Strange Pokemon Card Banned From World Championships

The Pokemon Company has banned a recently released Pokemon card from use in this month's World Championships. Later this month, The Pokemon Company will host its annual World Championships in Washington DC. The three-day event gathers the world's best Pokemon video game and trading card game players in one spot to determine who is the very best. However, a quirky Pokemon card released as part of the "Unified Minds" expansion won't be allowed in the tournament as it highlights some minor translation differences on Pokemon cards.

The card, Blaine's Quiz Show, allows a player to place a Pokemon from their hand face down in front of them. The player then tells the opponent the name of an attack on the card and has their opponent guess the Pokemon's identity. If the opponent guesses right, the player draws four cards, and the player draws four cards if their opponent is wrong. The issue is that players who speak different languages and use different translated versions of cards would struggle identifying cards. In addition to the obvious language barrier, localized cards often use different names for attacks. You can see the full announcement below:

Attention all #PokemonTCG Trainers! Due to potential issues it may cause at multilingual tournaments, the newly released Supporter card Blaine’s Quiz Show will not be legal for play at the 2019 Pokémon World Championships in both official competitive play and side events.

— Play Pokémon (@playpokemon) August 5, 2019

This isn't a permanent ban, but it will apply for the World Championships. The card is meant to reward players who have an extensive knowledge of Pokemon cards, so it doesn't seem that the card would be that relevant anyways.

The Pokemon World Championships will take place from August 16th to August 18th. All the action will air on Pokemon's Twitch channel.

(via PokeBeach)