The Best-Designed Pokemon Card

The best-designed Pokemon card of all time is named "batman!!". It has 1000 HP, the PokeBody "batcave" that means it can't be killed, and the PokePower "batereng" that reads "kills any pokemon on the other team".

Its medium is marker on construction paper. It was not sold or bought or copyrighted or kept hidden. It advances no claims about art or about Pokemon cards on purpose.

Great art creates a critical response. The card batman!! can be stopped by "me" who has HP infinity, the attack "gun" that does infinity damage, and "when this is killed by a pokepower return it to the bench and you can put that card on the bottom of your enemys deck". Reportedly, Emma (the artist behind batman!!) cried when she realized that batman!! was not immune to being put on the bottom of the deck.

Emma made card games of her own as she grew older. The first expansion of Fight Cards had ten cards, each on an index card. You got one energy per turn, because she didn't want to write "energy" on a bunch of index cards. Her second expansion had seven cards, and was widely considered by her contemporary and younger brother Taric to be "overpowered because you just made my cards but stronger". It was the best card game of all time because whenever she and her brother agreed it was solved, they added new cards.

When Emma was growing up, strong basic Pokemon had 100 HP. Years later, they have up to 300. How quaint compared to batman!! and me! The ends of the artistic institution of Pokemon cards are stripped bare. They grow stronger over time, making each other obsolete, and if you are naive this is their end. This cannot be so, though, because Emma's batman!! can beat even her friend Jessica's unfair Magmortar deck built from sanctioned booster packs.

Jessica would go on to author a number of critical responses, such as ANTIBATMAN RAY and FIRESTAR. This, if anything, is the desired effect of the normative force exerted by Emma's art. This is the secret to why batman!! is a better Pokemon card than even Roseanne's Research, the best Pokemon card you can play in a tournament. batman!! begets critical responses; Roseanne's shoos them away if they are not made by The Pokemon Company.

It's not wrong, exactly, to say that "real" Pokemon cards are made in pursuit of capital-- actually, it's perfectly right to say so. But that undersells the force that makes them. Years ago, artists sorted time by real numbers to organize the card artists, sorted space by longitude and latitude to ease the movement of booster packs, sorted an incommensurable amassment of players by which kinds of cards were made for them, sorted stories by trope to further the development of resonant loglines. And from this blood sacrifice art, of a certain definition, was born.

A Pokemon card, like Bulbasaur, is a temple to this worldless timespace. Its true purpose is to sway us into believing that those artists were right to sort time and space and people and stories. Emma's batman!! was made between dinner and bedtime, in her room, for Taric and Jessica, about Batman, and she hasn't even read Marx yet. Nine-year-olds often have such adept critical responses.

Faith

What is faith?

  

Faith is the belief in an unfalsifiable claim, something you accept knowing that you can't prove it false with whatever method of proof is most natural. It's most commonly used in a religious context-- if you have faith in a god, you interact with them as if you have proven that god is real, while being comfortable with the idea that such a proof cannot exist. But faith is not exclusive to religion. Mathematics, for example, requires faith-- mathematical proofs are all rooted in axioms like "all right angles are the same" or "every natural number has exactly one number right after it".¹ All worldviews, scientific, literary, religious, or otherwise, are built on a core belief that seems obvious, but can't be proven with the same tools provided by the worldview. This isn't a bad thing-- it's merely a fact of how worldviews work. 

This is why the “faithlessness” in Faithless Looting is red. If you don't have faith in anything, it's hard to apply any sort of method (scientific, critical, or otherwise) that builds from base principles. Red is the common enemy of blue and white, the colors most disposed toward method, so it follows that faithlessness is red.

Let's examine the card text. At first glance, "Draw two cards, then discard two cards" only mimics the the art, mirroring a process of destruction. After casting Looting, the player has two additional cards in the graveyard and (if they didn't use its Flashback ability) one fewer card in hand. However, what if we view a card not just as "material", but as a fact or a belief? After all, if a strategy is an argument about the game², then a card is a link in the chain of logic you're using to prove that argument. In this case, Faithless Looting models the process of throwing out old facts and acquiring new ones. Notice also that the "facts" that remain in hand replace the old ones, rather than building upon them; Faithless Looting does not privilege the existing worldview over the potential one. (If anything, the fact that you're casting Looting means you want to throw out the old cards in your hand in favor of something else!) Under this reading, every time you cast Faithless Looting, you are literally reassessing the core beliefs about how you're going to win the game, and thus reassessing your faith in the bomb rare in your opening hand.

Hilariously, our interpretation of the card text clashes with how the card tends to be played. We imagined the post-Looting player as having just reassessed their plan, probably down material, graveyard filled with shattered beliefs about what the game was going to look like. But historically, Faithless Looting has accomplished the opposite. The deckbuilder has a very clear idea of what should happen when they cast Looting-- discard extra lands or cards that like being in the graveyard like Arclight Phoenix, and draw two new cards. In this situation, the player gains material in any sense that isn't "how much literal cardboard is immediately in front of me". More importantly, though, while the player may have to face tough choices about what to discard in some situations, the deckbuilder does not get the sense that Looting will be played as an anti-methodical rewriting of the hand. If anything, Looting is a tool that confirms which facts go into the graveyard and which stay in hand.

None of this is to say that Faithless Looting is unfun or skill-light. (There are lots of factors at hand-- I'll leave sticky situations like "discarding a spell instead of a Phoenix to play around Rest In Peace" to you.) But if Faithless Looting artistically represents the process of reforging the links in the chain of your worldview, it's beautifully dissonant that it is one of the most steadfast of links.