The Pokemon Trading Card Game's Energy types are iconic for sure, but are they accurate to the video games? View the charts for yourself: 1drv.ms/x/s!ApiA2y8SVuhcaY9Jn...
I agree. The lore itself can be turned into a game mechanic, and given that from a lore perspective Dragon type pokemon are often considered mythical and rare creatures, it makes little sense to have them be grouped with the normal type, which is reserved for the more mundane and common pokemon. Also in the video games (the media the TCG and all other pokemon adaptations are based on), the Dragon type has more meaningful interactions with other types, with the most notable being resisting the 4 clasical types of most elemental power systems (Fire, Water, Grass, Electric). They even had to introduce a new type (Fairy) just to balance it out competitively. It is only appropriate that this level of distinction from the basic Normal type gets emphasized in some capacity. Another commenter also pointed out how the Dragon and Fairy type could be merged in the new Mystical type which would better reflect the video game matchups where Dragons are weak to themselves and Fairy types.
@@luchotenks2310 though I agree with the rest of your points, I will say lore-wise normal doesn’t ALWAYS mean normal, sometimes it can mean more obscure things like sound, but often times it means stuff that don’t look like they even have a type, or don’t fit into a clear typing already (like porygon, regigigas, ditto, Arceus himself, even moves like tri attack)
@@ThePenisMan for arceus and tri attack, i always thought of it (that i think i got from the “rainbow energy” card) is that normal type is kinda like the white light of pokémon types. where white light is made up of multicoloured light, normal “energy” is made up of energy from various types, hence arceus’ regular form bring normal type (it has access to all types) and making things that have multiple elemental powers make more sense to be normal, like tri-attack. it would also explain why so many (especially in gen 1) normal types get super diverse movepools with lots of types they don’t have
It's not like the colorless type interacts with anything offensively anyway and being dragon type could allow it to do super effective damage to other dragons if they wanted to.
They should do the same thing to Fairy since it's also a very rare typing and you'll have to be an actual fairy, nature sprite or witch/siren then give the types different unique energy requirements. Dragon: Fire, Electric, Water, Dark Fairy: Grass, Psychic, Electric (Thunderbolt can be learned by some Fairy types), Water (mermaids and sirens like Milotic and Primarina)
One thing to remember about Poison types is their distribution in Gen 1.10 were pure Poison, 9 were Grass-Poison, 5 were Bug-Poison, 3 were Ghost-Poison (the Gengar line), 2 were Poison-Ground (Nidoking/queen), 2 were Poison-Flying (Zubat and Golbat), and 2 were Water-Poison (Tentacool and Tentacruel). So, assuming they had already decided that Grass would be a type, and that Bug would be mixed with it, and that Tentacool and Tentacruel would be Water, then half of the Poison types would already be Grass types, so it was really only logical for the rest to be as well, with the exception of the Gengar line. There’s something similar where every Gen 1 Rock type was also a Ground type, with the exception of the fossils.
The fact that in gen 1 all non-fossil rock types were also ground types is why I've always wondered why the TCG didn't start out with earth energy. Pairing ground and rock with fighting just feels like it was done because of color, same with poison being physic
@@AbsolXGuardian Yeah definitely color-first approach going on. As a die-hard Rock Pokémon fan seeing Fighting not only tag along (an annoying weakness) but get the namesake of the Energy was almost offensively in bad taste for me ha. All 3 are often found in Caves, Mountains, and Desert biomes so maybe they grouped them together by their habitat as well. Tho that doesn't work with Poison/Psychic though- so maybe its 1.Color 2.Habitat
The grass/bug/poison merger also led to the absurd scenario where a Beedrill or Butterfree could totally beat up a Golem, exactly the opposite of how it would work in the video games. Explanation: The Beedrill is typed as grass, which the Golem is weak to because it was originally a rock/ground, and the Golem is typed as fighting, which the Beedrill resists because it was originally a bug/poison. This resistance was (I think?) removed in later gens, but it's still quite strong just from the weakness.
@@DoABarrelRol1l Ignoring weaknesses, thematically fighting fits very well as colorless, matching a theme of non-elemental physical combatants. Based purely on theme, I would have these types in the TCG: Fire, Grass, Lightning, Water(/Ice), Ground(/Rock/Steel), Psychic(/Ghost/Dark), Poison(/Bug), Fairy(/Dragon), and Colorless(Normal/Fighting/Flying). Though I think your observation on habitat is interesting. Based on habitat the original TCG types make much more sense: Forest (Grass/Bug/Poison), Ocean (Water/Ice), Cave (Ground, Rock, Fighting), etc.
As an avid fan of rock and steel type Pokémon, I have said for years I wished the Pokémon company would combine the two types in the TCG. It has never made sense that rock types are represented as fighting and only steel types are represented as metal.
But at the same time having rock and ground be together make sens. Thematically they are even more related than rock and steel and most of the early rock types are rock/ground making the type associated in a lot of people mind. Also rock brownish colour palet makes more sens alongside fighting type. Fighting is the least related type thematically but share the colour palet with rock and ground. Like basically, fighting is related to ground, ground is related to rock and rock is related to steel, so it is really hard to find an ideal split. It think there is a similar case to be made with fairy being related to psychic, being itself related to ghost being itself related to dark and dark is related to poison. Personally I like poison finally joining dark as it wasn't very magical to begin with and wasn't related thematically to psychic, it works much better with the violent/vicious nature of dark types and it just look way nicer tbh. However fairy while very related to psychic thematically looks really bad and wrong in practice, the colour palet just doesn't make sens at all. I think they should either move ghost to dark and make psychic card being more pink like in the video game, or just move back fairy to its own type. Dragon being its own type doesn't change much to me, I think the normal type colour palet looked a bit nicer but I don't mind it being its own type as dragons aren't really "normal" creatures.
Thematically I think Ground, Rock, and Steel would be great together as they are the mineral types. But since Steel and Dark were the new types and got special treatment (that is, all their energy cards were special), I think it made sense to have them separate. Of course, IMO it would have been better if later on they went with what I think is thematically the most correct.
I love how oddly specific this video is, it's one of those things that makes youtube special. Because I've definitely thought it too while playing the TCG, but where else would I find a video of someone discussing it? By the way, I'd be very interested to learn more about the project you shared! If you have somewhere you'll share updates+progress I hope we're kept posted, it's def something I'd follow.
I don’t play the TCG, but I remember being a teenager and seeing Dragon and Fairy promoted on their own for the first time. And then I got sad years later when the TCG removed those types.
for me, fairy is an extremely hard type to play, so its removal is both a blessing and a curse in my opinion. a blessing because it was very difficult to make work when it was still in the tcg, a curse because its removal makes it even harder to play since no one is weak to fairy anynore
The fairy change makes sens thematically but god does it look wrong in practice. Like psychic in the TCG has a shade of purple that doesn't look right with fairy types at all !
I find it weird that sometimes they just completely ignore a Pokémon’s secondary type. I think I remember seeing a dark type sableye card that was weak to fighting…
It is good that they do it as such because otherwise clubs like, for example, the Science Club, the Grass Club, the Rock Club, and the Fighting Club would be confused. These clubs use Pokémon based on type and weakness. For example, Aerodactyl is a Pokémon suitable for Rock Club usage, not Fighting Club usage. But we know that because of it's weakness to Grass. Had they taken the secondary type into account then we would not have know this fact because Aerodactyl would not have had a Grass weakness.
I was today years old when I learned Fairy had already retired and poison was changed yet again. This is one of those niche topics I've always thought about on a surface level, but absolutely love your deep dive.
The reason the dragon type works as a standalone type is that they don't use their own energy. Which makes them mechanically the same as colourless, But in lore and aesthetics clearly distinct.
@@eddiepeach3975 yeah, I realise I didn't actually mention that, But it's the one difference between colourless and dragon that arguably makes dragon worse in a vacuum. It's dope from a player perspective tho.
@@eddiepeach3975 basically types in the TCG are used to lock certain effects behind certain decks, Dragons having 2 type requirements makes them cards you tend to built a deck around Rather than cards you slot into a deck as a support piece.
I get the point of the video was likely just a fun statistical exercise, but I definitely think that thematic cohesion should be weighed more: As an example, Yes, Ghosts being dark type DOES have some thematic logic to it, but there's really nothing to tie poison thematically to pyshcic or fairies other then the color purple and pink. On the flip side, Fairy, Pyschic, and Ghost type all share a common theme of being tied to the occult and mysticism, and "Dark" type is usually more about underhanded tactics and being mean or predatory rather then literal shadow and darkness (which is more a ghost type thing), so poison being linked to that sort of underhanded and predatory theming makes a lot more sense. I could make similar observations about the Fighting-Rock-Ground-Steel changes (though I don't think those are as contentious), but another factor here is relative quantity per type: I think it makes sense to factor in how many pokemon are in a given type in the games vs the TCG. I don't think it's desirable to have one TCG type cover a TON of different Pokemon while a totally seperate TCG type barely has any, etc
I think Ground Rock and Fighting are paired together because they tend to share Habitats, making Earth a type over Fighting would've probably made more sense for this, but also I think people would be more interested in Fighting type than Earth type, like there's a reason Bakugan replaced Subterra with the Mystical Gold faction in the Reboot, I think earth as a theme is not as popular with kids
Placing Poison with Psychic makes sense because some poisons have psychological effects. Pairing Poison with Grass makes sense because many plants make poison. Pairing Poison with Bug makes sense because many bugs make Poison. Pairing Poison with Dark makes sense because Poison is underhanded. Pairing Ghost with Dark makes sense because of Dark rituals. Pairing Poison with Water would also make sense because a lot of poison is liquid. It would also make sense to pair Poison with Fighting because of steroids. Or with Steel because many metals are toxic. Or with Electric because poisons can influence the electric pulse in our body, or with Fire because flammable gas is poisonous, or with Colorless because some poisons are colourless.
This was really cool. I thought the TCG types where a bit awkward, but I never expected anyone to make a metric for compatibility. Looking at the spreadsheet you made it seems like the TCG types currently have a total compatibility score of 72(Solo types where given a score of 0), with Darkness(Dark + Posion) & Fighting(Fighting + Ground + Rock) weighing it down. Those changes as you suggested (Dark+Ghost, Steel+Rock, Psychic+Fairy, Poison+Bug, & Normal+Flying+Dragon) bring that total up to 267(You probably already knew this). I noticed that just adding up the compatibility scores favors cramming as many compatible types together as possible. I wonder if it would be better to determine a type's compatibility score as the average score then? Doing that, the base TCG's score total is 30(Average of 3) while your revised types give out a score of 116.5 (Average of 11.65). With the summation method the type combos Rock+Ice+Steel, Ghost+Dark+Psychic, & Grass+Fairy would be net gains, but would be net losses for the average method. This is really just an elaborate "Stable Roommate" problem, but aesthetics matter.
Great analysis. I've been playing the TCG competitively since 2014 and took a back seat when (world event) hit and got more into the design philosophy of the game by making cubes. You're right when you say less types is better for the game, and also that the type distribution needs to be relatively even. The reason Fairy was discontinued was because there aren't that many Fairy Pokémon, so the same Pokémon kept getting printed on cards all the time, which actually stunts diversity because if there are 6 Gardevoirs in the current format, you can't play all of them in your deck because you can only have 4 Pokémon of the same name in your deck. Metal still has this problem, and I have said to my friends that moving Rock over makes a lot of sense because they are functionally similar as types in the video games. The best thing to happen to Darkness is moving Poison types into it. It fits thematically and has made the type way more diverse. I know you said you wanted to get into playing the game more, so hit me up. I could be a good resource.
Having dragon and fairy being combined into one type would have been interesting But I do see the benefit of Dragon being a type that can’t do super effective damage (similar to normal) but is strong and usually needs more that 1 type of energy to use it’s attacks
I remember actually getting introduced to the card game before the video games, and was really confused the first time I played Pokemon Stadium when I was little. I never really thought about how less types makes more sense for the card game, due to the energy cards, but it makes a lot of sense. As for your balancing ideas, the only one I'm not the biggest fan of is separating rock from the fighting type. I've always kinda viewed rock and ground as one and the same, even though I know that isn't the case (though Gen 1 especially having a lot of rock/ground type Pokemon doesn't help things). It would just feel weird to separate them, even though pairing rock with steel sorta makes sense. Also, that game idea you have sounds interesting. I really like the TCG and PMD, so a combination of the 2 could be really cool.
Rock’s kinda like a middle ground (haha) between steel and ground, I think Weak to fighting and ground, like steel Weak to water and grass, like ground Positive matchup against fire and poison, like ground Positive matchup against ice and bug and flying and normal, like steel Also its only weaknesses aside from shared weaknesses, are steel and ground There isn't a single strength rock has that isn’t shared with ground or steel
I think the Poison Type cards are very interesting with how they were switched around It started as grass as in the early games Grass and Bug are paired with them very often and uses a lot of status conditions Then Psychic came around and thet decided to move Poison into Psychic due to it being more fitting in a Color Coding sense That is also probably why Rock Ground and Fighting are grouped together And finally it was put into Darkness because as the series went on, messing with the opponent with status conditions and tactics fit more with the Dark type Pokemon than grass type.
Also dark is thematically the most related, at least when it comes to personality. Just like dark type, poison types are vicious, violent and are considered less honourable type. They like torturing their opponents and killing so in this sens is makes a lot of sens. Plus it make them look way cooler, every time I see a poison type on a black card is just make so much sens. I didn't make sense thematically with ghost and psychic as unlike those it wasn't a very magical type, so it always felt like an oversight. The new classification makes much more sens thematically. However I really, really don't like what they did to fairy types ! Sure thematically it makes complete sens to be with other magical fairy tale creature but god does it look so wrong ! I think they need to change the shade of purple on them because it doesn't look right at all. Violet represents mystery and something special, it doesn't work well with super cute light pink innocent creatures.
The PTCG video games mixed with PMD sounds like a dream come true! They're easily my favorite spinoffs by a country mile, so I'm looking forward to whatever's in store for the project!
the example pokemon team you showed at the end of the video to demonstrate that pokemon can have multiple types is pretty likely a gen 3 competitive team and I think that's neat. blissey and tyranitar are defining members of the meta game, and swampert gengar moltres and cloyster are also popular and powerful choices for teams.
Great video, it's interesting what you bring up with poison and bug being a more appropriate type compared to bug and grass. I feel that poison isn't a popular enough type for the pokemon company to want to add it at this point, especially now that they've removed fairy. Would be cool though. Pokemon mystery dungeon explorers of sky is my favourite game of all time, so I'd be very interested in hearing more about your game idea!
I find it kind of interesting/funny that fairy was moved to the psychic type and poison was moved to the dark type in the same generation that there were two rival characters that highlighted these types' similarities (Bede's entire team switches from a psychic ace team to a fairy ace team, Marnie and her brother Piers both have poison types that conflict with their type speciality)
I like bug types. Their cool. part of me wishes umbreon was a bug or poison type. Its pokedex states it sweats poison. In fact with ghost types existing in gen one they could change psychics weakness to bug, ghost and lastly flying types(heights). Really theres no need for dark types. Another thing is buff the grass type, how about removing the fairy type and make grass super effective to electric( grass resists electric) and psyckic and ghost(grass the new light type is obviously super effective to both electric and ghost types). Give more reasons to choose grass type starter than water.
Well in basic team building there's covering your weakness. Like if you have a water Pokemon in your team it's a good Idea to catch a fire type for those grass types. Other examples are a dark type to go with the poison type on your team. Or just an immunitie like a steel type and a ghost who's immune to fighting types. Or just an earthtype with earthquake and we'll just steam roll the whole game with arguably the best type in the game. Think of it why is there so many Pokemon with levitate? Because earth is good.
Interesting topic. If we were rebuilding the game from the ground up, I'd definitely advocate for Poison splitting off into its own type and putting Bug underneath it. Same goes for moving Ghost to Dark. I also think Rock, Ground, and Steel are similar enough thematically to warrant being the same type, but Rock should be the umbrella they fall under instead of Steel (leaving Fighting on its own). Granted, the game's been around too long now to make a sudden, massive change like completely removing and replacing a type.
I like bug types. Their cool. part of me wishes umbreon was a bug or poison type. Its pokedex states it sweats poison. In fact with ghost types existing in gen one they could change psychics weakness to bug, ghost and lastly flying types(heights). Really theres no need for dark types. Another thing is buff the grass type, how about removing the fairy type and make grass super effective to electric( grass resists electric) and psyckic and ghost(grass the new light type is obviously super effective to both electric and ghost types)
i'd honestly like to see pokemon experiment with something like Magic's hybrid mana, but for energy costs on moves, though i don't know how they'd design those graphically in a way that wouldn't look terrible
just found your channel and holy shit you're incredibly underrated! i've never really been into the actual game of the card game and just collected a ton of them as a kid, but your videos make me want to dust them off again. also especially loved that grass + water + ground = regret visual gag, you've got some pretty slick editing skills! can't wait for the next!!
Keep up the great work man! i’ve getting into pokémon cards lately and i’ve been looking for a youtuber with this style of content. really excited to see what you do next
Loved the video, this was really interesting! Especially how certain types wind up being more compatible than others - I didn't expect Ghost to pair up so well, though it makes perfect logical sense once I think about how few non-neutral interactions it actually has. As a huge PMD fan, I'd love to try out your crossover game if you get past the idea stage, it sounds very intriguing!
I like your Video. My job requires me to use excel a lot and it can be fun to build complicated structures in it like the one you show. The background music is so well chosen, I think you like the right pkm games :) Subbed!
This video is insanely interesting. This topic has always been super interesting to me, and has been long conversations among friends for countless hours over beer and ptcg. Showing this to them now lol
I personally prefer having the dragon type. I really like that each dragon pokemon requires a certain amount of other types to make work... similar to commanders in Magic. They are much better now that dragon no longer has it's own energy, so I think they are balemced and open fun deck building options
Kind of a curious observation 11:35 Your bottom chart has some of the most busted dual type combinations in competitive. Fighting Ice (crabominable), Fighting Flying (Hawlucha), Fairy Ground (ground hits all 3 fairy resists), Ground Ice (Mamoswine), Dark Grass (Meowscarada), Ghost Grass (Dhelmise), Fighting Ghost (Marshadow), are some of the hardest pokemon to switch in and only a handful of dual types combinations resist them.
Ghost being moved to Dark would certainly make a lot more sense since you could also argue that Ghost-types are weak to other Ghosts and Dark-types in the game. Poison, however, is trickier. Moving it to Dark, due to theme makes sense, but it also becomes confusing when you bring game logic in, as Poison-types are traditionally weak to Psychic, while Dark-types are immune. So it becomes odd seeing Darkness Pokémon cards with a weakness to Psychic cards. As for Rock, it honestly makes more sense seeing it stick around in the Fighting section due to the fact that Rock and Ground tend to be paired up together more often than with Steel. The change that made the least sense were removing Fairy and moving those into the Psychic types. Especially since they briefly changed Dragon-type cards into their secondary typing during the Sword & Shield sets before changing them back into Dragon-types. The oddity with typings is how very little Resistances are properly used these days. A number of Ground-type Pokémon tend to go without Resistances to Lightning cards, or Darkness cards having no resistance to Psychic cards, or how Pokémon with the secondary typing of Flying in the games don't have resistance to Fighting in the card game. A good example of this is Scyther. This is a Pokémon well known from the early days due to its stats, including its Resistance to Fighting. If you look at the release of Scyther cards after the secret rare reprint of Jungle Scyther in the Platinum set, no Scyther card ever has a Resistance to Fighting ever again.
I really liked these ideas! Btw, I never played the tcg, but the topic and the presentation hooked me. Your other videos were great too! I hope you will find your place in the oversaturated poketube space (or any other space for the matter). Wish you the best luck for this year!
Kinda tangential, but I think having more pokemon cards with different energy requirements to their types would make the game way more interesting, and replicate the dual type mechanics better.
Think of it as similarity rather than compatibility. I just got two different types' strengths (2x) and weaknesses (0.5x), then deducted a point each time they differed. I did this with every possible pair of types, then normalized the results as I explain in the video, then compared pair "A" + pair "B" with its opposite, pair B + A, and averaged their scores. This gets both sides' perspective, since a matchup that's good for one type could be bad for another type with better options. The last step is just ordering the outcome of all of these calculations into one list, from most similar to least. Hope this helped
thematically ghost is curses and black magic, fairy normal magic and psychic is supernatural stuff so they fit, dark is more about fighting dirty so it kinda fits with poison but it i think it still fit better with grass bug since grass/poison and bug/poison is a common, and about rock and ground, most early rock types where also ground and are thematically very similar, normal, dark and fighting are also similar being attacks using body,most dragon moves could pass a fire moves since they often involve fire
I can really get behind this logic process. Moving Ghost over to Darkness and Rock over to Metal makes too much sense. I really don't think it would be a problem for the moved Ghost to be weak to itself as that is far from unprecedented in the PTCG. Rock would be weak to either Water, Grass, Fighting, or itself as the card itself dictates while Steel would be weak to Fire or Fighting, again, depending on the Pokemon card. I also don't think it would be bad if Pokemon cards had multiple weaknesses and/or resistances.
While I personally don't think that moving rock to the metal type makes the most sense, I can kind of see why there is an argument for it. I will agree, however, that having ghost becoming part of the darkness type rather than having poison migrate into that type is extremely intuitive, not just because of how similar dark and ghost are offensively (not to mention how frequently dark Pokemon get access to ghost moves and vice-versa), but also because it means that poison becomes good against psychic in the tcg. That said, one could argue that the last point about poison being strong against psychic is kinda rendered moot when considering that the 2 where previously connected, but that worked because at that point in time, all psychic Pokemon in the tcg usually were weak to their own type, which meant that poison was weak to psychic as well, but shifting it into the darkness type took this away. On a side note, I actually have a couple of ideas why poison got moved into the darkness type: the first being that when you look at Marnie's team in the video games, her only non dark type Pokemon is the poison type Toxicroak; and secondly, it could possibly have been a reference to the event involving Eternatus being known as the darkest day
@@matthewkuscienko4616 I think the explanation is much simpler, They saw that Fairy and Psychic are a good match, But realised Poison needed to move elsewhere to work well, So they move Poison to Darkness to make it hit Fairy decks Super-effectively, by pairing it with the type that hits fairy's paired cards (Ghost and Psychic) super-effectively.
This is a dimensionality reduction problem :D you’re trying to project the 18 dimensional space of types in Pokémon game down to 10 types of card game. If you want a really interesting comparison it would be cool to follow this up with a clustering based approach to optimize the grouping and scoring with entirely new types via cluster algorithms like K-means, t-SNE, PCA, or just brute force it with a Markov search. If you apply this more generic framework you may even be able to do more complex analysis such as how to project a dual type Pokémon into the categories based on which group has the minimum distance/loss. Great video!
I used to play the tcg very competitively (back in the days of claydol, uxie, magmortar lvlx and leafeon lvlx, and luxray sp lvlx). One thing I always wanted to see was all 18 types explored as independent types, especially normal (basically splitting up colorless and normal, similar to generic and colorless in magic)
alternatively to cutting dragon, fairy could move to dragon, then all card game types would be made up from 1-2 videogame types. they could make for a mythical type, but I guess that term is already is claimed
If I was making the Pokemon TCG, I would simply make types less restrictive in general. I think I would actually go ahead and make energy cards for every type in the game, so rock and ground and fighting would each have their own energy. However, I would make the moves require mostly colorless energy, with specific typed energy being more reserved for stronger moves. Also, the weakness thing would only come into play on certain moves, not the whole card. It would also give incentive to run more of the same Pokemon, for example, maybe you really like Magnemite, but you want to use electric moves and don't care about steel. Well you can just stick with electric energy and ignore his steel moves by not playing steel energy. And you could do the opposite if you wanted to focus on Magnemite's steel moves. I think the new issue would be all of the mons would need more moves though, but I think it's possible. It would make each different mon more impactful to the game. However, that's all being said if I was making the game from the ground up, it would erase everything you know about the TCG currently to work. But what do I know, I'm a Yugioh player so my idea is probably shit.
Dragon is okay to exist as long as it's given the support to run with mixed type attack costs. Looking at the regidrago vstar deck vs. the goodra vstar deck, the goodra tends to run better because it can more quickly and efficiently get to metal/water energies. Regidrago vstar on the other hand suffers because of extremely slow grass acceleration with what we have in standard. Most of the dragon types that came with evolving skies felt unusable at first, and the ones that were able to keep up are just now starting to see way more play because of cards like mirage gate
I moved Rock over to Metal and called the hybrid "Mineral." I moved Fairy over to Dragon and called it "Mystic," with Dragons being Mystic-types weak to Mystic and Fairies being Mystic-types weak to Mineral. Ghost-types become "Shadow" types that are weak to Shadow, while Dark-types are Shadow and weak to "Quaking," which is what I came up with for Ground/Fighting (side note: it's cool that the fist's thumb and palm form a broken-ground image). I also moved Poison over to Lightning and renamed it "Shock," which works remarkably well as many Poison-types have yellow accents. I also rearranged the symbols to make more sense. I reassigned the Fairy symbol to Psychic, and reassigned the Psychic symbol to Ghost/Dark's "Shadow," thereby eliminating the Darkness symbol instead of the Fairy one and keeping another bright color.
I like your new type pairings and their respective names. But I'm not really a fan of swapping the symbols and the card frames. A black card frame suits Dark and Ghost types better than a violet one in my opinion. The Fairy symbol and pink card frame are not really necesary either.
@@luchotenks2310 Shadow could use the dark frame, or the Darkness symbol on Psychic's color, I just lack photoshop skills. Re: pink not being "necessary," uhh, sez you?
@@AlderFletcher I thought that you meant to make the Psychic type pink with the Fairy symbol and Shadow type violet with the Psychic symbol, which would make them too similar colorwise. That's why I said pink wasn't necessary. Black, in my opinion, adds the much needed varierty to the energy color palette while representing its type's theme better. I've thought of another classification let me know what you think. - Red: Fire - Orange: Fighting, Ground (aka Seismic) - Yellow: Electric - Green: Grass - Blue: Water, Ice (aka Water) - Violet: Psychic, Poison (aka Psychic) - Black: Ghost, Dark (aka Shadow) - Grey: Steel, Rock (aka Mineral) - White: Normal, Flying (aka Neutral) - Pink: Dragon, Fairy (aka Mythical) Psychic and Poison are again in the same category because they focus on damaging the body from within without the use of physical violence and by altering perception (hypnosis, confusion, and other forms if intoxication). Poison has an tricky and gimmicky side it more related to the Psychic type than to the rather straightforward Electric type. As for Dragon and Fairy, they are now in the same group called Mythical. If you think about it, it goes perfectly with the lore that inspired those types (fairy tales) and also with their video game type matchups in the video games. This way the Dragon type subgroup can now be weak to itself and to the Fairy subgroup (just like in the games) because they are one and the same. The Fairy subgroup on the other hand, would be weak to Posion (aka Psychic) and resistant to itself (which includes Dragons).
•Colorless: Normal, Flying, Fighting •Fire: Fire •Water: Water, Ice •Grass: Grass, Ground •Electric: Electric •Toxic: Poison, Bug •Magic: Psychic, Dragon, Fairy •Metal: Steel, Rock •Darkness: Dark, Ghost Reasoning for the changes: Gras and Ground have a score of 24 and are both "nature" types Fairy/Dragon has a score of 40, Fairy/Psychic has a score of 28, and Dragon/Psychic has a score of 30 (32.6 average) They are also all magical types so they fit well. I put fighting with colorless because it just didn't fit anywhere else and colorless is the most basic of the types.
Interesting idea, but I personally don't vibe with Ground being Lumped in with Grass. Can you imagine a Diglett card that's weak to Fire instead of the other way around?
Interesting video, I really enjoyed how you set out your methodology. It was concise, and well explained. Something I think might be a weakness of this method of comparing type similarity is that you gave the the same weight to two different scenarios. Those scenarios being (x2 , x1) pairs and (x1, x1/2) pairs, both resulting in .5 similarity score. My argument would be that (x2 , x1) should be treated as more different than (x1, x1/2). My reasoning is that, in the TCG, most Pokemon have a weakness and far fewer Pokemon have a resistance. Also, weakness in the TCG doubles damage but resistance only reduces by a flat 20 damage. But that's just my personal analysis.
One thing I wish they did more was diversify weaknesses in tcg. For example, back in gen 3, tcg Fighting could be weak to grass, water, or psychic depending on the pokemon. There is still a little bit of this today, but they are actively removing this in the game. I always felt it made deck building more interesting if you also thought about all your cards weaknesses, as to avoid being weak to all one type, but thats becoming harder these days.
Love this type of video, though I may hit you up with my own attempt at the calculations of similarity. I'm suspicious that similarities aren't symmetrical, and in general I love doing this kind of math.
A part of me wonders what pokemon would be like with MTG mana Mountain - Fire, Dragon, Electric, Rock Island - Water, Ice, Steel Forest - Grass, Bug, Fairy Plain - Normal, Flying, Ground, Fighting Swamp - Dark, Ghost, Psychic, Poison Honestly would be kind of a wreck with so few types
I have to disagree with your thoughts about dark and poison. As much as I like the idea of poison being it’s own type, I think merging with dark alongside fairy and psychic was perfect. Poison shouldn’t be able to counter psychic by weakness, right? Well, you have the dark half for that. Why can ghosts be dealt super effective damage by poison? Because it’s the dark type half. Not to mention, it works thematically as well. The dark type isn’t meant to just be “the night”, but also sinister actions, which poison usually falls under. If poison didn’t exist, I could easily see many poison types like Toxicroak falling under dark with no problems whatsoever. By both the conversion of game design and lore-wise, I feel poison and dark have a lot more synergy than your spreadsheet gives it credit for. I’d go so far to say the current state of psychic and darkness is actually the perfect pairing of types, honestly. It’s interesting to see your ideas, but I think it’s fine as is, even if I do miss the fairy type being in the TCG.
Great video, one of the main things about the types is the color coding of each type, it makes it easier for kids to get it, so changing the rock types to steel types, for example would be a bad play IMO
I haven't played the TCG competitively since I retired as the Rhode Island State Champion of 2003, but i do have some things to say having been involved since back then. We had this conversation all the time about dual types. It was fixed ultimately by the weakness and resistance system. For example, since grass was often used for many types back then we knew if poison was the "video game type" then the weakness would be psychic. I did stay somewhat involved in my local TCG player hangout until after Delta Species, and would you like to know a secret? I was one of maybe 5-6 people who even cared that the TCG types weren't congruent to the video game type. And most of us, including me, saw the way the types working differently than in the games an interesting challenge when deck building and playing each other. In other words, the thought of making the types in the TCG the same as in the video games is insulting to the strategists who have enjoyed the variation. Its in my professional, gym leader esque opinion on the matter that anyone who actually believes the types should be a 1:1 match is butthurt that they haven't figured out how to make it work yet and should stop making decks based in their favorite pokemon (this is why they're losing) and making decks based upon strategy. If they can make decks with their faves in them, more power to them, but they cannot be the focus if they want a coherent deck. In other words, i was also once upon a time the whiney kid at the tournament who demanded the TCG worked the same as my Pokémon gold game cart, but since learned there's a very good reason it doesn't.
I miss the fairy type cards, I liked the variety in color and how they contrasted with the other types. I personally like the dragon type cards, too. The bug-poison idea was cool, and the design you showed was interesting and unique.
Speaking from game mechanics, the types in the TCG help to ensure deck diversity. It is set up the same way as Magic the Gathering's color pie (and people can endlessly discuss that), and thus it also borrows one of the game's greatest strengths. There is an inherent conflict between wanting to play more types/colors so they can cover their weaknesses and wanting to play the fewest types/colors so the deck is consistent. But I do agree that too many types cause a problem. If a single set is designed to be played (like at a prerelease event), then you need to ensure that players can open cards that form a consistent enough deck. Too many types fights against this. All that said, this means that colorless and dragon don't fit in the normal type chart the same way. They don't require their own energy, and as such they do not add inconsistency to the deck. In fact, colorless cards help smooth out a deck. Also, dragons end up being like Magic's multicolor cards. If you are already playing a grass and lightning deck, then something like that dragonite from 7:06 can easily slot in without adding much complexity AND reward the player for going with that combination in the first place. If anything, we need more types set up this way. Apparently another commenter said the same thing, but I think having fairy be treated like dragon is a good thing. Let it stand in for multicolor cards with its mystical counterpart. I do like the idea of rock being moved to metal, but I think that is because metal and lightning seem so strange as types. They are defensively difficult to deal with and relatively few in number. Fire is also strange that it gets its own type, but I feel like the starter trio need to be represented no matter what.
This video reminded me of something I had been trying to figure out: a way to mathematically derive a tier list from a list of matchups of every entrant vs every other entrant. My basic idea was that the aggregate positivity or negativity of all of a characters match ups would represent a basic "weight" for the character, and position on the tier list would derive from essentially replaying the match up comparison with those weights. Unfortunately, this new list could just as easily be used to make a second-derivative weight and the whole process repeats forever. Do you have any insights? You are cleary good at this type of spreadsheet, though I was thinking of this for Smash Bros Melee rather than a TCG.
As a person who doesn’t play the tcg, I don’t understand why they don’t just make 18 types, asking with dual type cards. I have a dual type Volcorona card that’s half grass and half fire, with a line down the center where the colors mix and it looks great
i always thought fairy type logo (small insect like wings) was ideal to add Fairy and Bug into one, also a lot of bugs are cute for "Girly" theme decks (at least on the marketing view) with a lot being butterflies or some are ideals for fairy type like volbeat and illumise, while some others are 2 types, like ariados or beedril.
Hmmmm... Iunno, Poison with Dark makes a whole lot more sense than Poison with Psychic. Poison as Dark and Ghost as Psychic make sense thematically enough, and those type matchups within the TCG are well balanced. But having Toxic as its own type could be cool!
I loved back when B2/W2 introduced the dragon typing card. These were powerful cards that could only be countered by other dragon types and dictated how decks would be built. Then X&Y came out and Faries came out basically ruined it. The dragon type was now a crutch because they were weak to fairy type cards now and fairy’s sole purpose was to counter a dragon. There was no real viable advantage to having either of them. When Sword and Shield removed faries i thought back to form but then noticed dragons were now slightly weaker and had no weakness or resistance. Having them now is just for show imo and really discouraging. Those are my thoughts at least I’ve been playing the tcg since the HG/SS card sets
I could see bug/poison being combined to a “toxic” type. However, if that were the case I think fairy would need to be moved in with grass as a “nature” type. Now the only problem with that is psychic would now have one pairing and those mons are weak to bug but strong to poison. Personally I think that more types in the TCG wouldn’t be bad and could be worked out. But you would likely have to overhaul the entire game.
Isn't that no different than Poison being part of Darkness? Seeing as Poison is weak against Psychic, but Dark is strong against Psychic. Further more when Poison was part of Psychic it was just weak against itself.
Yeah, the current type system could definitely be better- to my knowledge, a Pokemon weak to Rock in the main series has never had a Fighting weakness in the card game, nor have Ice or Bug-weak Pokemon been given a weakness to Water or Grass, respectively. It'd be nice if they changed that every now and again on some cards- having a Flying Pokemon weak to Fighting for once would be fun.
I may or may not have taken for granted just how ingrained in me the card-game typing system is. To this day, the way I keep track of all the types is to have them mentally arranged in ways which reflected how they were represented in the card system; either the 3 starter types come first (in order of the starters' dex number arrangement, naturally) or each starter type is directly followed by the types it was lumped with in the card game (so grass is followed by bug, then poison, probably because caterpie comes before weedle in the dex, and water is followed by ice, either that or water is followed by bug, poison, then ice). Electric is next, likely due to pikachu being a starter in Yellow version, then normal, along with the types it was lumped with in the card game (flying, then dragon, as dratini's at the end of the pokédex). Fighting and the other 2 types sharing its symbol follow (fighting is probably first because I heard the energy card called "Fighting energy", ground always comes before rock, for reasons I can't really explain), and psychic is the last of the original types, maybe because mewtwo is at the end of the dex? It, of course, is followed by ghost, which was lumped in with it in gen 1, then comes dark, as I noticed it was pretty similar to ghost, and steel and fairy are just stuck on the end. And this is all coming from someone who never even played the card game.
I haven't played the tcg since I was a kid, but it's never made sense to me that - if they're willing to change types, as they've proven they are - they never moved Ghost to Darkness. I get why they didn't at first I guess, when Darkness didn't have a basic energy, but it makes so much more sense than shoving Poison on there. Strong against the same two types, no better pair. Then Ghosts are just made weak to Darkness cards, which covers both of their in-game weaknesses. If not for how much overlap Poison and Grass (and Bug) had in gen I, Poison could have paired well with Fire. I don't think the flavour matchup is terrible if you consider Acid is a Poison move, and the important factor here is that they both hit Grass types for super effective damage. However, Metal type cards typically being weak to Fire hurts here...
I remember realizing how mismatched the card game types were and going through to see how to pair them differently, although I wasn't quite as scientific. I did hit the same ideas of uniting Dark/Ghost and Fighting/Ground, since the former both primarily hit psychic and ghost types, while the latter are both resisted by flying and bug. I had a different answer for Poison types though. I ended up pairing Fairy with Dragon, since both of those beat dragon, and then pairing Poison with Steel, since they both beat fairy, and other types like Ice, Rock, and Grass that would otherwise be weak to them have a lot of other weaknesses that could be put on cards. Another place where it differed was actually pairing together Ice and Rock, since Rock didn't pair very well with Ground/Fighting and Ice isn't a good fit for Water, although that'd need a new category like Crystal or something to work. I didn't quite have an answer to Bug or Flying though, as they didn't seem to have the same clearcut offensive overlap. I think it's best if Flying sticks with the primary type of the mon, while Bug instead relies on the secondary type or the pokemon's movepool. For instance, having Beedrill be Poison(Metal), or having Butterfree be Psychic because it gets Confusion and other psychic attacks, but then giving them more typical bug weaknesses/resists. In regards to theme or having too many types, one answer I had was to simply not give each type its own energy. For instance, the new Rock/Ice type could generally use Fighting energy for Rock types and Water energy for Ice types, adding offensive variety to decks that use those cards without putting on an extra energy burden. This is already similar to how Dragon types work, where they often rely on Fire, Water, or Lightning energy.
Get rid of dragon and make the new poison/bug energy sounds great! I think making them match thematically is the most important, and not over complicating as well.
I think they also made it based on the Gen1 Pokemon. Almost all Rock-Pokemon where ground. Alot of Ice-Pokemon were Water. Alot of Flying-Pokemon where Normal. This goes on for Grass, Bug and Poison which also shared alot of Pokemon from the Video Games.
The lack of typing interaction by having more types could be solve giving every pokemon 2 or 3 weakness and resistance, and change resistance to - 60 or ÷2 to make it more similar to the video game.
Dragon types were colourless for the first 5 sets of the Black and White era, it wasn't until Dragons Exalted that they introduced dragon types, which is why stuff like Haxorus and Druddigon were colorless while dual types like Hydreigon and Kyurem were their secondary types.
I like the rebalancing but feel like some more things could be addressed. I'd merge Steel and Rock with Electric and move dragon over to fire, I know dragon is resistant to water but is weak to ice.
I think it’s okay for Dragon to exist on its own, since it’s not dependent on Dragon Energy.
I agree. The lore itself can be turned into a game mechanic, and given that from a lore perspective Dragon type pokemon are often considered mythical and rare creatures, it makes little sense to have them be grouped with the normal type, which is reserved for the more mundane and common pokemon. Also in the video games (the media the TCG and all other pokemon adaptations are based on), the Dragon type has more meaningful interactions with other types, with the most notable being resisting the 4 clasical types of most elemental power systems (Fire, Water, Grass, Electric). They even had to introduce a new type (Fairy) just to balance it out competitively. It is only appropriate that this level of distinction from the basic Normal type gets emphasized in some capacity.
Another commenter also pointed out how the Dragon and Fairy type could be merged in the new Mystical type which would better reflect the video game matchups where Dragons are weak to themselves and Fairy types.
@@luchotenks2310 though I agree with the rest of your points, I will say lore-wise normal doesn’t ALWAYS mean normal, sometimes it can mean more obscure things like sound, but often times it means stuff that don’t look like they even have a type, or don’t fit into a clear typing already (like porygon, regigigas, ditto, Arceus himself, even moves like tri attack)
@@ThePenisMan for arceus and tri attack, i always thought of it (that i think i got from the “rainbow energy” card) is that normal type is kinda like the white light of pokémon types. where white light is made up of multicoloured light, normal “energy” is made up of energy from various types, hence arceus’ regular form bring normal type (it has access to all types) and making things that have multiple elemental powers make more sense to be normal, like tri-attack. it would also explain why so many (especially in gen 1) normal types get super diverse movepools with lots of types they don’t have
It's not like the colorless type interacts with anything offensively anyway and being dragon type could allow it to do super effective damage to other dragons if they wanted to.
They should do the same thing to Fairy since it's also a very rare typing and you'll have to be an actual fairy, nature sprite or witch/siren then give the types different unique energy requirements.
Dragon: Fire, Electric, Water, Dark
Fairy: Grass, Psychic, Electric (Thunderbolt can be learned by some Fairy types), Water (mermaids and sirens like Milotic and Primarina)
One thing to remember about Poison types is their distribution in Gen 1.10 were pure Poison, 9 were Grass-Poison, 5 were Bug-Poison, 3 were Ghost-Poison (the Gengar line), 2 were Poison-Ground (Nidoking/queen), 2 were Poison-Flying (Zubat and Golbat), and 2 were Water-Poison (Tentacool and Tentacruel).
So, assuming they had already decided that Grass would be a type, and that Bug would be mixed with it, and that Tentacool and Tentacruel would be Water, then half of the Poison types would already be Grass types, so it was really only logical for the rest to be as well, with the exception of the Gengar line.
There’s something similar where every Gen 1 Rock type was also a Ground type, with the exception of the fossils.
The fact that in gen 1 all non-fossil rock types were also ground types is why I've always wondered why the TCG didn't start out with earth energy. Pairing ground and rock with fighting just feels like it was done because of color, same with poison being physic
@@AbsolXGuardian Yeah definitely color-first approach going on. As a die-hard Rock Pokémon fan seeing Fighting not only tag along (an annoying weakness) but get the namesake of the Energy was almost offensively in bad taste for me ha.
All 3 are often found in Caves, Mountains, and Desert biomes so maybe they grouped them together by their habitat as well. Tho that doesn't work with Poison/Psychic though- so maybe its
1.Color
2.Habitat
The grass/bug/poison merger also led to the absurd scenario where a Beedrill or Butterfree could totally beat up a Golem, exactly the opposite of how it would work in the video games.
Explanation: The Beedrill is typed as grass, which the Golem is weak to because it was originally a rock/ground, and the Golem is typed as fighting, which the Beedrill resists because it was originally a bug/poison. This resistance was (I think?) removed in later gens, but it's still quite strong just from the weakness.
Really read that as generation 1.10, I thought I had missed something.
@@DoABarrelRol1l Ignoring weaknesses, thematically fighting fits very well as colorless, matching a theme of non-elemental physical combatants.
Based purely on theme, I would have these types in the TCG: Fire, Grass, Lightning, Water(/Ice), Ground(/Rock/Steel), Psychic(/Ghost/Dark), Poison(/Bug), Fairy(/Dragon), and Colorless(Normal/Fighting/Flying).
Though I think your observation on habitat is interesting. Based on habitat the original TCG types make much more sense: Forest (Grass/Bug/Poison), Ocean (Water/Ice), Cave (Ground, Rock, Fighting), etc.
As an avid fan of rock and steel type Pokémon, I have said for years I wished the Pokémon company would combine the two types in the TCG. It has never made sense that rock types are represented as fighting and only steel types are represented as metal.
But at the same time having rock and ground be together make sens. Thematically they are even more related than rock and steel and most of the early rock types are rock/ground making the type associated in a lot of people mind. Also rock brownish colour palet makes more sens alongside fighting type. Fighting is the least related type thematically but share the colour palet with rock and ground. Like basically, fighting is related to ground, ground is related to rock and rock is related to steel, so it is really hard to find an ideal split. It think there is a similar case to be made with fairy being related to psychic, being itself related to ghost being itself related to dark and dark is related to poison. Personally I like poison finally joining dark as it wasn't very magical to begin with and wasn't related thematically to psychic, it works much better with the violent/vicious nature of dark types and it just look way nicer tbh. However fairy while very related to psychic thematically looks really bad and wrong in practice, the colour palet just doesn't make sens at all. I think they should either move ghost to dark and make psychic card being more pink like in the video game, or just move back fairy to its own type. Dragon being its own type doesn't change much to me, I think the normal type colour palet looked a bit nicer but I don't mind it being its own type as dragons aren't really "normal" creatures.
Thematically I think Ground, Rock, and Steel would be great together as they are the mineral types.
But since Steel and Dark were the new types and got special treatment (that is, all their energy cards were special), I think it made sense to have them separate. Of course, IMO it would have been better if later on they went with what I think is thematically the most correct.
I love how oddly specific this video is, it's one of those things that makes youtube special. Because I've definitely thought it too while playing the TCG, but where else would I find a video of someone discussing it?
By the way, I'd be very interested to learn more about the project you shared! If you have somewhere you'll share updates+progress I hope we're kept posted, it's def something I'd follow.
I don’t play the TCG, but I remember being a teenager and seeing Dragon and Fairy promoted on their own for the first time. And then I got sad years later when the TCG removed those types.
They brought Dragon types back in Evolving Skies!
@@MindofInstincts :0
for me, fairy is an extremely hard type to play, so its removal is both a blessing and a curse in my opinion. a blessing because it was very difficult to make work when it was still in the tcg, a curse because its removal makes it even harder to play since no one is weak to fairy anynore
@@Jaminux but also that its harder to get fairy pokemons/energies for the deck (':
The fairy change makes sens thematically but god does it look wrong in practice. Like psychic in the TCG has a shade of purple that doesn't look right with fairy types at all !
I find it weird that sometimes they just completely ignore a Pokémon’s secondary type. I think I remember seeing a dark type sableye card that was weak to fighting…
Or coalossal (a rock and fire type) being weak to grass in the TCG? That one always throws me off
@@oliviastork1811 bruh
It is good that they do it as such because otherwise clubs like, for example, the Science Club, the Grass Club, the Rock Club, and the Fighting Club would be confused. These clubs use Pokémon based on type and weakness.
For example, Aerodactyl is a Pokémon suitable for Rock Club usage, not Fighting Club usage. But we know that because of it's weakness to Grass. Had they taken the secondary type into account then we would not have know this fact because Aerodactyl would not have had a Grass weakness.
Scovillain being weak to fire lol
Is not weird really, u just played the main games and became accustomed to the dual-type nonsense
I was today years old when I learned Fairy had already retired and poison was changed yet again. This is one of those niche topics I've always thought about on a surface level, but absolutely love your deep dive.
The reason the dragon type works as a standalone type is that they don't use their own energy.
Which makes them mechanically the same as colourless,
But in lore and aesthetics clearly distinct.
Mechanical, they all use two type attacks, which is based.
@@eddiepeach3975 yeah, I realise I didn't actually mention that,
But it's the one difference between colourless and dragon that arguably makes dragon worse in a vacuum.
It's dope from a player perspective tho.
@@BramLastname Worse to balance cool abilities and attacks, I always assumed. I am new :)
@@eddiepeach3975 basically types in the TCG are used to lock certain effects behind certain decks,
Dragons having 2 type requirements makes them cards you tend to built a deck around
Rather than cards you slot into a deck as a support piece.
@@BramLastname Couldn't agree more.
I get the point of the video was likely just a fun statistical exercise, but I definitely think that thematic cohesion should be weighed more: As an example, Yes, Ghosts being dark type DOES have some thematic logic to it, but there's really nothing to tie poison thematically to pyshcic or fairies other then the color purple and pink. On the flip side, Fairy, Pyschic, and Ghost type all share a common theme of being tied to the occult and mysticism, and "Dark" type is usually more about underhanded tactics and being mean or predatory rather then literal shadow and darkness (which is more a ghost type thing), so poison being linked to that sort of underhanded and predatory theming makes a lot more sense.
I could make similar observations about the Fighting-Rock-Ground-Steel changes (though I don't think those are as contentious), but another factor here is relative quantity per type: I think it makes sense to factor in how many pokemon are in a given type in the games vs the TCG. I don't think it's desirable to have one TCG type cover a TON of different Pokemon while a totally seperate TCG type barely has any, etc
I think Ground Rock and Fighting are paired together because they tend to share Habitats, making Earth a type over Fighting would've probably made more sense for this, but also I think people would be more interested in Fighting type than Earth type, like there's a reason Bakugan replaced Subterra with the Mystical Gold faction in the Reboot, I think earth as a theme is not as popular with kids
Placing Poison with Psychic makes sense because some poisons have psychological effects. Pairing Poison with Grass makes sense because many plants make poison. Pairing Poison with Bug makes sense because many bugs make Poison. Pairing Poison with Dark makes sense because Poison is underhanded. Pairing Ghost with Dark makes sense because of Dark rituals.
Pairing Poison with Water would also make sense because a lot of poison is liquid. It would also make sense to pair Poison with Fighting because of steroids. Or with Steel because many metals are toxic. Or with Electric because poisons can influence the electric pulse in our body, or with Fire because flammable gas is poisonous, or with Colorless because some poisons are colourless.
This was really cool. I thought the TCG types where a bit awkward, but I never expected anyone to make a metric for compatibility. Looking at the spreadsheet you made it seems like the TCG types currently have a total compatibility score of 72(Solo types where given a score of 0), with Darkness(Dark + Posion) & Fighting(Fighting + Ground + Rock) weighing it down. Those changes as you suggested (Dark+Ghost, Steel+Rock, Psychic+Fairy, Poison+Bug, & Normal+Flying+Dragon) bring that total up to 267(You probably already knew this).
I noticed that just adding up the compatibility scores favors cramming as many compatible types together as possible. I wonder if it would be better to determine a type's compatibility score as the average score then? Doing that, the base TCG's score total is 30(Average of 3) while your revised types give out a score of 116.5 (Average of 11.65). With the summation method the type combos Rock+Ice+Steel, Ghost+Dark+Psychic, & Grass+Fairy would be net gains, but would be net losses for the average method.
This is really just an elaborate "Stable Roommate" problem, but aesthetics matter.
Great analysis. I've been playing the TCG competitively since 2014 and took a back seat when (world event) hit and got more into the design philosophy of the game by making cubes. You're right when you say less types is better for the game, and also that the type distribution needs to be relatively even. The reason Fairy was discontinued was because there aren't that many Fairy Pokémon, so the same Pokémon kept getting printed on cards all the time, which actually stunts diversity because if there are 6 Gardevoirs in the current format, you can't play all of them in your deck because you can only have 4 Pokémon of the same name in your deck. Metal still has this problem, and I have said to my friends that moving Rock over makes a lot of sense because they are functionally similar as types in the video games. The best thing to happen to Darkness is moving Poison types into it. It fits thematically and has made the type way more diverse.
I know you said you wanted to get into playing the game more, so hit me up. I could be a good resource.
Thanks, a perspective like yours would be very helpful! I have a Twitter and Discord account listed on my channel, feel free to message me!
Having dragon and fairy being combined into one type would have been interesting
But I do see the benefit of Dragon being a type that can’t do super effective damage (similar to normal) but is strong and usually needs more that 1 type of energy to use it’s attacks
I remember actually getting introduced to the card game before the video games, and was really confused the first time I played Pokemon Stadium when I was little. I never really thought about how less types makes more sense for the card game, due to the energy cards, but it makes a lot of sense. As for your balancing ideas, the only one I'm not the biggest fan of is separating rock from the fighting type. I've always kinda viewed rock and ground as one and the same, even though I know that isn't the case (though Gen 1 especially having a lot of rock/ground type Pokemon doesn't help things). It would just feel weird to separate them, even though pairing rock with steel sorta makes sense. Also, that game idea you have sounds interesting. I really like the TCG and PMD, so a combination of the 2 could be really cool.
Rock’s kinda like a middle ground (haha) between steel and ground, I think
Weak to fighting and ground, like steel
Weak to water and grass, like ground
Positive matchup against fire and poison, like ground
Positive matchup against ice and bug and flying and normal, like steel
Also its only weaknesses aside from shared weaknesses, are steel and ground
There isn't a single strength rock has that isn’t shared with ground or steel
And if we're counting normal as a strength id say flying counts too
@@hhannahh7835 True, forgot steel resists flying
Actually, they are the same. The ground is made out of rocks!
I think the Poison Type cards are very interesting with how they were switched around
It started as grass as in the early games Grass and Bug are paired with them very often and uses a lot of status conditions
Then Psychic came around and thet decided to move Poison into Psychic due to it being more fitting in a Color Coding sense
That is also probably why Rock Ground and Fighting are grouped together
And finally it was put into Darkness because as the series went on, messing with the opponent with status conditions and tactics fit more with the Dark type Pokemon than grass type.
Also dark is thematically the most related, at least when it comes to personality. Just like dark type, poison types are vicious, violent and are considered less honourable type. They like torturing their opponents and killing so in this sens is makes a lot of sens. Plus it make them look way cooler, every time I see a poison type on a black card is just make so much sens. I didn't make sense thematically with ghost and psychic as unlike those it wasn't a very magical type, so it always felt like an oversight. The new classification makes much more sens thematically.
However I really, really don't like what they did to fairy types ! Sure thematically it makes complete sens to be with other magical fairy tale creature but god does it look so wrong ! I think they need to change the shade of purple on them because it doesn't look right at all. Violet represents mystery and something special, it doesn't work well with super cute light pink innocent creatures.
"then Psychic came around"? Psychic was in the game from day one!
rock ground and fighting have a lot in common
10:38 Ghost/Dark Gengar with levitate would be SUCH A MENACE in early gens it genuinely scares me.
The PTCG video games mixed with PMD sounds like a dream come true! They're easily my favorite spinoffs by a country mile, so I'm looking forward to whatever's in store for the project!
the example pokemon team you showed at the end of the video to demonstrate that pokemon can have multiple types is pretty likely a gen 3 competitive team and I think that's neat. blissey and tyranitar are defining members of the meta game, and swampert gengar moltres and cloyster are also popular and powerful choices for teams.
Great video, it's interesting what you bring up with poison and bug being a more appropriate type compared to bug and grass. I feel that poison isn't a popular enough type for the pokemon company to want to add it at this point, especially now that they've removed fairy. Would be cool though.
Pokemon mystery dungeon explorers of sky is my favourite game of all time, so I'd be very interested in hearing more about your game idea!
I find it kind of interesting/funny that fairy was moved to the psychic type and poison was moved to the dark type in the same generation that there were two rival characters that highlighted these types' similarities (Bede's entire team switches from a psychic ace team to a fairy ace team, Marnie and her brother Piers both have poison types that conflict with their type speciality)
I like bug types. Their cool. part of me wishes umbreon was a bug or poison type. Its pokedex states it sweats poison. In fact with ghost types existing in gen one they could change psychics weakness to bug, ghost and lastly flying types(heights). Really theres no need for dark types. Another thing is buff the grass type, how about removing the fairy type and make grass super effective to electric( grass resists electric) and psyckic and ghost(grass the new light type is obviously super effective to both electric and ghost types).
Give more reasons to choose grass type starter than water.
Well in basic team building there's covering your weakness. Like if you have a water Pokemon in your team it's a good Idea to catch a fire type for those grass types. Other examples are a dark type to go with the poison type on your team. Or just an immunitie like a steel type and a ghost who's immune to fighting types. Or just an earthtype with earthquake and we'll just steam roll the whole game with arguably the best type in the game. Think of it why is there so many Pokemon with levitate? Because earth is good.
@@peshomighty5051 umbreon has that in its dex bc during development it was poison type, actually
Interesting topic. If we were rebuilding the game from the ground up, I'd definitely advocate for Poison splitting off into its own type and putting Bug underneath it. Same goes for moving Ghost to Dark. I also think Rock, Ground, and Steel are similar enough thematically to warrant being the same type, but Rock should be the umbrella they fall under instead of Steel (leaving Fighting on its own). Granted, the game's been around too long now to make a sudden, massive change like completely removing and replacing a type.
I like bug types. Their cool. part of me wishes umbreon was a bug or poison type. Its pokedex states it sweats poison. In fact with ghost types existing in gen one they could change psychics weakness to bug, ghost and lastly flying types(heights). Really theres no need for dark types. Another thing is buff the grass type, how about removing the fairy type and make grass super effective to electric( grass resists electric) and psyckic and ghost(grass the new light type is obviously super effective to both electric and ghost types)
Give more reasons to choose grass over water everygame.
i'd honestly like to see pokemon experiment with something like Magic's hybrid mana, but for energy costs on moves, though i don't know how they'd design those graphically in a way that wouldn't look terrible
just found your channel and holy shit you're incredibly underrated! i've never really been into the actual game of the card game and just collected a ton of them as a kid, but your videos make me want to dust them off again. also especially loved that grass + water + ground = regret visual gag, you've got some pretty slick editing skills! can't wait for the next!!
If there gonna be dragon type pokemon cards they should at least bring back fairy types so that dragon types have a disadvantage.
Keep up the great work man! i’ve getting into pokémon cards lately and i’ve been looking for a youtuber with this style of content. really excited to see what you do next
I love your thought process with the types, I don't know the tcg that well but this is all very interesting, I love your ideas
Always looking forward to another upload. This channel is a gem.
Loved the video, this was really interesting! Especially how certain types wind up being more compatible than others - I didn't expect Ghost to pair up so well, though it makes perfect logical sense once I think about how few non-neutral interactions it actually has.
As a huge PMD fan, I'd love to try out your crossover game if you get past the idea stage, it sounds very intriguing!
This is such a cool video idea and seems like it took so much work. Well done for sure!
0:55 that little illustration was sick 10/10
I like your Video. My job requires me to use excel a lot and it can be fun to build complicated structures in it like the one you show. The background music is so well chosen, I think you like the right pkm games :) Subbed!
This video is insanely interesting. This topic has always been super interesting to me, and has been long conversations among friends for countless hours over beer and ptcg. Showing this to them now lol
Bonus points for the Rescue Team tracks playing in the background👍
Great vid and interesting topic. Kudos for the effort put in to this and laying out the information so it's clear and easy to understand!
A Raticate facing off agains a Ralts in a gen 3 game is messing with my head.
So glad someone finally made a video on this! Cant wait for more vids!
I personally prefer having the dragon type. I really like that each dragon pokemon requires a certain amount of other types to make work... similar to commanders in Magic. They are much better now that dragon no longer has it's own energy, so I think they are balemced and open fun deck building options
Dragon only ever had Double Dragon energy and for all intents amd puropses it was just a double Rainbow energy but for Dragon Types
Moving Ghost over to Dark, then creating a new Poison and Bug Type would be the best change to the TCG in a long time
I've been watching your tcg videos, I love it. I like the idea of a new type that combines bug and poison
Kind of a curious observation 11:35
Your bottom chart has some of the most busted dual type combinations in competitive.
Fighting Ice (crabominable), Fighting Flying (Hawlucha), Fairy Ground (ground hits all 3 fairy resists), Ground Ice (Mamoswine), Dark Grass (Meowscarada), Ghost Grass (Dhelmise), Fighting Ghost (Marshadow), are some of the hardest pokemon to switch in and only a handful of dual types combinations resist them.
I found this video because I saw a psychic-type Typhlosion card last night, lol. Great info!! Thank you!!
Ghost being moved to Dark would certainly make a lot more sense since you could also argue that Ghost-types are weak to other Ghosts and Dark-types in the game. Poison, however, is trickier. Moving it to Dark, due to theme makes sense, but it also becomes confusing when you bring game logic in, as Poison-types are traditionally weak to Psychic, while Dark-types are immune. So it becomes odd seeing Darkness Pokémon cards with a weakness to Psychic cards. As for Rock, it honestly makes more sense seeing it stick around in the Fighting section due to the fact that Rock and Ground tend to be paired up together more often than with Steel.
The change that made the least sense were removing Fairy and moving those into the Psychic types. Especially since they briefly changed Dragon-type cards into their secondary typing during the Sword & Shield sets before changing them back into Dragon-types. The oddity with typings is how very little Resistances are properly used these days. A number of Ground-type Pokémon tend to go without Resistances to Lightning cards, or Darkness cards having no resistance to Psychic cards, or how Pokémon with the secondary typing of Flying in the games don't have resistance to Fighting in the card game. A good example of this is Scyther. This is a Pokémon well known from the early days due to its stats, including its Resistance to Fighting. If you look at the release of Scyther cards after the secret rare reprint of Jungle Scyther in the Platinum set, no Scyther card ever has a Resistance to Fighting ever again.
I really liked these ideas! Btw, I never played the tcg, but the topic and the presentation hooked me.
Your other videos were great too! I hope you will find your place in the oversaturated poketube space (or any other space for the matter). Wish you the best luck for this year!
Kinda tangential, but I think having more pokemon cards with different energy requirements to their types would make the game way more interesting, and replicate the dual type mechanics better.
Great video! I had a hard time understanding the way you calculated the type compatibility but other than that it was a great watch.
Think of it as similarity rather than compatibility. I just got two different types' strengths (2x) and weaknesses (0.5x), then deducted a point each time they differed. I did this with every possible pair of types, then normalized the results as I explain in the video, then compared pair "A" + pair "B" with its opposite, pair B + A, and averaged their scores. This gets both sides' perspective, since a matchup that's good for one type could be bad for another type with better options. The last step is just ordering the outcome of all of these calculations into one list, from most similar to least. Hope this helped
@@DeltaSeeker Oh I see. That makes more sense.
Great video man. It would be pretty cool if you did a video about your favorite cards
I have been trying to figure this out forever. I never thought to move ghost into dark, for some reason. That clears up the spot for poison perfectly!
thematically ghost is curses and black magic, fairy normal magic and psychic is supernatural stuff so they fit, dark is more about fighting dirty so it kinda fits with poison but it i think it still fit better with grass bug since grass/poison and bug/poison is a common, and about rock and ground, most early rock types where also ground and are thematically very similar, normal, dark and fighting are also similar being attacks using body,most dragon moves could pass a fire moves since they often involve fire
I can really get behind this logic process. Moving Ghost over to Darkness and Rock over to Metal makes too much sense. I really don't think it would be a problem for the moved Ghost to be weak to itself as that is far from unprecedented in the PTCG. Rock would be weak to either Water, Grass, Fighting, or itself as the card itself dictates while Steel would be weak to Fire or Fighting, again, depending on the Pokemon card. I also don't think it would be bad if Pokemon cards had multiple weaknesses and/or resistances.
While I personally don't think that moving rock to the metal type makes the most sense, I can kind of see why there is an argument for it. I will agree, however, that having ghost becoming part of the darkness type rather than having poison migrate into that type is extremely intuitive, not just because of how similar dark and ghost are offensively (not to mention how frequently dark Pokemon get access to ghost moves and vice-versa), but also because it means that poison becomes good against psychic in the tcg. That said, one could argue that the last point about poison being strong against psychic is kinda rendered moot when considering that the 2 where previously connected, but that worked because at that point in time, all psychic Pokemon in the tcg usually were weak to their own type, which meant that poison was weak to psychic as well, but shifting it into the darkness type took this away. On a side note, I actually have a couple of ideas why poison got moved into the darkness type: the first being that when you look at Marnie's team in the video games, her only non dark type Pokemon is the poison type Toxicroak; and secondly, it could possibly have been a reference to the event involving Eternatus being known as the darkest day
@@matthewkuscienko4616 I think the explanation is much simpler,
They saw that Fairy and Psychic are a good match,
But realised Poison needed to move elsewhere to work well,
So they move Poison to Darkness to make it hit Fairy decks Super-effectively, by pairing it with the type that hits fairy's paired cards (Ghost and Psychic) super-effectively.
This is a dimensionality reduction problem :D you’re trying to project the 18 dimensional space of types in Pokémon game down to 10 types of card game. If you want a really interesting comparison it would be cool to follow this up with a clustering based approach to optimize the grouping and scoring with entirely new types via cluster algorithms like K-means, t-SNE, PCA, or just brute force it with a Markov search. If you apply this more generic framework you may even be able to do more complex analysis such as how to project a dual type Pokémon into the categories based on which group has the minimum distance/loss.
Great video!
I love the idea of a joint poison and bug type. The energy graphic for it was super cool.
those are pretty cool charts you made.
I used to play the tcg very competitively (back in the days of claydol, uxie, magmortar lvlx and leafeon lvlx, and luxray sp lvlx). One thing I always wanted to see was all 18 types explored as independent types, especially normal (basically splitting up colorless and normal, similar to generic and colorless in magic)
alternatively to cutting dragon, fairy could move to dragon, then all card game types would be made up from 1-2 videogame types.
they could make for a mythical type, but I guess that term is already is claimed
I'm a Play Pokemon Professor, and I fully agree with your opinions on these type match ups changes.
Very cool stats! Thanks for sharing the spreadsheet~
recently fairy types were turned back into psychic types and sometimes poison types like seviper and gengar are in the dark types.
damn Regret is my favorite pokemon now
If I was making the Pokemon TCG, I would simply make types less restrictive in general. I think I would actually go ahead and make energy cards for every type in the game, so rock and ground and fighting would each have their own energy. However, I would make the moves require mostly colorless energy, with specific typed energy being more reserved for stronger moves. Also, the weakness thing would only come into play on certain moves, not the whole card. It would also give incentive to run more of the same Pokemon, for example, maybe you really like Magnemite, but you want to use electric moves and don't care about steel. Well you can just stick with electric energy and ignore his steel moves by not playing steel energy. And you could do the opposite if you wanted to focus on Magnemite's steel moves. I think the new issue would be all of the mons would need more moves though, but I think it's possible. It would make each different mon more impactful to the game. However, that's all being said if I was making the game from the ground up, it would erase everything you know about the TCG currently to work. But what do I know, I'm a Yugioh player so my idea is probably shit.
Dragon is okay to exist as long as it's given the support to run with mixed type attack costs. Looking at the regidrago vstar deck vs. the goodra vstar deck, the goodra tends to run better because it can more quickly and efficiently get to metal/water energies. Regidrago vstar on the other hand suffers because of extremely slow grass acceleration with what we have in standard. Most of the dragon types that came with evolving skies felt unusable at first, and the ones that were able to keep up are just now starting to see way more play because of cards like mirage gate
I moved Rock over to Metal and called the hybrid "Mineral."
I moved Fairy over to Dragon and called it "Mystic," with Dragons being Mystic-types weak to Mystic and Fairies being Mystic-types weak to Mineral.
Ghost-types become "Shadow" types that are weak to Shadow, while Dark-types are Shadow and weak to "Quaking," which is what I came up with for Ground/Fighting (side note: it's cool that the fist's thumb and palm form a broken-ground image).
I also moved Poison over to Lightning and renamed it "Shock," which works remarkably well as many Poison-types have yellow accents.
I also rearranged the symbols to make more sense. I reassigned the Fairy symbol to Psychic, and reassigned the Psychic symbol to Ghost/Dark's "Shadow," thereby eliminating the Darkness symbol instead of the Fairy one and keeping another bright color.
I like your new type pairings and their respective names. But I'm not really a fan of swapping the symbols and the card frames. A black card frame suits Dark and Ghost types better than a violet one in my opinion. The Fairy symbol and pink card frame are not really necesary either.
@@luchotenks2310 Shadow could use the dark frame, or the Darkness symbol on Psychic's color, I just lack photoshop skills. Re: pink not being "necessary," uhh, sez you?
@@AlderFletcher I thought that you meant to make the Psychic type pink with the Fairy symbol and Shadow type violet with the Psychic symbol, which would make them too similar colorwise. That's why I said pink wasn't necessary. Black, in my opinion, adds the much needed varierty to the energy color palette while representing its type's theme better.
I've thought of another classification let me know what you think.
- Red: Fire
- Orange: Fighting, Ground (aka Seismic)
- Yellow: Electric
- Green: Grass
- Blue: Water, Ice (aka Water)
- Violet: Psychic, Poison (aka Psychic)
- Black: Ghost, Dark (aka Shadow)
- Grey: Steel, Rock (aka Mineral)
- White: Normal, Flying (aka Neutral)
- Pink: Dragon, Fairy (aka Mythical)
Psychic and Poison are again in the same category because they focus on damaging the body from within without the use of physical violence and by altering perception (hypnosis, confusion, and other forms if intoxication). Poison has an tricky and gimmicky side it more related to the Psychic type than to the rather straightforward Electric type.
As for Dragon and Fairy, they are now in the same group called Mythical. If you think about it, it goes perfectly with the lore that inspired those types (fairy tales) and also with their video game type matchups in the video games. This way the Dragon type subgroup can now be weak to itself and to the Fairy subgroup (just like in the games) because they are one and the same. The Fairy subgroup on the other hand, would be weak to Posion (aka Psychic) and resistant to itself (which includes Dragons).
•Colorless: Normal, Flying, Fighting
•Fire: Fire
•Water: Water, Ice
•Grass: Grass, Ground
•Electric: Electric
•Toxic: Poison, Bug
•Magic: Psychic, Dragon, Fairy
•Metal: Steel, Rock
•Darkness: Dark, Ghost
Reasoning for the changes: Gras and Ground have a score of 24 and are both "nature" types
Fairy/Dragon has a score of 40, Fairy/Psychic has a score of 28, and Dragon/Psychic has a score of 30 (32.6 average) They are also all magical types so they fit well.
I put fighting with colorless because it just didn't fit anywhere else and colorless is the most basic of the types.
Interesting idea, but I personally don't vibe with Ground being Lumped in with Grass. Can you imagine a Diglett card that's weak to Fire instead of the other way around?
For Poison Pokemon I think it should be on a Species basis that varies depending on the Pokemon.
Another great video Delta :)
Interesting video, I really enjoyed how you set out your methodology. It was concise, and well explained.
Something I think might be a weakness of this method of comparing type similarity is that you gave the the same weight to two different scenarios. Those scenarios being (x2 , x1) pairs and (x1, x1/2) pairs, both resulting in .5 similarity score. My argument would be that (x2 , x1) should be treated as more different than (x1, x1/2). My reasoning is that, in the TCG, most Pokemon have a weakness and far fewer Pokemon have a resistance. Also, weakness in the TCG doubles damage but resistance only reduces by a flat 20 damage.
But that's just my personal analysis.
One thing I wish they did more was diversify weaknesses in tcg. For example, back in gen 3, tcg Fighting could be weak to grass, water, or psychic depending on the pokemon. There is still a little bit of this today, but they are actively removing this in the game.
I always felt it made deck building more interesting if you also thought about all your cards weaknesses, as to avoid being weak to all one type, but thats becoming harder these days.
Love this type of video, though I may hit you up with my own attempt at the calculations of similarity. I'm suspicious that similarities aren't symmetrical, and in general I love doing this kind of math.
A part of me wonders what pokemon would be like with MTG mana
Mountain - Fire, Dragon, Electric, Rock
Island - Water, Ice, Steel
Forest - Grass, Bug, Fairy
Plain - Normal, Flying, Ground, Fighting
Swamp - Dark, Ghost, Psychic, Poison
Honestly would be kind of a wreck with so few types
I have to disagree with your thoughts about dark and poison. As much as I like the idea of poison being it’s own type, I think merging with dark alongside fairy and psychic was perfect. Poison shouldn’t be able to counter psychic by weakness, right? Well, you have the dark half for that. Why can ghosts be dealt super effective damage by poison? Because it’s the dark type half.
Not to mention, it works thematically as well. The dark type isn’t meant to just be “the night”, but also sinister actions, which poison usually falls under. If poison didn’t exist, I could easily see many poison types like Toxicroak falling under dark with no problems whatsoever.
By both the conversion of game design and lore-wise, I feel poison and dark have a lot more synergy than your spreadsheet gives it credit for. I’d go so far to say the current state of psychic and darkness is actually the perfect pairing of types, honestly. It’s interesting to see your ideas, but I think it’s fine as is, even if I do miss the fairy type being in the TCG.
Great video, one of the main things about the types is the color coding of each type, it makes it easier for kids to get it, so changing the rock types to steel types, for example would be a bad play IMO
Damn, my man just solved the Pokemon TCG.
I haven't played the TCG competitively since I retired as the Rhode Island State Champion of 2003, but i do have some things to say having been involved since back then. We had this conversation all the time about dual types. It was fixed ultimately by the weakness and resistance system. For example, since grass was often used for many types back then we knew if poison was the "video game type" then the weakness would be psychic.
I did stay somewhat involved in my local TCG player hangout until after Delta Species, and would you like to know a secret? I was one of maybe 5-6 people who even cared that the TCG types weren't congruent to the video game type. And most of us, including me, saw the way the types working differently than in the games an interesting challenge when deck building and playing each other. In other words, the thought of making the types in the TCG the same as in the video games is insulting to the strategists who have enjoyed the variation. Its in my professional, gym leader esque opinion on the matter that anyone who actually believes the types should be a 1:1 match is butthurt that they haven't figured out how to make it work yet and should stop making decks based in their favorite pokemon (this is why they're losing) and making decks based upon strategy. If they can make decks with their faves in them, more power to them, but they cannot be the focus if they want a coherent deck.
In other words, i was also once upon a time the whiney kid at the tournament who demanded the TCG worked the same as my Pokémon gold game cart, but since learned there's a very good reason it doesn't.
I miss the fairy type cards, I liked the variety in color and how they contrasted with the other types. I personally like the dragon type cards, too. The bug-poison idea was cool, and the design you showed was interesting and unique.
ghost and dark actually cover the same types in the games, so it makes sense for them to be the most similar
Speaking from game mechanics, the types in the TCG help to ensure deck diversity. It is set up the same way as Magic the Gathering's color pie (and people can endlessly discuss that), and thus it also borrows one of the game's greatest strengths. There is an inherent conflict between wanting to play more types/colors so they can cover their weaknesses and wanting to play the fewest types/colors so the deck is consistent. But I do agree that too many types cause a problem. If a single set is designed to be played (like at a prerelease event), then you need to ensure that players can open cards that form a consistent enough deck. Too many types fights against this.
All that said, this means that colorless and dragon don't fit in the normal type chart the same way. They don't require their own energy, and as such they do not add inconsistency to the deck. In fact, colorless cards help smooth out a deck. Also, dragons end up being like Magic's multicolor cards. If you are already playing a grass and lightning deck, then something like that dragonite from 7:06 can easily slot in without adding much complexity AND reward the player for going with that combination in the first place. If anything, we need more types set up this way.
Apparently another commenter said the same thing, but I think having fairy be treated like dragon is a good thing. Let it stand in for multicolor cards with its mystical counterpart. I do like the idea of rock being moved to metal, but I think that is because metal and lightning seem so strange as types. They are defensively difficult to deal with and relatively few in number. Fire is also strange that it gets its own type, but I feel like the starter trio need to be represented no matter what.
This video reminded me of something I had been trying to figure out: a way to mathematically derive a tier list from a list of matchups of every entrant vs every other entrant. My basic idea was that the aggregate positivity or negativity of all of a characters match ups would represent a basic "weight" for the character, and position on the tier list would derive from essentially replaying the match up comparison with those weights.
Unfortunately, this new list could just as easily be used to make a second-derivative weight and the whole process repeats forever.
Do you have any insights? You are cleary good at this type of spreadsheet, though I was thinking of this for Smash Bros Melee rather than a TCG.
As a person who doesn’t play the tcg, I don’t understand why they don’t just make 18 types, asking with dual type cards. I have a dual type Volcorona card that’s half grass and half fire, with a line down the center where the colors mix and it looks great
i always thought fairy type logo (small insect like wings) was ideal to add Fairy and Bug into one, also a lot of bugs are cute for "Girly" theme decks (at least on the marketing view) with a lot being butterflies or some are ideals for fairy type like volbeat and illumise, while some others are 2 types, like ariados or beedril.
Hmmmm... Iunno, Poison with Dark makes a whole lot more sense than Poison with Psychic. Poison as Dark and Ghost as Psychic make sense thematically enough, and those type matchups within the TCG are well balanced. But having Toxic as its own type could be cool!
I loved back when B2/W2 introduced the dragon typing card. These were powerful cards that could only be countered by other dragon types and dictated how decks would be built. Then X&Y came out and Faries came out basically ruined it. The dragon type was now a crutch because they were weak to fairy type cards now and fairy’s sole purpose was to counter a dragon. There was no real viable advantage to having either of them. When Sword and Shield removed faries i thought back to form but then noticed dragons were now slightly weaker and had no weakness or resistance. Having them now is just for show imo and really discouraging. Those are my thoughts at least I’ve been playing the tcg since the HG/SS card sets
I agree completely! I feel dual types and dual weaknesses and resistances could be interesting also
I could see bug/poison being combined to a “toxic” type. However, if that were the case I think fairy would need to be moved in with grass as a “nature” type. Now the only problem with that is psychic would now have one pairing and those mons are weak to bug but strong to poison. Personally I think that more types in the TCG wouldn’t be bad and could be worked out. But you would likely have to overhaul the entire game.
Isn't that no different than Poison being part of Darkness? Seeing as Poison is weak against Psychic, but Dark is strong against Psychic. Further more when Poison was part of Psychic it was just weak against itself.
Nice video. I think you should get an outro!
A poison bug theme would be cool
Yeah, the current type system could definitely be better- to my knowledge, a Pokemon weak to Rock in the main series has never had a Fighting weakness in the card game, nor have Ice or Bug-weak Pokemon been given a weakness to Water or Grass, respectively. It'd be nice if they changed that every now and again on some cards- having a Flying Pokemon weak to Fighting for once would be fun.
I may or may not have taken for granted just how ingrained in me the card-game typing system is. To this day, the way I keep track of all the types is to have them mentally arranged in ways which reflected how they were represented in the card system; either the 3 starter types come first (in order of the starters' dex number arrangement, naturally) or each starter type is directly followed by the types it was lumped with in the card game (so grass is followed by bug, then poison, probably because caterpie comes before weedle in the dex, and water is followed by ice, either that or water is followed by bug, poison, then ice). Electric is next, likely due to pikachu being a starter in Yellow version, then normal, along with the types it was lumped with in the card game (flying, then dragon, as dratini's at the end of the pokédex). Fighting and the other 2 types sharing its symbol follow (fighting is probably first because I heard the energy card called "Fighting energy", ground always comes before rock, for reasons I can't really explain), and psychic is the last of the original types, maybe because mewtwo is at the end of the dex? It, of course, is followed by ghost, which was lumped in with it in gen 1, then comes dark, as I noticed it was pretty similar to ghost, and steel and fairy are just stuck on the end.
And this is all coming from someone who never even played the card game.
I haven't played the tcg since I was a kid, but it's never made sense to me that - if they're willing to change types, as they've proven they are - they never moved Ghost to Darkness. I get why they didn't at first I guess, when Darkness didn't have a basic energy, but it makes so much more sense than shoving Poison on there. Strong against the same two types, no better pair. Then Ghosts are just made weak to Darkness cards, which covers both of their in-game weaknesses.
If not for how much overlap Poison and Grass (and Bug) had in gen I, Poison could have paired well with Fire. I don't think the flavour matchup is terrible if you consider Acid is a Poison move, and the important factor here is that they both hit Grass types for super effective damage. However, Metal type cards typically being weak to Fire hurts here...
I remember realizing how mismatched the card game types were and going through to see how to pair them differently, although I wasn't quite as scientific. I did hit the same ideas of uniting Dark/Ghost and Fighting/Ground, since the former both primarily hit psychic and ghost types, while the latter are both resisted by flying and bug.
I had a different answer for Poison types though. I ended up pairing Fairy with Dragon, since both of those beat dragon, and then pairing Poison with Steel, since they both beat fairy, and other types like Ice, Rock, and Grass that would otherwise be weak to them have a lot of other weaknesses that could be put on cards. Another place where it differed was actually pairing together Ice and Rock, since Rock didn't pair very well with Ground/Fighting and Ice isn't a good fit for Water, although that'd need a new category like Crystal or something to work.
I didn't quite have an answer to Bug or Flying though, as they didn't seem to have the same clearcut offensive overlap. I think it's best if Flying sticks with the primary type of the mon, while Bug instead relies on the secondary type or the pokemon's movepool. For instance, having Beedrill be Poison(Metal), or having Butterfree be Psychic because it gets Confusion and other psychic attacks, but then giving them more typical bug weaknesses/resists.
In regards to theme or having too many types, one answer I had was to simply not give each type its own energy. For instance, the new Rock/Ice type could generally use Fighting energy for Rock types and Water energy for Ice types, adding offensive variety to decks that use those cards without putting on an extra energy burden. This is already similar to how Dragon types work, where they often rely on Fire, Water, or Lightning energy.
Get rid of dragon and make the new poison/bug energy sounds great!
I think making them match thematically is the most important, and not over complicating as well.
Finally someone answered this ancient question
I think they also made it based on the Gen1 Pokemon. Almost all Rock-Pokemon where ground. Alot of Ice-Pokemon were Water. Alot of Flying-Pokemon where Normal. This goes on for Grass, Bug and Poison which also shared alot of Pokemon from the Video Games.
love the idea of a toxic type for poison and bug
6:01 my favorite Pokémon type: regret
The lack of typing interaction by having more types could be solve giving every pokemon 2 or 3 weakness and resistance, and change resistance to - 60 or ÷2 to make it more similar to the video game.
Dragon types were colourless for the first 5 sets of the Black and White era, it wasn't until Dragons Exalted that they introduced dragon types, which is why stuff like Haxorus and Druddigon were colorless while dual types like Hydreigon and Kyurem were their secondary types.
What's the background picture from? The charmander and seaking are so cute!
It's some of the drawings from the Pokemon TCG Game Boy game's instruction manual, they're pretty charming
This is the type of video I'd expect to have 200k or more views
I like the rebalancing but feel like some more things could be addressed.
I'd merge Steel and Rock with Electric and move dragon over to fire, I know dragon is resistant to water but is weak to ice.
It would be cool if every single type had its own energy
splendid video!
You mentioned the fairy type stopped being printed in G8/SwSh.
Dragons are printed as Dark.