LEGENDS - Failed Cards & Mechanics

They may have failed as a mechanic, they certainly won in the art category, Lugia especially is beautiful.

I always liked the weird stuff the TCG tried. Delta species will always have a place in my heart.

The failure of mechanics like Legends feels a lot more disappointing in Pokemon because, while they will often reprint different cards for any Pokemon, they will almost never revisit an old gimmick. This is easily my biggest gripe with Set rotation because it either puts a timer on the strategy to get it right before you disappear or they attempt something Like the Lost Zone multiple times, but each of those attempts are isolated from one another making for minimal overall growth

I was always sad that these never took off. They just weren't worth it. The game had to accelerate to a point where you can consistently get them off like you can with V Unions now

I thought these were the coolest cards when I was younger. (Man, I loved the Heartgold/Soulsilver era of cards.) I actually spent a bunch of in game currency in the old Pokémon online card game on Heartgold/Soulsilver packs to pull LEGEND cards to build gimmick decks. (Instead of, you know, good decks.) Rest in pizza all those HGSS cards I pulled.

Some of the best artwork in the game imo

In the video it’s not really touched on what made Pokémon LEGEND fall out of the game so quickly. To put it simply: The culprit was general power-creep. Starting with Next Destinies, Pokémon EX would enter the picture (not to be confused with Pokémon ex), which just like Pokémon LEGENDs were big Pokés with huge attacks and more HP, but with one key difference: They were not split into multiple cards and were treated as Basic Pokémon, still, meaning they’re much easier to get onto the board and cards that interacted with Basics (like Eviolite, and Skyarrow Bridge) worked on them, too. Consider Mewtwo-EX, a Psychic type with 170 HP and a double-colourless attack that does 20 damage for each energy attached to both itself AND the target. All the LEGENDs need at least three energy to do their job, and Mewtwo-EX can kill all of them back with ease.

These cards are the perfect example that it's always better to have cheap attacks with simple effects rather than expensive attacks with powerful effects. Unless of course there is some broken energy acceleration mechanic available.

You know, though.... Looking at these cards through a collector's lens. These were super cool. I wish I was collecting cards from this era.... For some reason, I originally stopped before the US release of the original G/S sets. Then out of the blue, in 2017, I started getting them again in the Sun/Moon era. But, yeah. Those pictures really gave off that "legendary" vibe... especially the Ho-Oh and Lugia ones.

These feels like less problematic V Union cards

Ya know with the whole, "take a number of price cards equal to the number of pokemon on this card" could have had an incredible exploit. Place Pokémon stickers on the opponent's legend card till they have 6 in the art work!

8:04 resource management has always been an important skill, thats like the entire idea of the TCG

1:48 Entei looks like he was stung by a bee 😂

So it's a lesser Exodia knock-off.

I just find out these legend cards are all drawn by Shinji Higuchi, the co-creator of Evangeleon

"it was never favourable in it's favour"

I feel like, given the right support (and given that the cards were worth playing to begin with), it would’ve been viable to play 1 copy of one half and 3 of the other half, searching for the single piece with specific support and then using more normal draw power to pull one of the three copies of the other half. This would only really work as a piece of a late-game strategy, and would preclude the Legends card from being a deck’s sole win condition, but with the right moves or poke-powers it might have been workable. Shame the cards were never that strong or supported

I pulled the top half of the kyogre and groudon card and the the way the art was applied to the foil card made it so that after a few minutes it just peeled right off which was awesome

While the concept of using 2 specific cards to battle isn't the best concept, the art is definitely amazing, I had the Rayquaza and Deoxys Legends cards and remember really wanting to find the other half in order to complete the artwork. They ended up being my only Duel Legends Cards I ever got and then I eventually lost them because I was a dumb child who didn't keep my holos and rare cards in a binder like a normal TCG collector. If I ever decided to hunt for any Legends cards via packs, I would definitely want the Darkrai and Cresselia cards because, to this day, it has one of the best card artwork of the TCG, that Darkrai looks so spooky and menacing.

Ho-Oh Legend is one of the most beautiful cards ever.