Hypothetical: What if WOTC still made the Pokémon TCG?

Right. But what would have been in Jamboree? Also I hate that name for a set :joy:

It doesn’t sound like a Pokémon set at all :nauseated_face:

I do not think they would have been able to or want to hold onto the license for much longer. Other companies would’ve wanted the rights for cheaper in the mid-late 2000s as interest waned. There were already internal conflicts about the direction of Pokemon, employee frustration over prices and marketing, mismanagement of organized play, and a general company disdain for Pokemon compared to MTG. It’s hard to attract employees to work in a division of a gaming company where nearly every rule and card of said game is dictated from abroad with no WOTC input. You can read about the time and effort it took to create Dark Raichu. It’s not a recipe for long-term WOTC success with Pokemon.

The tragic consequence of TPCI formation was the absolute death of international promos. We’ve had nearly twenty-years with next to no innovation for English or non-Japanese promo cards. Perhaps “no innovation” is the wrong term since this is by design. With very few exceptions they are part of merchandise. At Japan National Championships in its glory days there were dozens of exclusive cards and trophies awarded. Compared to any other Inter-National Championship the latter are a joke, lucky to get a trainer stamp promo and a t shirt. I do think WOTC would’ve invested more resources in global Pokemon.

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It doesn’t sound like a Pokemon set at all because it wasn’t the real name of the set. WoTC creates beta names (“development codenames”) for each set to refer to them without spoiling the real name.

For example, in Magic the Gathering the three most recent sets were codenamed Judo (real name: Dominaria United), Ice Skating (Streets of New Capenna), and Hockey (Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty). Beta names often have a theme and come in clusters when they used to release three-set “blocks” (e.g., Lights, Camera, Action for Scars of Mirrodin, Mirrodin Besieged, and New Phyrexia).

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Tagging-on to @qwachansey
One common mantra in business is “never run competing products/shows/etc”. If you have a product that is doing well, and another similar product that is too similar, one will start to look like the other, OR you’ll do something so different with one that it tanks it… OR as in WotC’s case, they had one product that they loved and slaved over, and the other that they were not allowed to love and slave over. Recipe for toxic competition and failure, I’d say.

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That makes sense, I didn’t realize that. What do y’all think that set really would have been called?

Do we know what was planned to be in that set?
Or has that never been mentioned before?

@xileets thats a good point.

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This is about all that we know, unfortunately.

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Some good info there! Interesting that we’re thinking of putting vending cards in the set. I wonder if this could have been the set to basically be the VS equivalent + other cards? That would have been cool. Sadly we were robbed of Gym Heroes: Johto edition :sob::sob::sob:

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