That Time I Made my own Pokemon TCG format

Back when I started working at an FLGS, one of my responsibilities was the Pokémon TCG League. Whilst I've never been too big on Collectable Card Games, I used to have a bit of fun with Pokémon, mostly because the community was a lot of fun and the game had enough depth to be engaging. Like most card games, Pokémon has a rotation, meaning cards are only usable in tournaments and events like League for a couple of years before being replaced by the new ones. In a lot of ways, this approach is advantageous to players, because new cards are easy to find and you avoid the Yu-Gi-Oh issue of cards becoming impossible to get a hold of. The flipside is, of course, players end up with a lot of useless cards on their hands. Back when I was doing this (2010 to 2013ish), aside from the Standard game, there wasn't another way to play Pokémon and use the older cards in the League. Expanded Format was around, but no one really bothered and Unlimited was yet to be birthed officially, but there were some older cards I wanted to get on the table, so I had to have a bit of a think. 

Magic The Gathering already had some other formats going at the time, some of which had started with groups of players putting them together independently, like "Commander", originally called EDH (Elder Dragon Highlander), which put interesting restrictions on deckbuilding, but allowed for a greater depth of cards from older sets. To this end, I set about making a variant of the Pokémon TCG with my friends, both so we could keep using some of the cards we have, but we also wanted to capture more of the "feel" of the video games. We called the resulting format "Pokémon Trainer Battles", and it had a number of issues, but I think it wasn't too bad overall. I think if the idea of something other than Standard had been on the tables, we could have developed it more, but lack of interest made us drop the idea before it went too far. Knowing what I know now, I suspect that we would have had to start banning some cards, but any extended-format card game has that issue. 

First off, Trainer Battles was different in that a "deck" only contained 6 Pokémon and they all started on the field, face down, to better simulate the six Pokeballs carried by trainers in the video games. One was still in the "Active" space, and was revealed after turn order had been decided, but the remaining five on the bench would be hidden at the start. Unlike the normal game, these Pokémon could be at any Stage, not just basics, again in an attempt to simulate the video games. As the Pokémon on the bench were KOed or Switched, they would be flipped up, so your opponent would slowly learn what you had and vice-versa. Pokémon on the Bench could only be damaged by attacks when face up and could only use Abilities when face up, for an added element of risk. So if I was running something like the Serperior with the "Royal Heal" ability, I would have to expose it to risk to gain the benefit it provides. 

The rest of the "deck" that players had also featured a few restrictions; 40 cards rather than 60, and, excepting Basic Energy, in "singleton" format, i.e., one of each card. Unlike in regular games, "decking out" didn't trigger a game loss, as the intention was to emulate "PP" from the video games, but this may have been a mistake, as one player just built an engine to draw his entire deck as fast as possible, due to the lack of a "max hand size" rule in the Pokémon TCG. Me, I focused on recurring my Boost Energy card to drop huge attacks each turn. Energy and Items could still be attached to face-down Pokémon, but players had to declare it, as in "I am attaching a Water Energy to this Pokémon", but we did experiment with options for "hidden" attachment. Of course, some cards, like Rare Candy and Devolution Spray were essentially unplayable in Trainer Battles, but this was to be expected, and cards like Computer Search and Red Card became a lot more interesting. 

So was Trainer Battles a "failure"? Yes and no. We abandoned it because it didn't catch on, but we also really didn't put enough effort into it either. Thinking about this all these years later, I can see some fun that could be had with the format and, if I still had any physical cards, might put together a couple of decks to test out. Some cards would certainly need to be banned (anything that returned Active Pokémon to hand for example), but the opportunities to try out new combinations and give old cards new life would be good to see in the Pokémon TCG, which doesn't have all that much variation currently. The only format of Magic The Gathering I play is Commander, precisely because I don't need more than one or two new cards with each new set and even an entire new deck can be pretty affordable, so something more like that for Pokémon would be very much of interest to me. Feedback welcome on this one, folks. 

Superhero Media: The Wolverine

I have a few friends who claim that X-Men is their favorite superhero film franchise, which I tend to find funny, as such an announcement usually comes with a caveat that it's really only certain films. I'm not going to make fun of that right here, but I will mention that, for some reason, The Wolverine gets forgotten, but it's one of the better ones. I get it, The Wolverine came between First Class (the racist one that everyone loves) and Days of Future Past (probably the best team outing) and looked like a sequel to the disappointing Origins Wolverine, so a lot of people gave it a miss. What we all missed was a surprisingly tight Yakuza thriller with added mutants and PTSD, probably the best Hugh Jackman had been in the role up to this point and some great action scenes. Looking back, The Wolverine isn't up to the measure of Logan, but we'll get to the secrets of Logan in due course. What The Wolverine is, is a solid action film that Logan just happens to be wandering around, which is pretty much exactly what it needed to be. 

Starting with a flashback to the bombing of Nagasaki at the end of WWII, Logan wakes to find himself living rough in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, running from his past and watching bears urinate. After taking revenge on some hunters for using illegal arrows, Logan meets Yukio, a young woman in the employ of the powerful Yashida family, who possesses the precognitive ability to determine when a person will die. The patriarch of the Yashida family is dying and wants to see Logan, who saved him from the Nagasaki bombing, one more time before he dies. Very quickly, Logan and Yukio are embroiled in a battle for the future of the family interests, with the anointed heir, Mariko, caught between tradition, duty, Logan and the Yakuza. The absolute smartest choice the writers of The Wolverine made was to reduce Logan's healing ability for the majority of the film; so good, in fact, that they did it again in Logan. For once, Logan is at risk himself, which means when he throws himself in harm's way, the act is heroic, something the character hasn't had much of a chance to be before. 

Having, somewhat, learned from the mistakes of Origins Wolverine, the claws are no longer just CGI and most of the fights are done practically, though the film is still going for too sleek a look to be truly visually interesting. I get why Viper is here, but she feels like an unnecessary antagonist just so Yukio gets to fight someone in the climax, but Jean Grey isn't really even there and gets some of her best lines and scenes in the entire series, so it kind of evens out. In terms of being a Yakuza action film, The Wolverine isn't great, but combining the genre with a superhero is pretty damn interesting, and I wouldn't mind seeing it done again sometime, even just with Wolverine again, if it came to it. Unless The New Mutants drops in the next few days, The Wolverine marks the halfway point in the X-Men series for my re-watch, which feels crazy, like how are there this many? I'm very cognitively aware that there are a lot of MCU and Dragon Ball Z films, but somehow I always forget about the X-Men franchise. Still, I'm very happy I got to see this one again, I think it may go in the rotation a little more now.

The LXG Cinematic Universe

Ok, this one will be something of a "broad strokes" approach, as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is already a bricolage of other works loosely held together with narrative, so it doesn't really need any help in that regard. Since writing about both the divisive Sean Connery film and and the cult Alan Moore comics on this blog, I have been surprised to learn just how devoted some fans are to the film and how genuine the regret that it never spawned a sequel is. Whilst I'm not enthused to the same level as some, I do regard the LXG film in a more positive light than most and perfectly understand the desire for that bit more of a media that you love, so here's my short list of suggestions to get you going in that direction. For the sake of brevity, I'll be looking at film and television that features the main cast of LXG, rather than branching out into the broader world presented by the comics, but by all means check out some classic Fireball XL5 or The Avengers (the British television version) if you are so inclined.

So we're all pretty much agreed that the 1992 Bram Stoker's Dracula is about the best film version of the story, right? Yes both versions of Nosferatu are also excellent, but as far as a straight adaptation goes, Francis Ford Coppola got it bang on, with the right amount of sex and gore to slide into LXG with minimal effort. Personally, I have fond memories of the 1997 Mini-Series of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea starring Michael Caine as Captain Nemo, but that could be down to a particular scene in which Caine beats Brian Brown savagely. Certainly, Caine bears little resemblance to an exiled Indian prince, but most adaptations of the original text have this issue. In the 1980s, Richard Chamberlain did a couple of Alan Quartermain films that are about as good as one may expect, but still lean heavily on Colonial assumptions and can be a little uncomfortable to watch in these, somewhat more enlightened, times. '90s Kids will remember Jonathan Taylor Thomas, well he did a Mark Twain adaptation entitled Tom and Huck, which I haven't seen, but honestly looks pretty pedestrian. 

Ok, who's left? Well, Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde have been adapted only less frequently than Sherlock Holmes and Dracula, but there hasn't really been a good modern version, and the 1931 film tends to still be the best option, if it is a little hokey by today's standards. Similarly, Claude Rains  is about as good an Invisible Man that you're likely to find in the correct cultural milieu, even if the character isn't quite the same. There is a 2009 film, Dorian Grey which is, honestly, a train wreck, but I feel that suits the tone of the version presented in LXG? Shall we not bother with Moriarty? I mean, for tone the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes series is appropriate, but he's such a non-entity in LXG that I bet you can't even remember who kills him in the finale. Alright, enough of this nonsense, on to the regular nonsense we concern ourselves with around here. 

Superhero Media: Black Panther

Something I am never likely do to on this blog is a "Top 10" list of superhero films. There are a few reasons for this; the years-long backlog (I'm writing this in August 2020), the constant cycle of new superhero films and the fact I would have to justify many things not being on the list being just a few. However, one film that would certainly be in one of the top three spots would be Black Panther, the most important, if not the greatest, superhero film in cinema history. You may not personally like Black Panther, some people don't, but there is no denying the impact it had, or that it was masterfully assembled, acted and directed. Ryan Coogler had only directed two feature films before putting this together, that's hugely impressive in it's own right, but add to that star-making turns for Chadwick Boseman, Michael B Jordan and Letitia Wright and you have a damn masterpiece. Oh yeah, while we're at it, let's have career highlight performances from Danai Gurira, Winston Duke and Andy Serkis, a banging soundtrack by Ludwig Goransson and the first use of the Afro-futurist aesthetic in a major motion picture, and you have a movement. 

Thing is, if Black Panther was just a groundbreaking, glass-ceiling shattering, genre defining film as wasn't all that good, it would still be amazing on merit of intention alone. However, the film is also transcendent on a narrative level, even if it does borrow heavily from Hamlet, but it's called the monomyth for a reason, people. While I think of it, Killmonger is an excellent villain, but please stop trying to tell me "he was right", it just makes it clear you didn't understand the film. The contrast between T'Challa and Killmonger is that T'Challa is king for his people and Killmonger wants the throne for personal revenge on a world that has wronged him. Want proof? When T'Challa imbibes the Heart Shaped Herb, he sees the spiritual plane and the line of kings before him, whereas Killmonger sees his father and the apartment he grew up in. Even though T'Challa decides that the isolationist policies of the past are wrong in light of Killmonger's actions, he wants to help the world, not conquer it. Killmonger actually appropriates the language of the colonisers, "the sun will never set", as he advocates for the wholesale murder of billions of women and children. By Bast, this is a great film. 

People do get that Wakanda isn't meant to be some big, anti-White People statement, right? The characters accept Everett Ross as soon as he demonstrates his humanity, but despise Klaw because he murdered for profit. Wakanda is an ideal, a post-needs society like the Federation in Star Trek, not perfect, but having perfected government for the benefit of the people. It's not explicitly said, but Wakanda doesn't seem to have money, and all of the industry is publicly owned, is the country a Socialist Monarchy? That would be really interesting, if a tad odd, I hope it gets explored at some stage. I actually like the introduction of Vibrainium as being some kind of "Handwaveium" fix-all, because I can see how that will come in handy as the Marvel Cinematic Universe matures and requires some leaps in logic to get things done. Like how Iron Man and Rocket can make an ersatz Infinity Gauntlet in Avengers Endgame or how space travel doesn't have any discernible "rules". Black Panther is always going to be important, but I hope it becomes only part of a broader series of equally "important" MCU films, eventually incorporating Queer, Trans and any and all rights movements that toxic individuals try to exclude from Superhero fandom. RIP Chadwick.  Wakanda forever!

Terrain Finished: Craters

A little while ago, I picked up a couple of one of the older Games Workshop craters and just got around to painting them. These are pretty nice if you can find them around, though may be a little on the big side for most 28mm games.

The reason I wanted a set of these for my Superhero gaming ties to an Osprey game called Of Gods and Mortals; a mytho-historical game I was pretty excited about, but never got into because I found the rules clunky and dull. One rule I really liked though was "Awe", which created a radius around two clashing Gods that Mortals would flee from.

So I was thinking about powerful superheroes clashing and causing destruction, like in any Dragon Ball Z fight or Superman Vs Captain Marvel, and how such a fight may affect the "ordinary" people around them.

I'm not sure as to how I'd actually implement it, but I think some kind of "Awe" system would work well in my Ultimate Alliance games, throwing off the rest of the battle when two suitably powerful characters clash. Where I'm stuck is just which characters get to use this rule, obviously Superman and Thor would qualify, but what about Iron Man and Green Lantern? I think I need to borrow a page out of Heroclix and start introducing symbols to represent certain abilities. I really need a visual designer to work with one of these days. 

 

Superhero Media: Incredibles 2

A decades-later sequel to a beloved film, Incredibles 2 is not only another brilliant entry in Brad Bird's filmography, but is a brilliant response to the original and the critical literature resulting thereof. Starting moments before The Incredibles finished, Incredibles 2 gives us the Parr family battling The Underminer, and really not doing very well at all, making mistakes, being out of practice and tripping over one another as they're not yet used to being a team. If I had to pick a single scene that turned people off this film, the opening Underminer fight would likely be it, as it robs the moment of triumph from the first film and injects a more harsh reality. Of course, it all makes perfect sense, as none of the family have done regular hero work recently and have not worked together long enough to get a good team dynamic going. As far as I'm concerned, it's a great place to start both the narrative and the metanarrative, as Incredibles 2 isn't just a sequel, it's a critical response. 

In my review of The Incredibles I mentioned the, sadly still prevalent, Objectivist reading of the film and how Brad Bird's own filmography is the argument against such a take, but it seems Bird was not one to take it lying down himself. The newer "Supers" of Incredibles 2, including Acid Reflux, Brick and Void, are heavily queer-coded, with the villain revealed to be a wealthy and privileged woman with a narrow view of progress and no understanding of heroes as individuals with needs. The contrast between Screenslaver and Elastigirl, especially as the two clash in the final act is easy to read as  a conflict between schools of theoretical feminism, with a mother fighting a "career woman", but Elastigirl's entire character arc, from the opening of The Incredibles, as been that she is who she chooses to be, undefined by anyone but herself. Of course Elastigirl is the best choice to spearhead the "relaunch" of superheroes into the public eye, she's never questioned that saving lives is where she belongs. 

Probably my favourite element of Incredibles 2 is the building of Edna Modes' character, essentially a comic foil in the first film, her encounter with Jak-Jak provides insight into her fixation with superheroes. Supers are Edna's link to eternity and something beyond the temporal world of fashion. Edna is not the ascended fan in the same ways as Phil Coulson, she is more a "Supergods" devotee, or Campbellian realist, inhabiting a world were the gods walk the Earth and she is lucky enough to brush their capes with her fingers. Robert's journey to accepting modern fatherhood is wonderful, unlike much I've seen in recent film, and whilst Dash and Violet don't get to do much, they remain consistent and the times they are prevalent are pretty entertaining. I get that Incredibles 2 may not be the sequel that people wanted, but I really find it hard to fault anywhere, as it answers questions left, engages with criticism and does move on the stories of several of the main characters. Whilst I wouldn't mind seeing more of the Incredibles, I feel that the Big Hero 6 television approach may work better, with Bird overseeing it. Only time will tell where this series goes, but I'm very happy with where it is right now. 

Miniatures Finished: Weird Science

Keeping to loose themes for a while, here are some science-related characters I painted up in-between other projects. 

Baxter Stockman: I wasn't planning on getting this character anytime soon, but I got him in a blister and couldn't resist a Playmates Toys style paintjob. Heroclix 

Weather Wizard: I have a growing collection of Flash's Rogues that I'll have to do something with one day. I love how crummy the colour scheme looks on this guy. Heroclix 

Metallo: A classic Superman foe I've wanted to get on the table for years, but kept forgetting to paint him. This classic Clix isn't a brilliant sculpt, but has plenty of character. Heroclix 

Mister Terrific: I considered painting my copy of this character up after watching Arrow, but never got around to him. I'm tempted to do a couple of "T-Spheres" on separate bases to buzz around him. Heroclix 

Robotman: Different base for this figure as I was using him as a "Plod-Bot" for Judge Dredd miniatures for a while. I guess now I'll have to get the rest of the Doom Patrol. Heroclix. 

Angstrom Levy: How could I not get this awesome antagonist from Invincible onto the table? A classic evil genius with teleporting powers, his knowledge of the multiverse makes him truly dangerous. Heroclix