aroramage |
Man, this guy is one of the big
O.G. Trainer cards for drawing all your other cards. By
default, back in the day? You always ran 4 of Professor
Oak.
Part of it is because this was in a
time long before Supporters could limit you to a
once-per-turn clause, and part of it is because the game
was much different. Energy acceleration wasn't really a
thing, Big Basics were dominant, and there weren't even
Tools or Stadiums to change the playing field. Cheap
powerful attacks were still highly sought after, and the
goal of the game was to get to those Pokemon as fast as
you could.
And no card was better at drawing
cards than Professor Oak. Sure there weren't as many
Energy accelerators like there are these days, but
drawing 7 cards straight from your deck was never looked
at as a disadvantage, even if you had to discard an
extra couple of cards. If getting to those cards you
need faster was a necessity, Professor Oak got you there
FAST!!
Moral of the story: thank goodness
we transitioned to Supporters so we don't have to deal
with this sort of thing.
Rating
Standard: N/A (seriously)
Expanded: N/A (like how broke was
this game back in the day?)
Limited: 5/5 (the answer is very,
very very broke)
Arora Notealus: Professor Oak still
reminds us of a different time, a simpler and yet
strangely more dangerous time. Yet his legacy lives on
in cards like Juniper and Sycamore, which both inherited
his effects and updated him to the modern Supporter
standard. Just think, if Sycaper is THIS powerful and
THIS necessity as a card you can only play once a turn,
imagine what Oak was like.
Next Time: And now to rotate things
around and about!
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Otaku |
On this Throwback Thursday, we’re covering the original
“big draw” card: Professor Oak (Base Set
88/102; Base Set 2 116/130). Even if you’re
only familiar with the contemporary Standard Format, the
effect of Professor Oak should be familiar as it
reads “Discard your hand, then draw 7 cards.” The
exact wording is different, but this is the effect
you know from Professor Juniper and Professor
Sycamore, the staple Supporter cards of the modern
Pokémon TCG (whether the Standard or Expanded Format).
That discard cost can backfire horribly, actually
costing you the game, but not only can it be a total
non-issue but sometimes it enables the combos that win
you the game. So potent is drawing a new hand
equal to your opening draw in size, it has defined how
we play. There would almost always be a benefit to
having a deck capable of making use of almost every card
within it ASAP, even before considering draw power it is
a useful thing, but it goes from “nice perk” that is
only sometimes used (for being reckless and wasteful) to
being standard operating procedure for Pokémon thanks to
large draw cards like this. It inadvertently
punishes more complicated strategies as cards that only
work in tandem with other cards have to deal with
discarding bits of the combo from hand to try and draw
the rest. The pacing of the modern game would be
vastly different without Professor Sycamore or
Professor Juniper. Professor Oak schools
these two, making them look slow.
Wait, I just said they had the same effect, so what
gives? Professor Oak was only printed twice
before, the first going all the way back to the Base
Set (January of 1999), the dawn of the Pokémon TCG,
while the second is from Base Set 2 (February of
2000), long before the Supporter card subclass of
Trainers was created. So this was and still is
played like an Item card version of Professor Juniper
and Professor Sycamore. Let that sink in;
you can play as many instances of Professor Oak
from your hand as you want from your hand, barring
outside interference or your deck running out of cards.
What’s more is that Base Set also
contained Computer Search (non-Ace Spec version)
and Item Finder (Dowsing Machine if it
wasn’t an Ace Spec). Some decks focused on
winning via “donk” (a First Turn Knock Out when the
opponent has an empty Bench), while most would
take one if it presented itself; burning through your
entire deck in a turn was sometimes a tournament
winning strategy, and remained as such until the
adoption of a rotating format. Both before and
after it was cut in the first rotation, Professor Oak
set a precedent for both players and designers, as most
Professor-themed cards would feature drawing as
at least part of the effect with players expecting
to run one as their main draw card for most formats.
Over the years, we’ve seen other Professor Oak-themed
cards: Professor Oak’s Research, Professor
Oak’s Visit, Professor Oak’s New Theory, and
Professor Oak’s Hint.
If Professor Oak were to be reprinted, allowing
it to be used in Standard and/or Expanded play, there is
no doubt that it would be as a Supporter and the rule
about not mixing Professor Juniper with
Professor Sycamore would be updated to include
Professor Oak. Barring some other development,
it would become a deck staple post-rotation, and just an
alternative to Professor Juniper and Professor
Sycamore (aesthetically, as it would play the same)
The arguments against are that (for now) it
looks like we don’t have this kind of raw draw power
post-rotation, and that there is a much better approach
to this kind of thing. I’ve said it before; as
long as they want this kind of effect in modern play,
why not shake up Unlimited, streamline modern play, and
enable some awesome promos/reprints by releasing a card
just named “Professor” (no specific professor
being specified) as a Supporter with this effect.
Then, instead of adding it to the “can’t use with
Professor Juniper/Professor Sycamore rule,
issue an errata changing the names of those two cards
plus the original Professor Oak to just “Professor”,
and do away with that silly rule. With them all
being the same name, you’d be restricted to four total
per deck, and with little to no added “bookkeeping”
compared to what the current arrangement requires.
This also has a big benefit that I’ll get next
paragraph.
Before
that benefit, let us address the Limited Format.
Due to the age of the sets, you’re not seeing it
at an official event or side event (barring that
hypothetical reprint). If you and some friends
want to spend a lot of money, or use some of the
unofficial ways of replicating a sealed product event
with open product (less expensive, but still kind of
pricey with such old card stock). Professor Oak
is magnificent here, but remember your deck is
only 40 cards so decking out becomes a real risk.
That means there is also the risk of it showing up too
late to bother using. While Professor Oak
did show up in some Theme Decks, the PTCGO Theme Deck
format doesn’t go back anywhere near far enough for it
to be an option (the card isn’t even in the PTCGO at
all). The power creep or nearly 20 years makes it
really hard to guess how well the decks that
feature it would do against modern Theme decks, so I’m
not giving it a numerical score. Instead, we’ll
have one additional format to score because I don’t see
how Professor Oak could not still be a
staple in the Unlimited Format. This is still a
gutsy (or just foolish) thing for me to guess at because
we don’t have competitive, tournament data for this
format and I haven’t personally played it in
10-12 years. So… why am I so sure this is still
important? The last time I read anything about the
Unlimited Format, even if you were running a First Turn
Win (FTW) or First Turn Lock (FTL) deck, Professor
Oak in multiples was a must-run. Even with
other, additional draw/search combos, even with Erika,
you still needed this raw amount of draw power.
The only significant change, as such, is that if
you have to rip through your entire deck, you now
have insurance: Lysandre’s Trump Card is not
banned for Unlimited Format play! I’d love to see
how a Supporter reprint, which would effectively errata
the original, would shake things up…
Ratings
Standard:
N/A (See above)
Expanded:
N/A (See above)
Limited:
4.5/5 (See above)
Theme:
See Above
Unlimited:
4.75/5
Conclusion
Professor Oak,
the original big draw card is still the greatest the
Pokémon TCG has ever seen, though if it were to be
reprinted it would be nerfed and turned into a
Supporter… which would still leave it as tied for the
greatest draw power in Standard and Expanded play,
because we already have two such cards:
Professor Juniper and Professor Sycamore.
I do not expect such a thing to happen because
the powers-that-be already passed on that when we
got the infuriatingly bad Professor Oak’s Hint in
XY: Evolutions. This was extra egregious as
they could have just reprinted Professor Oak’s
Research or Professor Oak’s Visit to give us
an irrelevant Professor Oak-themed card, or Professor
Oak’s New Theory for one that might be a little too
good and yet possibly improve the metagame.
Whenever said powers-that-be release another big draw
card remotely close to Professor Juniper/Professor
Sycamore, I’ll once again wish they would consider
reprinting Professor Oak as a Supporter, just for
the effect it would have on Unlimited play, where it
remains a staple to this day (but a reprint would change
it from play-as-an-Item to an actual Supporter).
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