Kind of boring how they're dripping out the Gallery cards to promote Crown Zenith. We already expect to get all of those. How about they show us the leftovers that will comprise the main set?
It can be contrasted against how Pokebeach/WPM assumed it/he was meant to handle, or else told to handle, the illegitimate leaks surrounding VSTAR Universe. I don't agree with the way that was handled, where we were all supposed to pretend we didn't see them? It was bizarre, but understandable. The information came out unintentionally, and kinda-sorta
illegally*, through unauthorized backchannels.
On the other hand, this is... what, exactly? Am I supposed to pretend I don't know all the cards in VSTAR Universe already? pokemon-card.com is obviously an authorized primary channel for news about the Pokémon TCG, and since the set has already released, information insofar as what cards are in the set and what they look like is, I assume,
intentionally available information.
I understand there's a need to promote the English TCG as a thing in and unto itself, but since we usually already know what, say, 60-70% of a given set is comprised of based on the Japanese sets they're adopting, and in a case like this we're closer to 80-90% if not more, I don't know why TPCi is insistent on pretending we don't know this. But it's the same branch of the company that insists on the same backward policies as releasing the anime with solely dub audio. This is despite the fact there is 0 licensing issues – when an anime like Evangelion is released on Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc. there are negotiations around the rights to the original JP dub (which is almost always provided) as well as additional negotiations around the rights of the various international language dubs, because
TPCi is making a lot of steps in the right direction lately, but refuses to budge on some things. At the same time they do things like prepare to host Worlds in Yokohama, and release trailers announcing Satoshi/Ash is being retired from the anime after winning the PWC
(even though that jumps the gun on the current timing of the English dub!! oh noes), it still wants us to play along and pretend we don't know that Pokémon is a Japanese franchise and gets things ahead of us, in Japanese, and the rest of the world typically follows on a secondary, delayed timeline. Like, for example, the TCG.
Like you've said, Frost, the news we want is to find out where the differences between VSTAR Universe and Crown Zenith is. This drip-drip-drip of cards we already know exist is behind the times.
To put this all another way: Why can't I buy Japanese cards from pokemoncenter.com?*
* NDA violations aren't illegal in the sense of violation of law, but they're a violation of a contract. It's not the point of this post.
** Yes, yes, there's logistics issues insofar as who is printing what language edition and where they're printing it, but wouldn't it be nice if this was something the franchise worked towards? This partition doesn't make sense anymore and the segments still enforcing it are vestiges of another, archaic era for the franchise.
