be weak to either grass or lightning.
100% valid on most of this, but Dark type Poison pokemon being weak to fighting can be argued to make sense since fighting types in the tcg also encompass ground types, which are super effective against poison.
My favorite thing was collecting both cards with different types for a dual-type mon, but I haven’t been following as of late so I don’t know if they still do that
7:30 it's actually up to 7 Now: Fire>Grass>Dark>Psychic>Fighting>Lightning>Water>Fire, with some variations here and there(Mostly to add Steel, which tends to beat Psychic, then lose to Fire). Dragon and Colorless are now Wild Cards: Dragons have no weakness but have to use a variety of Types for attack, Colorless can use any cards for cost but have nothing weak to them.
What I don't understand are why newer dragons (Giratina VSTAR, Altaria ex, etc.) aren't weak to dragon types. Having no weaknesses makes them meta defining
The game has evolved into one big coin flip strategy where going second is much more better and having the ability to obliterate a defending Pokemon ASAP is crucial to winning. Roaring Moon EX, Hisuian Arcanine V, Chien-Pao EX, and potentially Tsereena EX has those moves that doesn't care about resistances. If you're weak, I deal 300+ damage, doesn't matter if HP and resistances goes over 400 damage. And there's a card, Iron Hands EX, who pretty much has an accelerated wincon of ripping 1 more prized card.
I used to play a Xerneas and Aromatisse deck years ago. I did quite well with it in local tournaments. It was a favorite deck of mine and a super easy deck to build. I briefly considered fairy type Pokemon as my favorite. I then took a break from the TCG for a few years only to return to find that the type was completely gone. I believe it was when I first saw a psychic Gardevoir and I thought “what the heck is this?” So, goodbye fairy type. We hardly knew ye.
They never should have removed the fairy types... the types don't even effect the game balance that much (in my experience at least). Above all else, the most unforgiveable part of this, that pink color was a _really nice shade of pink!_ I can't believe they removed it. >:(
Weakness and resistance still feels like an under-utilised mechanic in the TCG, I am very much an amateur player and often forget about weakness and resistance, but I’m rarely ever caught out by it
You don’t see it in game play, because the meta at large pushes decks out. Like Mew VMAX being pushed out of the meta because Charizard EX could OHKO and prize faster.
@@SeisoYabai When mons can already OHKO, weakness doesn't matter. likewise, taking 30 less damage is meaningless against 200-300 damage hits. weakness and resistance mattered more when numbers were smaller. and when it would matter, like when lightning decks are topping, no one is gonna play water into that, and thus then doesn't matter. for example, when PikaRom was the top deck, you didn't see any water decks, because PikaRom was already good into non-water, it would essentially be autowins against water.
I think what annoys me the most about the TCG’s decision to remove the fairy type is how the dragon type never got its own basic energy yet retains its unique typing and card color scheme (albeit a changed color since it was first introduced in BW). As someone who admittedly doesn’t play the TCG and only collects, I don’t see why fairy types couldn’t continue to bear the fairy typing and the gorgeous pink color but just have their attacks cost random combinations of the other basic energies - just like all dragon types do.
The only reason Dragon was absent from the game for 2 years was exactly because fairies were being removed. It took 2 years for them to fully remove the fairies from standard play and they didnt wanted to make the only type weak to it suddenly not weak anymore. So to avoid backlash they simply stoped printing dragon type cards for a while. Fairies are most likely never returning to the tcg.
Fairies in the TCG were great. I had a fairy deck with a Xerneas that dumps energies out onto my benched Pokemon, and then they'd evolve into letting me move energy around wherever AND things with fairy energy had protection. It was neat lol
Removed types in Pokemon are always fascinating conceptually. Kinda like how the ???-type was removed from the maingames and replaced with typeless.(Which effectively does the same thing because the only non-cosmetic use of the type was unused in ???-Arceus, but it's just a neat thing to think about, lol)
I think they could have binned fairy type energy but kept fairy type in game, similar to dragons, though it's definitely tough to give enough Pokemon fairy weakness when dragon should also get dragon weaknesses, dark should get fighting weakness, and fighting should also have psychic/water/grass weakness. I don't see much reason why we can't have actual fighting/ground/rock type cards that all share fighting type energy and same for water/ice sharing water energy. Giving each pokemon 2 or 3 weaknesses would help with keeping them all relevant. It would certainly be tougher to balance though.
You missed the part where Fairy pokemon suddenly were Psychic type and Poison pokemon were suddenly Dark type. They didn't have to do that when they temporarily dropped Dragon, hence why they needed to officially cancel the type to explain all the other knock-on effects.
I feel like trying to differentiate rock/fighting/ground or water/ice without giving them different energies is pretty much impossible, and wouldn't change anything. The only thing they could do is make like, cards that specifically only interact with Ground types or only with Fighting types, but that kind of ends up feeling arbitrary. Imagine if Baxcalibur in the modern game couldn't attach water energy to non-"ice type" pokemon. It would be so much less good and more importantly less interesting. Fewer groups is significantly better.
I feel like, if they are willing to move types around. I would rather have Lightning linked into Fire, use that spot to separate Ice and Flying into new Flying type. Move Rock to Steel and have Fairies and Dragons linked. This way we keep 18 types hidden within 10 TCG types. And everything is more spread and kinda linear when it comes to weaknesses and resistances. Grass (Grass/Bug), Fire (Fire/Electric), Water (Water), Flying (Ice/Flying), Fighting (Ground/Fighting), Steel (Steel/Rock), Psychic (Ghost/Psychic), Fairy (Dragon/Fairy), Dark (Dark/Poison), Colourless (Normal). The reshuffle fixes the awkwardness of Rock inside Fighting and Ice inside Water. Dragons can now have their own energy - and be properly weak to both itself, Fairies and new Flying type. This would also significantly affect Fire, Steel and Water and it would make Dark more relevant type.
I remember as a kid being pretty surprised about the dragon cards being colorless. I had always thought they'd be fire types in the tcg since that would have made the most sense to me.
Its kinda crazy that they can just do that. As a mainly VGC/Smogon player, it feels like if they just took Fairy out of the games today and pretended they never existed
I played TCG online in those weird middle days when they were putting out the Sword/Shield sets, but also you could use sets before that that were balanced around Fairy being an energy type. I was genuinely the only person I saw on there running a Fairy deck. The format I played was using precon decks, and there was one deck I saw a bunch that was a Dragonite Sun/Moon deck, which was really scary when I wasn't running my fairy deck. In X/Y and Sun/Moon the check for dragons was having a fairy type (among other things but that was the simplest one). Because there was that check their strength generally didn't have downsides other than having to use multiple energy types. So when that check is no longer in use, now you have monsters that can hit very hard very quickly. Now Dragons have counters on their cards themselves, high energy costs on strong attacks or low power on quick attacks. Doesn't mean they aren't scary, I've been scared by a stock Giratina VStar deck that people run that's absolutely nightmarish if you can't shut it down early enough.
I don't know much about the card game, apart from that the seven energies actually make a lot of sense when you look at type distributions in the earliest games. Ice was almost never seen without water, rock was rarely seen without ground, half of grass was seen with poison, half of bug was seen with poison flying was always a modifier type that disregards all other typing rules (like fire and electric having no dual types and the rules around rock and ice) ghost and dragon had one line each and dragon was built around being a defensive type and fighting was a pretty uncommon type of 8 Pokemon (5 evolution lines) which may signify the cutoff point.
Dude I love your videos they’re so well produced! Because of you, I got recommended to watch the livestream of the Portland regionals, then I realized how fun the meta game atm seems so after a few days of learning about the current meta I decided to go play in a tournament last night at a local shop in my city for the first time in over 10 years!
@@orsonzeddThis thinking encourages power creep, and power creep ruins games. I'd rather have a clean game because it's well-balanced over a dirty/broken game where people play Solitaire-but-Pretty-Art because there's no balance or little balance.
I feel like something this video could have benefitted from touching more on why it's so important to minimize the amount of types the game has to balance. Fairy type existing was a drag on resources that made things more complicated and essentially ensured it would never be able to stand on its own as a type. The only good Fairy type cards in the game were good completely unrelated to being a fairy type, and honestly, it felt like a gimmick for most of its lifespan. Fairy type and Psychic Type are pretty much already the same concept, magic, cosmically powered purple/pink creatures, so Fairy being a separate type just kinda made them feel like a more bland Psychic type. The game, and Fairy type Pokémon are better off as Psychic type, as is the entire game. The more distinct types in the game, the less the developers can put into each type. When i see people talk about how we should have a separate Ice type, or a separate Ground type, or anything like that, it makes me just want to ask them to try theorycrafting a set with all those types, and then try to do it again, and then again, and see how much they can contribute to keep that balanced. It's not feasible at all.
Just don’t make fairy energy. Give the type unique proporties but use a different energy. If the Pokémon in the card is a dual type you use the energy of that type
@@seaberrysvideodump9602 That doesn't fix the problem, at all though. We see with Dragon types and right now in the game, Tera Pokemon, how difficult it can be for those specific cards to get set up because they have to blend resources or can't benefit from the resources they want to use because their type is shifted from their original type. See a Pokemon like Mewtwo ex who would be a really fun card if it was just a Psychic type like normal, but because it's a Tera Electric Mewtwo, it couldn't benefit from effects it would've loved to benefit from, like Fog Crystal, Gardevoir ex's Ability, etc. Even in a perfect world where we build every effect to make it nice and easy to run Fairy types without any complications or limitations, you have to ask what we *actually* gain from having them instead of fitting them into the thematically apt Psychic type. Dragon Pokemon have a weakness (they could just be weak to themselves again, or weak to water or psychic if they really wanted that without Fairy), and... nothing else, really? There comes a point with every card game with multiple types/archetypes/etc where there is just too many for no real purpose. It's dramatically better to have a few, highly synergistic, well designed, balanced types than to try to get as many specific types that remove synergy and balance from the game.
@@SquidSystem you right.. hmmm buut what if.. fairy types were exclusively dual types? and thus could use the energy of the 2nd type? im cooking here... maybe
He likely meant as a Basic energy. In Gen II and III, Darkness and Metal Energy were special energy cards you could only have 4 of each per deck. They also had bonus effects tied to them, with Darkness increasing the Pokemon's damage dealt and Metal reducing the Pokemon's damage taken. Diamond and Pearl finally made both full-fledged types in the game you could make entire decks with instead of an unwieldy gimmicks that you could at best splash into a deck.
i wonder why they moved poison over to darkness, rather than ghost. for one thing ghost shares almost the same offensive matchup as dark in the main games so their weaknesses are usually shared ones. (both hit psychic/ghost and are resisted by dark)
Thinking about just the Poison type on its own it makes much more sense as Dark than Psychic. If it wasn't originally Psychic, nobody would think it belongs there, whereas Ghost is similar enough in that they're a kind of spiritual energy sort of deal.
It's not just the removal of fairy typing that urked me. It was also that they didn't get fairy's resistance to darkness types when Sword and Shield came out. Both of these grinds my gears to the absolute max!!
That was an intentional design choice, because Darkness types in SwSh also included Poison type Pokemon. Since Poison types are statistically supereffective against Fairy types, and Dark types are not very effective, they split the difference and gave them neutrality.
I treid the pokemon tcg when they where added. I left for two reasons. One, the deck i made absolutly made my freinds rage quit (i made a mono fairy built around free rotating xernius ex early game till i could feild garde ex and be hitting for 180+) and then this happened right after. Back when i played yugioh tcg, they did a similar deal that just compleatly invalidated my deck, meanwhile my magic decks have cards that are like 15 to 20 years old that i can still use (not in standard format, im not much of a turnament goer) when i saw the game power creep i bailed. Shame too, my short stint was a blast
I haven't touched the game in a long time, and the biggest shock I learned was that the TCG only had 5 types, had to break open my 25-years-old collection binder to realize that really was the case 😅Can't believe I never realized all the types that got combined despite spending so long on it back in '98
Yugioh has 25 types and even if you take out the Divine Beast and Creator God types, there’s still 23, 5 more than there are in the pokemon games. And the people who play the video games have to know the type matchups and how dual types affect them, the weaknesses and resistances are literally printed on every card. There’s no reason they can’t update this system And that’s not to mention how asinine it is to give moves different types only to have the weakness and resistances be based on the pokemon itself and not the move it’s using
@@StarSeraphStanthat's just not true. Types and Attributes absolutely do matter for decks, so much so that they had to create types like Wyrm just so the already-existing types would get less support.
7:53 Garbodor is weak to psychic in the games, but weak to fighting as a dark type Pokemon because some "fighting" types are actually ground types. But this also means it's weak to actual fighting type Pokemon like Machamp even though poison resists fighting!
Lol you act like this is a new problem. Base set Doduo is resistant to fighting even tho it's weak to rock. Jynx is weak to psychic because of ghost even tho it is resistant to psychic. Why did 11 people like this comment
I used to think weaknesses were kinda dumb in the TCG, but honestly. After playing a bunch, watching competitive, etc. I actually like having less variables on this (although I miss resistances in 2024), and I think most competitive players feel that way as well. I've even heard opinions about removing weaknesses from the game entirely (which would be pretty bad, its the only reason Charizard ex doesnt completely dominate the format).
Poison types have got to be the most passed off type in the TCG going from grass to psychic to now being represented by dark. I had a conversation about this with my 7yo nephew as he has a lot to say about TCG typings and how they make 0 sense.
If I was really silly, I would put every type into the TCG but give most of them the Dragon treatment (just use random other energies instead of energy for that specific type)
It's because they were scared of the Fairies. Pokemon feared their power. That's why they don't let me play fairies no more. 😢 I still think removing fairies but bringing Dragons back was kinda dumb.
I know this vid is old but: i have two kinds of grimer cards so poison is a little weird...one is psychic and the other is grass. No. Neither are delta species cards.
I use basic fairy energies in my retro "Do the Wave" deck. However, I always keep a stack of equivalent assorted energies just incase someone isn't ok with me using them in a retro format
@@ceulgai2817 fairy energies didnt exist back then, so even though they usually dont make any difference (there might be but I havent found any reason yet), some people may not feel comfortable with me running them, which is ok. I run them just because they look cute.
Power creep. Older cards tend to not perform well on pokemon tcg. Its been a while but i recall cards I had that where from the last gen underperformed compared to newer cards. True if your not in standard you can play what you want, but a newer deck might just roll over a older one. Mind you I lost played right around the event the vid is about. They might have chilled the creep, can't confirm.
Talking about Pokemon types being represented in the TCG, and with how the TCG energies having represented different combinations of types, reminds me of a video by DeltaSeeker called “How accurate are Pokemon Types in the TCG?” He has his own opinions on what Pokemon types should be represented with each energy based off in-game type interactions but I did have a thought of “what if Pokemon Types were grouped thematically” Grass: Grass, Poison, Bug Water: Water, Ice (no change) Fighting: Fighting, Ground, Rock (no change) Psychic: Psychic, Fairy Dark: Dark, Ghost Normal: Normal, Steel, Flying Dragon: Dragon (no change) Fire and Electric being combined into 1 “power/energy” themed energy to represent both types, fire for fire starter and the classic “Grass, Water, Fire” triangle, electric for that sweet Pikachu promotion.
Honestly I kinda wish there’d be a new card game using a fresh start of new modern conventions and emphasizing adventuring more, or at least a larger tabletop game like we used to have. I don’t think it’d ever happen though.
That's crazy. I remember getting the first sets of dragon and fairy type pokemon when it came out when I was a kid. That Raquaza EX will always live rent free in my mind, next to the Xerneas EX I got from the packs
It is worth noting Dragon did not receive any dragon cards from the final SM set all the way to Evolving skies, the last set of the 2nd block of sword and shield, Likely due to not wanting to create cards that would give the already dominant four gods deck power.
Given dragon types have a gimmick of using dual type energy to be more difficult. Maybe a mechanic where fairy energy can’t be treated as colorless would make it different enough to mess with, it’d require fairy type Pokemon to always have some other energy on hand if their attacks require it.
I do wish they kept it as alternate print of the Psychic energy, tbh. The pink cards were super cute. Just change the symbol to the eye and you could still have it work.
most comments, if not all: *discourse about trading card game* me, a rando suffering from terminal terraria brain rot 7:14: "ANCIENTS AWAKENED?!!? INFINITY ZERO?!!?"
What bothers me,e so much is that they reworked things in SWSH for the sake of balance but we don’t have balance at all. I know balance isn’t with weaknesses alone, like say for example more types are weak to fighting than psychic but maybe you balance this with how much energy you need how much damage you do, resistances, etc. But idk although it was so poorly received in Reddit my proposal for rearrangement of the weaknesses in game I still think TPC can do better. My balance proposed was that each type represents 2, you have the same amount of weaknesses per type, each video game type was represented somehow, all weaknesses made sense in a simplified matter (as in regardless if, say Hisuian Zoroark comes to TCG as ghost the normal type becomes irrelevant or vice versa). The only thing that later on and while playing more I kinda understand TPC decision with dragon not having weakness and no hitting for weakness & colorless not hitting for weaknesses. It does give certain uniqueness to these types and makes them interesting, instead of making everything “balanced” on paper. Maybe I’ll make a video someday bc like I even came with 3 proposals 😅that are progressively more drastic, bc I actually retain a lot of what’s already in the game
The new Pokemon TCG mobile game kinda fixed this where card weakness and resistances can differ even with the same Types like we have Colorless who has resistance to Fighting. They split fairy types to Psychic, Grass and Colorless too. Dragon still exists tho. Strongest type in paper but very hard to manage energies as they need fire and electric type energies for attacks. Oh and the Poison types have been put to Dark now which is good and makes sense.
as if the "Rock paper Scissor" of typing in the game actually matters where most of the time you oneshot the pokemon anyway. It WAS maybe back then a huge part when you didn't had attacks that did 150 plus dmg but nowadays???
2:00 - OHHHH, so THAT’S why I keep misremembering Psychic Pokémon as being weak to Psychic in the video games. I collected those cards for a short time after they came out.
it's a bit of an unpopular opinion, but I think the removal of fairy type did make a lot of sense for balancing. Remember that fairy being removed wasn't the only thing that changed, the big thing was the nerfing of psychic and indirect buff to grass and metal aswell as a indirect nerf to fighting that came with it. Before the change like 90% of psychic were weak to psychic while both dark and lightning were weak to fighting. Darkness only hit ghost pokemon for weakness, which 50% of the time were also weak to ghost (thus psychic). another problem is that water pokemon just had too many different weakness. between lightining, grass and metal usually the designers would make everything weak to lightning and rarely care about the other types This screwed up the rock-paper-scissors balancing around weakness, which really favored some types over others (also coupled on how some types are better than others because their identity lines better with what makes a good deck), removing fairy, moving poison to dark giving another weakness for grass to hit, making more pokemon weak to darkness helped even the matchups a lot Fairy will be missed, they had a lot of cool gimmicks, unfortunately even if expanded was a real thing in ptcgl they are already pretty powercrept by now
And we’re out here wondering why Giratina VStar is the BDIF - after watching this whole video - I do not understand why Fairy was removed. We need it back.
Fairy types have always been my favorite, ever since I started playing the game with a Sylveon/Gardevoir GX deck. I miss having that special identity for most of my favorite Pokemon in the TCG.
the hilarious thing about fusing ghost and psychic is that they already meant ghost to be the counter to psychic, but biffed it up in the programming. so rather than retcon, which they seem to hate doing even when it makes sense to, they just invented dark to take over where Ghost was meant to be. If anything, ghosts should have moved to that card type.
Dragon being represented by colorless made sense, they are resistent to the main types and have a diverse move pool like normal types, but there is a lot of dragons nowadays back in Gen 3 they were 4 families and like 3 legendaries. Poison being move around is funny, it represents how much of a nothing type it is
They really should've just moved Dragons to the Fire pool, they both had the weakest representation and it fits with the Water/Ice dynamic. They also could've added Steel to electric given the common weakness to ground types in the Fighting Energy pool. That actually makes it a lot more even, all Energy types except Fighting and Fairy have at least 2 types generally associated with it outside of rare exceptions.could even keep fairy with psychic energy to make it 8 energy types overall....but I'd still prefer Fairy to be it's own thing, my own preference really.
I don't really like the weakness mechanic in the TCG. Unlike in the videogames, which is literally THE POINT (if you want to be good, you need a balanced team, switch-ins to cover the weaknesses of other pokemons, etc: the pokémon videogame would be really stupid without weaknesses and resistances, it's literally the core mechanic), in the card games an efficient deck "is supposed" to be monotype or close to that. You may throw a tech or two that have colorless attacks, or splash in a "second type" or stuff like that, but MOST decks have a dominant type (let's say it's the type of which you play the most energies). Tera pokemons add a bit of flair to it (would you consider a Charizard ex deck fire-based or dark-based, despite playing no dark energies?) but most of the time decks have a clearly evident dominant type. Which means we SHOULDN'T splash all types together to "make it balanced" like you would team-build in the videogame. Which means that weaknesses have a huge impact on match ups without being reliant on actual gameplay-based mechanics. It feels arbitrary: you just have a bad matchup against a deck you would otherwise have a shot against because the card say so. Let me clarify: I'm not saying bad/good match ups shouldn't be a thing. But usually, in most card games, it's about the mechanics. If your deck relies on using the discard pile as a resource, and I play "discard pile-hate" (like stuff that removes cards from the game instead of sending it to the discard pile), then you're gonna have a bad time because my mechanic counters your mechanic. On the contrary, if I play a deck whose goal is to discard your cards (which is usually a bad thing to happen to you), you're going to thank me if you play that graveyard-reliant deck, my strategy ends up actually helping your gameplan. If I play a deck that moves damage around and heals, I'm going to be strong against a deck that does fast, consistent but "weak" damage that is supposed to bi/trishot my stuff and I'm going to be weak against a slower deck that aims at oneshotting, not giving me the chance to heal. These match ups I just described are "gameplay-based" ("the core strategy of my deck is good/bad against the core strategy of your deck"). That's great. I love that there are decks that do different things and have different styles, like the colors in magic (blue being control and counters, black being about graveyard and LP manipulation, red being about direct damage through effects and sacrificing your own creatures, green being about stomping with big sticks, white being about swarming etc etc). And it's okay that a gameplan is strong against another gameplan and weak against a different one, all fine and dandy. But most of the time (not always, thankfully) match ups in the pokémon card game end up being "your card says my card is stronger :) ". Sometimes with hilarious consequences (Charizard being weak to grass). It feels cheap and, ironically, unbalanced. If anything, I would have let the Pokemon TCG have all 18 types EXACTLY because of balance: with 18 types, the chances of weaknesses having any impact are low. Assuming every type in the game has one type it is weak to and one type it is strong towards, with 18 types there are 16/18 chances (8/9) that weaknesses won't be relevant in the game (if I have a fire deck, I'm strong against a grass deck, weak to a water deck, and my type will be irrelevant against the other 16 types of deck). With less than half of that, the chances of weaknesses being relevant is higher, and as I said earlier, the way they work in the pokemon tcg makes it a bad thing. Weaknesses are a bad mechanic that is just there to "mimic" the videogame (where, I repeat, it's great) and probably wouldn't be there at all if pokémon was born as an original TCG without being based on a pre-existing IP.
What bugs me is that they started applying a more universal weakness to everything, rather than the actual weaknesses of the specific Pokémon. In turn, they've also made Resistance practically nonexistent. Like, why does Swampert and Seismitoad have a weakness to Lightning in current cards when they're part Ground-types in the game, while previous sets had them weak to Grass?
Lightning weak Swampert is pretty cringe, but interestingly it was actually weak to Lightning in its debut set in the TCG.
Game balance. Grass types have almost always been okayish and mostly defensive. Electric almost always has a major offfensive role in the meta and some big fancy new offensive card. As such, making it weak to electric rather than grass is a good way to make it weaker.
@@meeb_consumer Which is funny, because the one time a Grass-type card (Jungle Scyther) helped deliver a major disruption of the game, TPC made sure to never give that Pokémon or even Grass-types that kind of power again.
Purely for balance, it's dumb, but they weigh what can answer it and give it weakness based solely on that. Game typing is irrelevant
@@TsukentoX??? Genesect ex virizion ex was meta for a few years and stayed good in expanded format for another 2 years
Sylveon and Espeon used to be on different type cards seeing them on the same type cards in card lists just feels weird
It evens out with Vaporeon and Glaceon
It feels wrong i hate it
This is the comment I was hoping to see
If we have a Ghost type Eeveelution its gonna get weirdier
The odd thing about Dragons is how TPC avoided the issue of their disappearance for those 2 years. They ONLY printed dual-type Dragons, and ALWAYS as their secondary typing.
What do you mean? Only Scarlet&Violet base missed out on Dragons?
@@beunjoris No, from Sword & Shield Base to Evolving Skies (Sword & Shield 7). For SWSH 1-6, the only Dragon-type Pokemon they printed were dual-types, and always as the second type. For example, they printed Salamence V as Colorless (Flying), and didn't do a single-prize Bagon or Shelgon in order to dodge the issue of whether they were going to do Dragon again.
I wish they'd go back to weakness being a +30 modifier instead of x2. It sucks when a matchup is basically unplayable due to weakness.
Yeah true.
I basically prayed I would never run into a blue deck when I played fire, because if I did I would automatically scoop
Maybe different weaknesses being +10, +30, +50, etc. modifiers on a case by case basis, just like how Resistances can vary.
@@RoninCatholic Diamond and Pearl era had that.
@@kstanni87 That's how I remember them being (or at least the notation on the card having the potential for them being that way) back when the card game initially launched. I think I stopped playing before the expansions, or at least never got any of the expansions.
I haven't touched the card game in a long time. But an idea did come from seeing how they handled Dragon types.
They could have done the same with every type and just not given every type their own energy. So flying types can resist ground without resisting rock, maybe even some could be weak to rock, psychic types could be weak to ghosts without being weak to themselves, etc. But ground, rock and fighting could still share the same energy type and maybe even color, so using them together would help for synergy.
I love this idea. This is similar to what I would ideally choose if I had that power.
just do something like MTG and have five "mana" types, but pokemon be separate. i.e. fire, water, psychic, lightning, colorless.
I think it'd be pretty great.
At the time Fairy cards were made, I really liked the colour pink so I used to collect them but when I see the psychic card Fairy Pokémon now, I feel disappointed.
same here except i wasn't interested in cards back then. but i thought it was cool. now i buy cards sometimes and it's sad there's no pretty pink ones.
Same here
I miss my fairy cards. But I still have my mega gardivoir deck. ❤
This might sound silly, but it's actually the reason I stopped collecting and playing. I mean, I started when the fairy type was added, so I guess it made sense that I would leave when it was removed.
Removing Fairy Type from the card game honnestly made the cardgame typing more confusing than it was before, since they shuffled around Poison Types to shove Fairy types in with Psychic and Ghost types. Hopefully it comes back, since Mimikyu needs more Fairy type cards ;-;
The poison type shift was confusing, but I kind of like it. Dark is my favorite type but there's not enough dark type pokemon to make decks out of. The new poison dark types more than doubles the number of pokemon than can be dark type, and add a status-theme to the type, which is fun to play with. Clodsire-Ex decks are so great
@@Kmn483 fair, I would think Ghost would've worked better for the switch though, since Dark and Ghost are more similar, and Ghost is weak to itself too, so it'd work mechanically too.
@@Typi Oh that's a good point, they are really similar.
And let’s be fair, it made no sense for poison types to be considered psychic. At least I can kind of see the connection between poison and dark, or fairy and psychic, even if it’s not totally accurate.
@@VinTheDirector True, the only reason I think Poison matches better with psychic rather than dark is the coloration. Fairy does match pretty well with psychic, so even if the Fairy energy doesn't return it isn't too bad. Ghost works with either purple or black, but fits better with Dark types as a whole rather than psychic.
(Poison in general is hard to fit into any of the main type groups lol)
Fascinating stuff. I played 1999-2001 and got back into the game last year. I love the historical recap so I know how we're at the state we are. Playing Kyogre Lostbox at my local card shop on Sunday thanks to you!
Awesome deck choice! Have fun 😎
They fucked up with the weaknesses and resistances. Instead of using the in-game type effectiveness logic, they started to treat all Pokemon of a TCG type as the same exact game type.
For example, all dark Pokemon were weak to fighting at one point, even poison type Pokemon even though poison resists fighting. In the past, poison type Pokemon were either grass or psychic in the TCG, but were still weak to psychic, not to either fire or dark.
But then they go absolutely crazy and make Houndoom as a dark type weak to GRASS?! When it's actually weak to fighting, they make him weak to grass of all types because bug is a small part of the grass TCG type. OK. Houndoom isn't even weak to bug because he's also fire type. He's weak to fighting, ground and rock, which are all fighting type in the TCG. The perfect weakness and they screw it up.
They also made Swampert weak to lightning instead of weak to grass and maybe even a lightning resistance. They used to have water Pokemon be weak to either grass or lightning.
100% valid on most of this, but Dark type Poison pokemon being weak to fighting can be argued to make sense since fighting types in the tcg also encompass ground types, which are super effective against poison.
My favorite thing was collecting both cards with different types for a dual-type mon, but I haven’t been following as of late so I don’t know if they still do that
@@jhozan ironic in this case cuz houndoom also gets smoked by ground
But a dark type houndoom can be weak to grass/bug type. There is no hint of being fire type.
7:30 it's actually up to 7 Now: Fire>Grass>Dark>Psychic>Fighting>Lightning>Water>Fire, with some variations here and there(Mostly to add Steel, which tends to beat Psychic, then lose to Fire).
Dragon and Colorless are now Wild Cards: Dragons have no weakness but have to use a variety of Types for attack, Colorless can use any cards for cost but have nothing weak to them.
What I don't understand are why newer dragons (Giratina VSTAR, Altaria ex, etc.) aren't weak to dragon types. Having no weaknesses makes them meta defining
Cause they not main type dragon i think, its their secondary
@@ДюсековИльяс That's a terrible reason to have no weakness. 💀
The game has evolved into one big coin flip strategy where going second is much more better and having the ability to obliterate a defending Pokemon ASAP is crucial to winning.
Roaring Moon EX, Hisuian Arcanine V, Chien-Pao EX, and potentially Tsereena EX has those moves that doesn't care about resistances.
If you're weak, I deal 300+ damage, doesn't matter if HP and resistances goes over 400 damage.
And there's a card, Iron Hands EX, who pretty much has an accelerated wincon of ripping 1 more prized card.
@@D-vbNo way they put in pokémon
Why aren't any Dragons printed with a Water weakness to represent their weakness to Ice?
I really hate that the Fairy type was taken out, i loved having those cards - but I also do have to admit, in hindsight I think its worked...
What did it change???
same
It changed having a bit of variety. @@BobBob-ye8fn
I used to play a Xerneas and Aromatisse deck years ago. I did quite well with it in local tournaments. It was a favorite deck of mine and a super easy deck to build. I briefly considered fairy type Pokemon as my favorite. I then took a break from the TCG for a few years only to return to find that the type was completely gone. I believe it was when I first saw a psychic Gardevoir and I thought “what the heck is this?” So, goodbye fairy type. We hardly knew ye.
They never should have removed the fairy types... the types don't even effect the game balance that much (in my experience at least). Above all else, the most unforgiveable part of this, that pink color was a _really nice shade of pink!_ I can't believe they removed it. >:(
Such a pretty pink!
Weakness and resistance still feels like an under-utilised mechanic in the TCG, I am very much an amateur player and often forget about weakness and resistance, but I’m rarely ever caught out by it
You don’t see it in game play, because the meta at large pushes decks out. Like Mew VMAX being pushed out of the meta because Charizard EX could OHKO and prize faster.
@@BlueSapphyreYou didn't really explain the why, just reiterated that weak/res doesn't get used much because it's not meta.
@@SeisoYabai When mons can already OHKO, weakness doesn't matter. likewise, taking 30 less damage is meaningless against 200-300 damage hits. weakness and resistance mattered more when numbers were smaller. and when it would matter, like when lightning decks are topping, no one is gonna play water into that, and thus then doesn't matter.
for example, when PikaRom was the top deck, you didn't see any water decks, because PikaRom was already good into non-water, it would essentially be autowins against water.
@@BlueSapphyre Gotcha, makes sense. I only dabbled in Pokemon for a while like two years ago.
I think what annoys me the most about the TCG’s decision to remove the fairy type is how the dragon type never got its own basic energy yet retains its unique typing and card color scheme (albeit a changed color since it was first introduced in BW).
As someone who admittedly doesn’t play the TCG and only collects, I don’t see why fairy types couldn’t continue to bear the fairy typing and the gorgeous pink color but just have their attacks cost random combinations of the other basic energies - just like all dragon types do.
The only reason Dragon was absent from the game for 2 years was exactly because fairies were being removed.
It took 2 years for them to fully remove the fairies from standard play and they didnt wanted to make the only type weak to it suddenly not weak anymore. So to avoid backlash they simply stoped printing dragon type cards for a while.
Fairies are most likely never returning to the tcg.
Fairies in the TCG were great. I had a fairy deck with a Xerneas that dumps energies out onto my benched Pokemon, and then they'd evolve into letting me move energy around wherever AND things with fairy energy had protection. It was neat lol
Fairy Box with arromatisse was a favorite of mine!
Removed types in Pokemon are always fascinating conceptually. Kinda like how the ???-type was removed from the maingames and replaced with typeless.(Which effectively does the same thing because the only non-cosmetic use of the type was unused in ???-Arceus, but it's just a neat thing to think about, lol)
Rip fairy type
2016-2020
I think they could have binned fairy type energy but kept fairy type in game, similar to dragons, though it's definitely tough to give enough Pokemon fairy weakness when dragon should also get dragon weaknesses, dark should get fighting weakness, and fighting should also have psychic/water/grass weakness.
I don't see much reason why we can't have actual fighting/ground/rock type cards that all share fighting type energy and same for water/ice sharing water energy. Giving each pokemon 2 or 3 weaknesses would help with keeping them all relevant. It would certainly be tougher to balance though.
You missed the part where Fairy pokemon suddenly were Psychic type and Poison pokemon were suddenly Dark type. They didn't have to do that when they temporarily dropped Dragon, hence why they needed to officially cancel the type to explain all the other knock-on effects.
I feel like trying to differentiate rock/fighting/ground or water/ice without giving them different energies is pretty much impossible, and wouldn't change anything. The only thing they could do is make like, cards that specifically only interact with Ground types or only with Fighting types, but that kind of ends up feeling arbitrary. Imagine if Baxcalibur in the modern game couldn't attach water energy to non-"ice type" pokemon. It would be so much less good and more importantly less interesting. Fewer groups is significantly better.
I feel like, if they are willing to move types around. I would rather have Lightning linked into Fire, use that spot to separate Ice and Flying into new Flying type. Move Rock to Steel and have Fairies and Dragons linked.
This way we keep 18 types hidden within 10 TCG types. And everything is more spread and kinda linear when it comes to weaknesses and resistances.
Grass (Grass/Bug), Fire (Fire/Electric), Water (Water), Flying (Ice/Flying), Fighting (Ground/Fighting), Steel (Steel/Rock), Psychic (Ghost/Psychic), Fairy (Dragon/Fairy), Dark (Dark/Poison), Colourless (Normal).
The reshuffle fixes the awkwardness of Rock inside Fighting and Ice inside Water. Dragons can now have their own energy - and be properly weak to both itself, Fairies and new Flying type.
This would also significantly affect Fire, Steel and Water and it would make Dark more relevant type.
They wanted less types, not more. Less of a headache to balance them and opens more oportunities for fairy tyoes again @@mjm3091
I remember as a kid being pretty surprised about the dragon cards being colorless. I had always thought they'd be fire types in the tcg since that would have made the most sense to me.
Its kinda crazy that they can just do that. As a mainly VGC/Smogon player, it feels like if they just took Fairy out of the games today and pretended they never existed
0:49 with the names still being weird. Why are they called Darkness and Metal instead of Dark and Steel?
not gonna lie, as a collector i would like to have more types
I played TCG online in those weird middle days when they were putting out the Sword/Shield sets, but also you could use sets before that that were balanced around Fairy being an energy type. I was genuinely the only person I saw on there running a Fairy deck. The format I played was using precon decks, and there was one deck I saw a bunch that was a Dragonite Sun/Moon deck, which was really scary when I wasn't running my fairy deck. In X/Y and Sun/Moon the check for dragons was having a fairy type (among other things but that was the simplest one). Because there was that check their strength generally didn't have downsides other than having to use multiple energy types. So when that check is no longer in use, now you have monsters that can hit very hard very quickly.
Now Dragons have counters on their cards themselves, high energy costs on strong attacks or low power on quick attacks. Doesn't mean they aren't scary, I've been scared by a stock Giratina VStar deck that people run that's absolutely nightmarish if you can't shut it down early enough.
Your videos are getting better and better. I really wish TPCI calls you to cast, it would be perfect!
I don't know much about the card game, apart from that the seven energies actually make a lot of sense when you look at type distributions in the earliest games. Ice was almost never seen without water, rock was rarely seen without ground, half of grass was seen with poison, half of bug was seen with poison flying was always a modifier type that disregards all other typing rules (like fire and electric having no dual types and the rules around rock and ice) ghost and dragon had one line each and dragon was built around being a defensive type and fighting was a pretty uncommon type of 8 Pokemon (5 evolution lines) which may signify the cutoff point.
Dude I love your videos they’re so well produced! Because of you, I got recommended to watch the livestream of the Portland regionals, then I realized how fun the meta game atm seems so after a few days of learning about the current meta I decided to go play in a tournament last night at a local shop in my city for the first time in over 10 years!
The pink cards were majestic but I agree balancing seems much easier now.
I don't fucking care, they should bring it back, fuck balancing
@@orsonzeddThis thinking encourages power creep, and power creep ruins games. I'd rather have a clean game because it's well-balanced over a dirty/broken game where people play Solitaire-but-Pretty-Art because there's no balance or little balance.
@salvadortoscano2534 If they can't figure out how to make fairy Pokemon work it is a lack of imagination
I feel like something this video could have benefitted from touching more on why it's so important to minimize the amount of types the game has to balance. Fairy type existing was a drag on resources that made things more complicated and essentially ensured it would never be able to stand on its own as a type. The only good Fairy type cards in the game were good completely unrelated to being a fairy type, and honestly, it felt like a gimmick for most of its lifespan. Fairy type and Psychic Type are pretty much already the same concept, magic, cosmically powered purple/pink creatures, so Fairy being a separate type just kinda made them feel like a more bland Psychic type. The game, and Fairy type Pokémon are better off as Psychic type, as is the entire game. The more distinct types in the game, the less the developers can put into each type. When i see people talk about how we should have a separate Ice type, or a separate Ground type, or anything like that, it makes me just want to ask them to try theorycrafting a set with all those types, and then try to do it again, and then again, and see how much they can contribute to keep that balanced. It's not feasible at all.
Just don’t make fairy energy. Give the type unique proporties but use a different energy. If the Pokémon in the card is a dual type you use the energy of that type
@@seaberrysvideodump9602 That doesn't fix the problem, at all though. We see with Dragon types and right now in the game, Tera Pokemon, how difficult it can be for those specific cards to get set up because they have to blend resources or can't benefit from the resources they want to use because their type is shifted from their original type. See a Pokemon like Mewtwo ex who would be a really fun card if it was just a Psychic type like normal, but because it's a Tera Electric Mewtwo, it couldn't benefit from effects it would've loved to benefit from, like Fog Crystal, Gardevoir ex's Ability, etc. Even in a perfect world where we build every effect to make it nice and easy to run Fairy types without any complications or limitations, you have to ask what we *actually* gain from having them instead of fitting them into the thematically apt Psychic type. Dragon Pokemon have a weakness (they could just be weak to themselves again, or weak to water or psychic if they really wanted that without Fairy), and... nothing else, really? There comes a point with every card game with multiple types/archetypes/etc where there is just too many for no real purpose. It's dramatically better to have a few, highly synergistic, well designed, balanced types than to try to get as many specific types that remove synergy and balance from the game.
@@SquidSystem tera pokemon were poorly implimented to begin with
@@seaberrysvideodump9602 Oh, I agree. But Fairy Pokémon without Fairy Energy would essentially just be Tera Pokémon now.
@@SquidSystem you right.. hmmm buut what if.. fairy types were exclusively dual types? and thus could use the energy of the 2nd type? im cooking here... maybe
0:42 Metal type Energy card appeared way before Diamond and Pearl base sets. Its in that commercial from the early 2000s you put on the video.
He likely meant as a Basic energy. In Gen II and III, Darkness and Metal Energy were special energy cards you could only have 4 of each per deck. They also had bonus effects tied to them, with Darkness increasing the Pokemon's damage dealt and Metal reducing the Pokemon's damage taken. Diamond and Pearl finally made both full-fledged types in the game you could make entire decks with instead of an unwieldy gimmicks that you could at best splash into a deck.
i wonder why they moved poison over to darkness, rather than ghost. for one thing ghost shares almost the same offensive matchup as dark in the main games so their weaknesses are usually shared ones. (both hit psychic/ghost and are resisted by dark)
Ghost isn't its own card type; it shares it with psychic already.
@@MattTOB618I think they're saying that Ghost types should have become dark in the TCG rather than poison becoming dark in the TCG
Thinking about just the Poison type on its own it makes much more sense as Dark than Psychic.
If it wasn't originally Psychic, nobody would think it belongs there, whereas Ghost is similar enough in that they're a kind of spiritual energy sort of deal.
Poison was also combined with ghost and psychic
It's not just the removal of fairy typing that urked me. It was also that they didn't get fairy's resistance to darkness types when Sword and Shield came out. Both of these grinds my gears to the absolute max!!
That was an intentional design choice, because Darkness types in SwSh also included Poison type Pokemon. Since Poison types are statistically supereffective against Fairy types, and Dark types are not very effective, they split the difference and gave them neutrality.
I recently got back into collecting the tcg after 25 plus years. I really hoped Fairy type cards return someday.
7:13 Terraria Ancients Awakened Mod Void Background Jumpscare
I treid the pokemon tcg when they where added. I left for two reasons. One, the deck i made absolutly made my freinds rage quit (i made a mono fairy built around free rotating xernius ex early game till i could feild garde ex and be hitting for 180+) and then this happened right after. Back when i played yugioh tcg, they did a similar deal that just compleatly invalidated my deck, meanwhile my magic decks have cards that are like 15 to 20 years old that i can still use (not in standard format, im not much of a turnament goer) when i saw the game power creep i bailed. Shame too, my short stint was a blast
I haven't touched the game in a long time, and the biggest shock I learned was that the TCG only had 5 types, had to break open my 25-years-old collection binder to realize that really was the case 😅Can't believe I never realized all the types that got combined despite spending so long on it back in '98
Yugioh has 25 types and even if you take out the Divine Beast and Creator God types, there’s still 23, 5 more than there are in the pokemon games. And the people who play the video games have to know the type matchups and how dual types affect them, the weaknesses and resistances are literally printed on every card. There’s no reason they can’t update this system
And that’s not to mention how asinine it is to give moves different types only to have the weakness and resistances be based on the pokemon itself and not the move it’s using
Typing in Yu-Gi-Oh! influence almost nothing in the battles
@@StarSeraphStanthat's just not true. Types and Attributes absolutely do matter for decks, so much so that they had to create types like Wyrm just so the already-existing types would get less support.
Ancients awakened in the first 5 seconds
7:53 Garbodor is weak to psychic in the games, but weak to fighting as a dark type Pokemon because some "fighting" types are actually ground types. But this also means it's weak to actual fighting type Pokemon like Machamp even though poison resists fighting!
Lol you act like this is a new problem. Base set Doduo is resistant to fighting even tho it's weak to rock. Jynx is weak to psychic because of ghost even tho it is resistant to psychic. Why did 11 people like this comment
7:13 is that the goddamn void form ancients awakened mod?
I used to think weaknesses were kinda dumb in the TCG, but honestly. After playing a bunch, watching competitive, etc. I actually like having less variables on this (although I miss resistances in 2024), and I think most competitive players feel that way as well.
I've even heard opinions about removing weaknesses from the game entirely (which would be pretty bad, its the only reason Charizard ex doesnt completely dominate the format).
Poison types have got to be the most passed off type in the TCG going from grass to psychic to now being represented by dark.
I had a conversation about this with my 7yo nephew as he has a lot to say about TCG typings and how they make 0 sense.
Even worse, I still got a Fairy Energy from a set box with no fairies.
If I was really silly, I would put every type into the TCG but give most of them the Dragon treatment (just use random other energies instead of energy for that specific type)
*Insert short Ancients Awakened void moment*
It's because they were scared of the Fairies.
Pokemon feared their power.
That's why they don't let me play fairies no more. 😢
I still think removing fairies but bringing Dragons back was kinda dumb.
I know this vid is old but: i have two kinds of grimer cards so poison is a little weird...one is psychic and the other is grass. No. Neither are delta species cards.
There are also dark type grimers
I use basic fairy energies in my retro "Do the Wave" deck. However, I always keep a stack of equivalent assorted energies just incase someone isn't ok with me using them in a retro format
Why would they not be okay with you using them when they were only phased out of standard? (This is a genuine question; I don't play the Pokemon TCG.)
@@ceulgai2817 fairy energies didnt exist back then, so even though they usually dont make any difference (there might be but I havent found any reason yet), some people may not feel comfortable with me running them, which is ok. I run them just because they look cute.
Power creep. Older cards tend to not perform well on pokemon tcg. Its been a while but i recall cards I had that where from the last gen underperformed compared to newer cards. True if your not in standard you can play what you want, but a newer deck might just roll over a older one. Mind you I lost played right around the event the vid is about. They might have chilled the creep, can't confirm.
Talking about Pokemon types being represented in the TCG, and with how the TCG energies having represented different combinations of types, reminds me of a video by DeltaSeeker called “How accurate are Pokemon Types in the TCG?”
He has his own opinions on what Pokemon types should be represented with each energy based off in-game type interactions but I did have a thought of “what if Pokemon Types were grouped thematically”
Grass: Grass, Poison, Bug
Water: Water, Ice (no change)
Fighting: Fighting, Ground, Rock (no change)
Psychic: Psychic, Fairy
Dark: Dark, Ghost
Normal: Normal, Steel, Flying
Dragon: Dragon (no change)
Fire and Electric being combined into 1 “power/energy” themed energy to represent both types, fire for fire starter and the classic “Grass, Water, Fire” triangle, electric for that sweet Pikachu promotion.
Huge problem when dragapult ex is this oppressive against decks that DONT have 70hp basics
Honestly I kinda wish there’d be a new card game using a fresh start of new modern conventions and emphasizing adventuring more, or at least a larger tabletop game like we used to have. I don’t think it’d ever happen though.
Tcg, kinda have to be not focused at all on the adventuring and all on the battle. What youre describing is you just want a tabletop pokemon game
Oh that's why Muk is a dark type in pocket tcg. I specifically remember having a Muk with that same art but as a psychic type.
That's crazy. I remember getting the first sets of dragon and fairy type pokemon when it came out when I was a kid. That Raquaza EX will always live rent free in my mind, next to the Xerneas EX I got from the packs
7:30 is like Palworlds type Hexagon, I'm wondering if that's a reference to Palworld 🤣
2:00 they are in gen 1
No
6:20 wait what? i thought poison types were grass in the TCG. when were they psychic? WHY would they be psychic, just because of the color purple?
yes
@@ADDERALLJESUS PFFFFF
Some poison types were given Psychic too
This + the Slowking video have been amazing to watch, I hope you keep doing more videos like this!
Thank you! Will do!
It is worth noting Dragon did not receive any dragon cards from the final SM set all the way to Evolving skies, the last set of the 2nd block of sword and shield, Likely due to not wanting to create cards that would give the already dominant four gods deck power.
Luke you are great at making these informative videos. I appreciate you
Given dragon types have a gimmick of using dual type energy to be more difficult. Maybe a mechanic where fairy energy can’t be treated as colorless would make it different enough to mess with, it’d require fairy type Pokemon to always have some other energy on hand if their attacks require it.
Ancients Awakened has breached containment
Poison has also been represented by dark and psychic types too for some reason
I do wish they kept it as alternate print of the Psychic energy, tbh. The pink cards were super cute. Just change the symbol to the eye and you could still have it work.
most comments, if not all: *discourse about trading card game*
me, a rando suffering from terminal terraria brain rot 7:14: "ANCIENTS AWAKENED?!!? INFINITY ZERO?!!?"
Aaw 🥺 thank you for explaining.... Maybe they will come back better than ever in the distant future.
This would explain why the Fairy Type is missing from Pokemon Pocket TCG. I thought they where just waiting on adding it.
so all future Gastly evo lines gonna be dark type now?
They could be either Dark or Psychic
Please explain why base set gyarados is weak to grass type.
water
@@notbob4542 flying?
@@Maxinidas makes more since for it to be grass tho cause gyarados is a fish and like no one knows gyarados is a flying type
@@notbob4542 Makes no sense at all. They made that mistake once and made him weak to lightning ever since.
I love that this video doesn’t really explain why they won’t return, just why they were removed.
Poison should have been Dark as soon as Dark was added. It was a weird fit being in either Grass or Psychic, Dark is a lot better of a connection
What bothers me,e so much is that they reworked things in SWSH for the sake of balance but we don’t have balance at all. I know balance isn’t with weaknesses alone, like say for example more types are weak to fighting than psychic but maybe you balance this with how much energy you need how much damage you do, resistances, etc. But idk although it was so poorly received in Reddit my proposal for rearrangement of the weaknesses in game I still think TPC can do better. My balance proposed was that each type represents 2, you have the same amount of weaknesses per type, each video game type was represented somehow, all weaknesses made sense in a simplified matter (as in regardless if, say Hisuian Zoroark comes to TCG as ghost the normal type becomes irrelevant or vice versa). The only thing that later on and while playing more I kinda understand TPC decision with dragon not having weakness and no hitting for weakness & colorless not hitting for weaknesses. It does give certain uniqueness to these types and makes them interesting, instead of making everything “balanced” on paper. Maybe I’ll make a video someday bc like I even came with 3 proposals 😅that are progressively more drastic, bc I actually retain a lot of what’s already in the game
The new Pokemon TCG mobile game kinda fixed this where card weakness and resistances can differ even with the same Types like we have Colorless who has resistance to Fighting. They split fairy types to Psychic, Grass and Colorless too. Dragon still exists tho. Strongest type in paper but very hard to manage energies as they need fire and electric type energies for attacks. Oh and the Poison types have been put to Dark now which is good and makes sense.
as if the "Rock paper Scissor" of typing in the game actually matters where most of the time you oneshot the pokemon anyway. It WAS maybe back then a huge part when you didn't had attacks that did 150 plus dmg but nowadays???
2:00 - OHHHH, so THAT’S why I keep misremembering Psychic Pokémon as being weak to Psychic in the video games. I collected those cards for a short time after they came out.
The most underused feature in this game is still weaknesses and resistances
You know, it’s really funny, I’ve been getting ads for TCG Pocket that remind me I have packs to open.
it's a bit of an unpopular opinion, but I think the removal of fairy type did make a lot of sense for balancing.
Remember that fairy being removed wasn't the only thing that changed, the big thing was the nerfing of psychic and indirect buff to grass and metal aswell as a indirect nerf to fighting that came with it. Before the change like 90% of psychic were weak to psychic while both dark and lightning were weak to fighting. Darkness only hit ghost pokemon for weakness, which 50% of the time were also weak to ghost (thus psychic).
another problem is that water pokemon just had too many different weakness. between lightining, grass and metal usually the designers would make everything weak to lightning and rarely care about the other types
This screwed up the rock-paper-scissors balancing around weakness, which really favored some types over others (also coupled on how some types are better than others because their identity lines better with what makes a good deck), removing fairy, moving poison to dark giving another weakness for grass to hit, making more pokemon weak to darkness helped even the matchups a lot
Fairy will be missed, they had a lot of cool gimmicks, unfortunately even if expanded was a real thing in ptcgl they are already pretty powercrept by now
Poison also got mixed with ghost and psychic. That’s very relative
so what happened to the previous typing cards? are they still valid to use as is, or simply banned?
I didn’t know they were gone, RIP my favorite type, fairy.
And we’re out here wondering why Giratina VStar is the BDIF - after watching this whole video - I do not understand why Fairy was removed. We need it back.
Its fine because Gardevoir is favored against tina anyway in current standard! Fairy prevails ❤️
I think making a "mystic" type to include both dragon and fairy would be cool, even if it doesn't really reflect anything from the games.
“oh shit Zacian is too op we can’t add it as a fairy”
Then they could have just added it as a steel type 😅
@@cameronhubbuck not in the Hero of Many Battles form
@lilharm then don't print cards with that form 🤷🏼♂️
Fairy types have always been my favorite, ever since I started playing the game with a Sylveon/Gardevoir GX deck. I miss having that special identity for most of my favorite Pokemon in the TCG.
the hilarious thing about fusing ghost and psychic is that they already meant ghost to be the counter to psychic, but biffed it up in the programming. so rather than retcon, which they seem to hate doing even when it makes sense to, they just invented dark to take over where Ghost was meant to be. If anything, ghosts should have moved to that card type.
I for an eye
Eh they will probably bring it back during gen 6 remakes lol
Dragon being represented by colorless made sense, they are resistent to the main types and have a diverse move pool like normal types, but there is a lot of dragons nowadays back in Gen 3 they were 4 families and like 3 legendaries.
Poison being move around is funny, it represents how much of a nothing type it is
6:16 they made poison psychic and not grass?
I still have my fairy deck and will never get rid of it. ❤
While fairy’s removal was messy, I feel like poison fits much better being dark type cards than it did grass or psychic type cards
So Gardevoir went from grass to fairy to psychic type?
It was never grass
They really should've just moved Dragons to the Fire pool, they both had the weakest representation and it fits with the Water/Ice dynamic.
They also could've added Steel to electric given the common weakness to ground types in the Fighting Energy pool.
That actually makes it a lot more even, all Energy types except Fighting and Fairy have at least 2 types generally associated with it outside of rare exceptions.could even keep fairy with psychic energy to make it 8 energy types overall....but I'd still prefer Fairy to be it's own thing, my own preference really.
I don't really like the weakness mechanic in the TCG. Unlike in the videogames, which is literally THE POINT (if you want to be good, you need a balanced team, switch-ins to cover the weaknesses of other pokemons, etc: the pokémon videogame would be really stupid without weaknesses and resistances, it's literally the core mechanic), in the card games an efficient deck "is supposed" to be monotype or close to that. You may throw a tech or two that have colorless attacks, or splash in a "second type" or stuff like that, but MOST decks have a dominant type (let's say it's the type of which you play the most energies). Tera pokemons add a bit of flair to it (would you consider a Charizard ex deck fire-based or dark-based, despite playing no dark energies?) but most of the time decks have a clearly evident dominant type. Which means we SHOULDN'T splash all types together to "make it balanced" like you would team-build in the videogame. Which means that weaknesses have a huge impact on match ups without being reliant on actual gameplay-based mechanics. It feels arbitrary: you just have a bad matchup against a deck you would otherwise have a shot against because the card say so. Let me clarify: I'm not saying bad/good match ups shouldn't be a thing. But usually, in most card games, it's about the mechanics. If your deck relies on using the discard pile as a resource, and I play "discard pile-hate" (like stuff that removes cards from the game instead of sending it to the discard pile), then you're gonna have a bad time because my mechanic counters your mechanic. On the contrary, if I play a deck whose goal is to discard your cards (which is usually a bad thing to happen to you), you're going to thank me if you play that graveyard-reliant deck, my strategy ends up actually helping your gameplan. If I play a deck that moves damage around and heals, I'm going to be strong against a deck that does fast, consistent but "weak" damage that is supposed to bi/trishot my stuff and I'm going to be weak against a slower deck that aims at oneshotting, not giving me the chance to heal. These match ups I just described are "gameplay-based" ("the core strategy of my deck is good/bad against the core strategy of your deck"). That's great. I love that there are decks that do different things and have different styles, like the colors in magic (blue being control and counters, black being about graveyard and LP manipulation, red being about direct damage through effects and sacrificing your own creatures, green being about stomping with big sticks, white being about swarming etc etc). And it's okay that a gameplan is strong against another gameplan and weak against a different one, all fine and dandy. But most of the time (not always, thankfully) match ups in the pokémon card game end up being "your card says my card is stronger :) ". Sometimes with hilarious consequences (Charizard being weak to grass). It feels cheap and, ironically, unbalanced. If anything, I would have let the Pokemon TCG have all 18 types EXACTLY because of balance: with 18 types, the chances of weaknesses having any impact are low. Assuming every type in the game has one type it is weak to and one type it is strong towards, with 18 types there are 16/18 chances (8/9) that weaknesses won't be relevant in the game (if I have a fire deck, I'm strong against a grass deck, weak to a water deck, and my type will be irrelevant against the other 16 types of deck). With less than half of that, the chances of weaknesses being relevant is higher, and as I said earlier, the way they work in the pokemon tcg makes it a bad thing. Weaknesses are a bad mechanic that is just there to "mimic" the videogame (where, I repeat, it's great) and probably wouldn't be there at all if pokémon was born as an original TCG without being based on a pre-existing IP.
My brother has a Fairy deck that he stubbornly refuses to abandon. For his sake, I hope Fairy types make a comeback
Making poison Darkness is actually insane though. Supereffective and Weaknessess literally reversed