Hi! Some of you know that I am designing Yet Another Card Database. There are many card databases. Mine is not special, yet.
One of the first steps to checking in cards to a database is to have an enumeration of all the sets that cards might belong to, so that each card can be checked in to a set. Here, we’re going to be considering TPCi and WOTC sets only: I have not yet expanded this mission to KKP (Kabushiki Kaisha Pokemon, 株式会社ポケモン) sets.
There are a lot of common abbreviations in use for sets. Broadly, we can divide them into two categories:
- Product codes: These are things like ex1, dp2, pl3, hgss4, pop5, bw6, xy7, sm8. They reflect the series and the major set release number for each series.
- Deck abbreviations: These are things like RS, MT, SV, TM, P5, DRX, AOR, LOT. They reflect the official league deck registration codes used for tournament signups.
Broadly speaking, any main expansion is pretty consistent across all, or most resources.
So far so good. However, there are some problems:
- There are no official league abbreviation codes prior to TPCi taking over the competitive league.
- There are, to my knowledge, no official product codes for WOTC-era card productions.
- Product codes for mini-sets, special releases, and other promotional items are not always known, because TPCi does not always add them to their database or press sites.
- Not all minisets and special releases got a distinct league abbreviation. (All promos are “PR”, all Trainer Kits are “TK”.)
In lieu of authoritative or conclusive sources, many different resources and organizations have taken to inventing their own codes. As you can expect, not everyone has invented the *same* codes.
This means that the following types of releases have some consistency problems across many fan resources. I’d like to at least document this problem before moving on to choose which set IDs/abbreviations make the most sense for my database.
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Black Star Promos
Official league abbreviations are always “PR”. In most cases, this is enough to be fully unique when combined with the card number: “PR-SM53” “PR-BW35” “PR-DP12” and so on. However, WOTC-era promos and EX-era promos don’t disambiguate their collector numbers, so it’s not always sufficient. TPCi uses the designations “smp” “xyp” “bwp” and “hsp”, but has no official designation for EX-era promos. -
Setless/Unnumbered Energy Cards
Most resources don’t have a “set” they file these cards under, or do not track them at all. However, Pokemon TCG Online does, and has its own set of codes and abbreviations for dealing with them internally. However, these codes are a lot longer than 3-5 letters and aren’t widely known because they’re primarily used internally. -
Trainer Kits
No trainer kits are in the TPCi card database. The first two trainer kits were known as “TK” and “TK2” on league deck registration sheets, before the first TK fell out of rotation and TK2 was renamed to “TK”. All other Trainer Kits since have been simply referred to as “TK”. This is a problem because it’s not enough to disambiguate the card fully. Most resources seem to have taken to enumerating the trainer kits as TK1, TK2, TK3, … TK9, TK10. Pokemon TCG Online also does this, but because of the half-decks it’s STILL not sufficient, and you need an extra signifier to denote which half-deck you’re talking about.
Pokemon TCG Online uses “A” and “B” to denote its half-decks, but the designation appears random. (It’s not alphabetical, based on the order they appear in the title or packaging, the pokedex number, or the card number of the featured Pokemon). RK9labs uses the first letter of the marquee pokemon for each half-deck. pokegym uses an inconsistent variety of methods across their resources.
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McDonald’s Collections
Since 2011, there has been a McDonald’s collection every year with its own unique icon. Almost. Sometimes they only release in certain territories. They are never in the TPCi database, they are not in Pokemon TCG Online, and they are always listed as simply “MCD” on league deck list sheets. RK9 has taken to listing them by release year: MCD1 (2011), MCD2 (2012), … MCD7 (2017), MCD8 (2018). Pokegym largely followed suit, but because of 2013’s release appearing only in France, some resources skipped trying to label it at all, leading to an off-by-one error in some places. RK9’s is the least confusing, for now. -
Mini-sets and special releases:
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Detective Pikachu, Dragon Majesty, Shining Legends: These all have very straightforward and clear designations from TPCi as “det”, “sm75” and “sm35”.
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Generations: Appears to use “g1” in most TPCi resources.
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Double Crisis: TPCi uses “dc1” for cards, and does not use the code anywhere else.
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Dragon Vault: dv, dv1 and dv01 are all used in different places, but the card database token is dv1.
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Call of Legends: col and col1 are both used. Amusingly, even hgss5 is used in one place. This really was a weird set, huh? col1 is the card database token.
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Pokemon Rumble: No official presence on the TPCi website. The most official thing is therefore the league abbreviation “RM”. Most product codes have a number indicating its place in the series, but some of the newer ones like Detective Pikachu (DET) don’t. Either “RM” or “RM1” is likely a suitable code here.
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POP cards:
The league abbreviations are officially P1, P2, P3; but the card database IDs are POP1, POP2, POP3. Some fan resources seem to mix and match the two. -
WOTC era cards:
There’s no standard here to even loosely follow. Most people are using league-like codes, but since there are no official codes from this era, the ones people have chosen are largely random and subject to their whims. I am proposing some product codes that are a little less ambiguous: -
WOTC1 through WOTC6 for Base Set through Gym Challenge.
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BS2 for “Base Set 2”, not considered a main or primary expansion. Wizards’ own website used the “BS2” abbreviation.
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NEO1 through NEO4 for Neo Genesis through Neo Destiny.
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“SI” for Southern Islands, which appears to be the community consensus for this set.
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“LC” for Legendary Collection, also by community consensus.
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EC1 through EC3 for Expedition through Skyridge.
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“BEST” for the Best collection, taking the name directly from the expansion icon as maximally non-ambiguous.
Taking all of the above into account, here is a spreadsheet:
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13DY0pWFdMFt5_codwy4A86ZRHVfB7vU4Qw6sa9H8-S0/edit?usp=sharing
This shows:
(A) All of the IDs as they are in-use today, including resources from TPCi, PTCGO, RK9, Pokegym (in four different places), and pkmncards.
(B) A consolidated Product ID that I intend to use as the database key for a given set. This is not necessarily the abbreviation that will be shown on website pages and in query results, but it WILL be used as an API token to get results, so it should make sense to people in an intuitive way and be unambiguous whenever possible.
What’s left to do?
- Decide on a scheme for Trainer Kits (Though RK9’s is not as official as PTCGOs, it is probably less confusing overall.)
- Decide if Sun & Moon Energy and Team Up Energy will be organized as one or two sets. (I am leaning to ‘yes’.)
- Take any feedback into account; and
- Publish a “set names, IDs and abbreviations” database for use by anyone;
- Continue working on my database project!