The Best Pokemon Card
The best-designed Pokemon card of all time is named "batman!!". It has 1000 HP, the PokeBody "batcave" that means it can't be killed, and the PokePower "batereng" that reads "kills any pokemon on the other team".
Its medium is marker on construction paper. It was not sold or bought or copyrighted or kept hidden. It advances no claims about art or about Pokemon cards on purpose.
Great art creates a critical response. The card batman!! can be stopped by me who has HP infinity, the attack "gun" that does infinity damage, and "when this is killed by a pokepower return it to the bench and you can put that card on the bottom of your enemys deck". Reportedly, Emma (the artist behind batman!!) cried when she realized that batman!! was not immune to being put on the bottom of the deck.
Emma made card games of her own as she grew older. The first expansion of Fight Cards had ten cards, each on an index card. You got one energy per turn, because she didn't want to write "energy" on a bunch of index cards. Her second expansion had seven cards, and was widely considered by her contemporary and younger brother Taric to be "overpowered because you just made my cards but stronger". It was the best card game of all time because whenever she and her brother agreed it was solved, they added new cards.
When Emma was growing up, strong basic Pokemon had 100 HP. Years later, they have up to 300. How quaint compared to batman!! and me! The ends of the artistic institution of Pokemon cards are stripped bare. They grow stronger over time, making each other obsolete, and if you are naive this is their end. This cannot be so, though, because Emma's batman!! can beat even her friend Jessica's unfair Magmortar deck built from sanctioned booster packs.
Jessica would go on to author a number of critical responses, such as ANTIBATMAN RAY and FIRESTAR. This, if anything, is the desired effect of the normative force exerted by Emma's art. This is the secret to why batman!! is a better Pokemon card than even Roseanne's Research, the best Pokemon card you could at one point play in a tournament. batman!! begets critical responses; Roseanne's shoos them away if they are not made by The Pokemon Company.
It's not wrong, exactly, to say that "real" Pokemon cards are made in pursuit of capital-- actually, it's perfectly right to say so. But that undersells the force that makes them. Years ago, artists sorted time by real numbers to organize the card artists, sorted space by longitude and latitude to ease the movement of booster packs, sorted an incommensurable amassment of players by which kinds of cards were made for them, sorted stories by trope to further the development of resonant loglines. And from this blood sacrifice art, of a certain definition, was born.
A Pokemon card, like Roseanne's Research, is a temple to this worldless timespace. Its true purpose is to sway us into believing that those artists were right to sort time and space and people and stories-- or, at least, that the blood sacrifice was worth it. Emma's batman!! was made between dinner and bedtime, in her room, for Taric and Jessica, about Batman, and she hasn't even read Marx yet. Nine-year-olds often have such adept critical responses.