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.

Ravioli Preparation Games

A friend of mine recently had the luxury of attending the Ravioli Preparation Games, the premier competition for ravioli-cooking.

Naturally, they gave out goodie bags, and my friend, ever gracious, offered the entire thing to me, claiming ze didn't need another novelty spatula with the games' logo on it. I accepted, of course, and found something curious inside-- an issue of Stuffed, the official Ravioli Preparation Games periodical! I'd like to share some excerpts of the articles within-- I'm sure you'll find them delightful.

"On tableside guacamole"

...My longtime followers know where I'm going with this. Tableside guacamole is the premier food. While I might enjoy the occasional compound butter or marinara to augment my ravioli, I admit any ingredient I have for either would be better served as a component of a tableside guac. The reason for this is simple: tableside guacamole is interactive. Any old food can taste good, but tableside guacamole has power beyond that. A transcendentally good salsa might give the diner ideas about the recipe for the salsa; even a mediocre tableside guacamole, however, lays its recipe bare and asks its audience to participate.

A friend once told me that he had a bizarre idea about an egg, the process of eating which would inspire diners to call their local congressperson. Surely he expected me to ask how his political egg would work, but I was unconcerned with this-- I incuriously assumed such an egg could exist. I had bigger game, after all.

"Chef," I told him, "I'm sure your egg is good-- but if it were tableside guacamole, a true interactive food, you could involve calling one's local congressperson as an act of eating. Your radical scramble is impressive, but eggs as a medium lack the inherent power of tableside guac."

"Everything is a recipe"

...Every chef worth their kosher salt knows this: everything is a recipe. Even if it is not written down, it is impossible to cook food without performing a number of steps manipulating that food in sequence-- which, of course, is what a recipe really is. Yet let me read you the first words from the world-acclaimed YouTube series "You Can Cook! with Madame Beurre":

"You don't need a recipe!"

She says this sincerely, directly-- bluntly, even. Now I respect Madame Beurre, and it is beyond debate that "You Can Cook!" is invaluable to old and new. She's certainly changed more hearts than me, and anyone who's tasted her banh mi ravioli knows her talent!

But imagine you are new to cooking. What do you have to gain from being told a technical falsehood?

 "The 2020 Competition: Looking Back"

...outrage at the 2020 Ravioli Preparation Games. The reason? The winning entry, deconstruction iii, was not a ravioli-- or so said some detractors! A number of arguments were made to this point, including the following:

• deconstruction iii did not envelop the filling-- it simply surrounded it, leaving room for the inner works to poke out.
  
• deconstruction iii had literally no nutritional value (at the time, this was not thought to be possible). A ravioli, it was widely believed, should use its fillings to provide varied and balanced nutritional value.
• deconstruction iii had more sauce and garnish than filling, decreasing the importance of the filling that is a natural prerequisite for ravioli.
• deconstruction iii advertised itself as not requiring eating to be beautiful or appreciated. This sparked debate over whether a ravioli not intended to be eaten is technically a ravioli.
• deconstruction iii handled mozzarella innovatively. The artist first dissolved a clump of mozzarella in water. They then drew ire by diluting this water in front of an audience until, probabilistically, not a single molecule of mozzarella remained, then used this water as an ingredient. Critics dismissed this as "going too far", "disconnected from any semblance of artistic tradition", and "derivative of un-ravioli for the new millenium".

These complaints, in hindsight, look childish. We can see now that deconstruction iii is certainly more of a ravioli than Narcissus Looks Into The Stadia and Seas, the controversial "bathtub ravioli" from earlier this year...

"Against fanciful sides"

...since nobody else in the ravioli community is willing to say it, it falls to me: the so-called fanciful sides movement is a hoax. I remember my first encounter with one of these fanciful chefs well. Before me was a perfectly passable plate of ravioli, triple-fried (as was the fad at the time) with a creamy lobster stuffing. I was ready to judge-- but also to dig in!

But the chef would not allow me to simply enjoy a meal. Her eyes glittered as she instructed me to perceive what she claimed to be a "fanciful" untasteable side in the empty bowl to my left: polenta. Everything she described was not to my taste-- curious, since she could have described anything. She instructed me to only eat it if I found the lobster raviolis to be getting repetitive.

The other judges on the panel fell for it-- one even pantomimed spooning a dollop of polenta into her mouth, nodding and laughing. Personally, I was disgusted. If this polenta were necessary, shouldn't it be material, rather than fanciful? And if it will never come up (a likely case-- each bite of her ravioli was unlike the last, so I never needed a break) why have it exist at all?

If this were just artsy-fartsy bullshit about the difference between taste and flavor, it would be fine. But when people walk past my stand at the Big Bread Convention and spend their money on some hack who can't even prepare polenta...

"Letter to the editor #1"

I am disappointed that you published "5 Lovely Recipes!" last February. I have written over thirty cookbooks and edited thirty more, including the romantic cookbook "Macademia Nut Hearts". Your "sexy skillet-starters" were cute, if lackluster. Much less cute was your insistence that they share the collective spotlight with my recipes that integrate themes of love into everything from filling to pasta to plating.

You're telling people that they can take their grandpa's cookbook, swap some ingredients, change the oven time to "333, like three pairs of kissy lips", and call it good. You are just a bunch of disgusting men starving your readers who make a living off selling cookbooks.

"My Time With Madame"

...Madame Beurre taught me an important lesson that day. All throughout culinary school I had been taught that food was more than just the sum of its ingredients-- you might like chocolate, and you might like ketchup, but not together. Trying to impress Miss Beurre, I told her this, expecting her to ask me why I agreed or disagreed. But she skipped that step-- she asked why I thought that.

Eventually I mustered an answer, which seemed to impress her: combinations of ingredients invoke cuisines, a form of collective knowledge, and we grow up with cuisines. After some thinking, she agreed, and told me she liked that thought. I was prepared for a complicated, nuanced response.

Her next instruction was simple, though, scraping off years of baggage: Let's make something. A ravioli, let's say, and we'll see what happens. We used the microwave a lot, and integrated everything we knew, from the pancake batter Miss Beurre's kids loved to the toppings on the cheap bagel pizzas I ate every Thursday in college. We even served it on a paper plate like I used to eat, and Beurre showed me her family's dinnertime routine.

It was incoherent. I'd never serve it to anyone. It was also the most fun I've ever had cooking-- and because of that, even if I'd never serve it to anyone other than her, it was one of the most delicious things I've ever tasted...

"On Realities and Teaching"

 ...I love teaching technique. My cooking career is built on them. In a perfect world, I would do nothing but introduce chefs to my beloved techniques, teach them everything I learned at the Tesselation bar and restaurant. I would make dishes out of the change in my coin purse, and serve them to everyone, and feed the world.

The reality, though, is a lose-lose situation: I don't particularly care for the ins and outs of knife work or grill management or which expensive salts to use when, nor do I want to use expensive ingredients or work alongside professional food photographers. Yet in order to demonstrate my ideas about flavor combinations, I must master every step along the way, or pay someone who has. And I had best do so with expensive and exquisite ingredients!

I fear for my students-- and quite frankly, my customers, who are focused on the foreign sensation of seeing a duck press for the first time. They must think my ideas are so much more obscure than they actually are!

"My Lamb Ravioli Recipe (The Point Of It All)"

...a number of artists created sheet music that separated itself from Western notation, or more generally any notation that prioritized notes. Their reasoning was that if the sequence of notes were just as important as dynamics, emotions, imagery, instrumentation, and so on, it was unreasonable to create sheet music that proposed that the notes were the point of it all, resigning concepts like "crescendo", "84 beats per minute", and "like a butterfly's wings" to marginalia...

 

...Now I'll get to the point of it all. Here, for the first time in print, is my infamous lamb ravioli recipe, the very same that won me the 2014 Games:

lamb, five-spice, cornstarch, sesame oil, rice wine, eggs, flour, scallion for sure, some sort of heat, some sort of acidity. You are momentarily an astronaut playing helmetless in Jupiter's gases; breathe them in-- how would you describe those blooming scents to your parents? I am describing what I imagined, looking up at my mother performing alchemy on the stove above me.

 

My child watches me cook, and I selfishly wish for them to imagine the same fantasies I did, just as I simultaneously hope they tell me the worlds they visited someday. Now feel the lapse in inertia as you hit the ground again, O meteorite ablaze, jostling your bones and knocking your heart up your spine into your head. Best piping hot.