Why do you think the card layout and holo pattern was changed by wizards when they brought over the Pokémon card game to North America?
When looking at Japanese cards compared to the English tcg even the boarders are different.
Thoughts?
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Reformatting the cards to some extent was going to be required just to account for the language difference, as Japanese text and English text can be difficult to format identically. Most likely the changes WotC made to formatting were as much to make the process easier as anything else.
As for the design, Wotc had two challenges when introducing the cards to market.
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Convincing toy stores to carry them, as trading card games were not the juggernaut yet they were about to be. Changes like the yellow borders were to make them look more like toys for kids. In the 90s real estate in toy stores was in high demand and it was not always easy to convince stores to carry you and merchandise you where you wanted to be sold. Nintendo themselves did something similar when trying to sell the NES into toy stores with the introduction or R.O.B. - making sure retailers perceived these novel goods as “toys for kids” was essential to get placement in those crucial stores.
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Making the game their own. The perception of Wizards was that this was their new card game, which they wanted to manage and produce their own way. They made a lot of changes to the cards to align them with their vision for how they should be presented, and they made creative and marketing decisions that they felt were correct for the product and its brand.
Something else to remember is that in the 90s it was exceptionally rare and unusual for Japanese products - as in the original Japanese merchandise designed for sale in Japan - to ever be visible to American kids. Most households did not have the internet. This product was difficult to import. Most American localizers for things like this were operating under the assumption their consumers would never see or be able to buy the original Japanese products they were adapting. It is in large part because of Pokémon itself that this gap began to narrow. But when WotC acquired the license to create the Pokémon card game outside of Japan, the goal was not to make the Japanese skus available exactly as they were originally designed. The goal was to create a new product to sell globally based on that product. That’s exactly what they did.
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Very interesting! So even the holo pattern was in order to make it more accessible to kids at least in the eyes of retailers?
It was probably as simple as they 1) liked it better and 2) this foil was more accessible from their existing manufacturers.
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Ah I see. I know early wotc Pokémon info is pretty under wraps so it’s always interesting to hear
This is a great answer
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It’s definitely #2
The holo sheet is not produced by Wizards. They went to a separate company to produce the sheets and holo patterns for them. So it’s not really a “why did they change the pattern” but more of the options available to them were different kind of scenario. I guess the question of why they moved from the original base set holo to the cosmos pattern is an interesting one I don’t know the answer to
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We know they were experimenting with Cosmos in English as early as Fossil. I imagine Cosmos was always a consideration and originally felt the less pronounced Starlight foil better suited for the cards, but after some testing decided Cosmos was the more appealing choice.
Maybe we can consider the international releases of Jungle + Fossil that used Cosmos foil as a test before issuing new cards as-such in their largest market. Or maybe they could only get so much of each in the beginning to a split was necessary.
Manufacturing realities are often the explanation where something more interesting is often suspected.
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If someone wants to look into it, my Uncut Holo-only test sheet has this written on it.
“Shells on Koehler” is likely the name of the holo pattern from whoever they were buying from. I’m sure it’s in some catalog somewhere.
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This is really cool, have not seen such a thing before.
I really like the starlight holo compared to the cosmo. I think it’s a nostalgia thing
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I hated Cosmos as a kid, but have come to prefer it now.
But I thought they had ruined Pokémon cards when I first saw it on Base Set 2.
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Personally, the JP version is more nostalgic for me. BUT I also like the WotC holo because it has more optical depth than the JP cosmos foil. I could stare at the base WotC sets for hours, and not see everything in there… which is how I only recently discovered this Star-in-Circle holo pattern in old WotC foils. It’s actually pretty common, but amazed I’d never noticed or heard of it before.
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I will say the cosmos looks absolutely beautiful on the Japanese base set holos.
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Very cool, thanks for sharing!