#149. Power Reserve (Tuesday, August 31, 1999)

What was your best day…of caring way too much about something?

I know we touched on it in #84, but the entire concept of how unique of a hold the Pokémon TCG had on all of us kids in the late-1999 deserves to be an item of singular focus here.¹

The special, once-in-a-generation status of Pokémon cards could have only come about from a miraculous convergence of factors:

The sheer scarcity of Pokémon cards relative to immeasurable scale of the public interest. Scarcity in terms of available Pokémon to collect—only 150 individual cards available, and only 115 before the release of Fossil in October (#84)—which meant that if you owned a card of a Pokémon, it was like you definitively owned that Pokémon.
And that was magnified by the scarcity of obtaining cards itself: Pokémon cards were highly in demand, sold out instantly at stores, and we were are kids with limited money of our own to spend. A booster pack was a luxury: every single card you owned was a precious resource.
Plus, the cards’ the connection to a video game and anime that were mainstream, and the attachment of the trading cards to an actual functional (and in my view, pretty well-designed and strategically de) game, gave those pieces of cardboard a deeper resonance beyond collector’s items.
Finally, the visual design of the cards themselves had this “je ne sais quoi” retro, minimalist, slightly campy, but somehow high-personality quality. Unlike how they look like now, the card frame was unpolished and over-simplified. The text boxes were oddly proportioned and text itself was extremely non-concisely written, leading to barely readable 8-point text for Pokémon with any complexity. The font and faded type colors were a bit tacky and unnatural. The numbers stood out too strongly. Yet, all of that somehow combined into a striking, memorable card object that told their owners, “Yes, you’re in possession of something real here.”

It was at sports camp in August where all of this first came to me.² I owned no Pokemon cards at the time, barely understood the franchise besides a handful of anime episodes I’d watched. But outside the sports (very much an afterthought), the centerpiece of the camp was the breaks and lunch hour—where every one of us gathered on the platforms by the side of the curling arena to trade cards, and battle cards, and trade cards again. Every day, I’d see a few cards I’d never seen before—with our teenage counselor being the source for most of them—and each one of them, with their evocative visuals and immediate numerical resonance, give me one of those unconscious “holy shit, this cool” feeling.

So, after the last day of sports camp, my mom bought be the Power Reserve theme deck, for the latest Jungle expansion. It was a full sixty cards, with a centerpiece holographic Kangaskhan that I treasured immensely (until I traded it away for scraps a few weeks into the school year), and a fresh, subtle, distinctly factory scent. But even just as special was seeing the full card list for the first time: and seeing the names of the only four Pokémon cards I still had not yet seen: Chansey, Electabuzz, Snorlax, and Victreebel.³ There was just a mythical quality to all this.

Later in the summer, I have a dedicated trading session with best friend Harry Liu (#139, #84) at my house, which is essentially him exchanging the duplicated from the Base Set Starter deck he got months ago with my own duplicates—with us nearly pulling off a trade of my ace (Kangaskhan) for his ace (Machamp).⁴ Then my dad tells me⁵ that the Yahoo! website (the go-to homepage circa 1999 internet) has an “Auctions” page where I can see images of different Pokémon cards myself.⁶ So, all day for the rest of the summer, I read through the card text of every Pokémon I know more closely—while finally seeing the mythical Chansey, Victreebel, and Snorlax cards in the (pixellated) flesh.

This last night of August is the last day of summer vacation. School starts tomorrow. And Harry and I, along with our moms and his grandparents, decide to go together for a walk. Not far, just five minutes to the local Nepean City Hall and library building, and around the fountain / winter skating rink next to it. And it is in the hour or two we spend there, Harry and I just walking around the edge of the fountain, that my Pokemon interest hits its peak. We talk through many of the 115 cards in detail, which ones are strong, which ones are not⁷, which ones we could realistically get our hands on through trading at school.

And that’s the kicker. At school. We’re about to return to a community, where we’ll be interacting and talking Pokémon and playing and trading Pokémon with hundreds of other kids who are just as invested in the franchise as we are. Kids who’ve had a whole summer to assemble their own collections, show them off, and then use them as trading pieces in the unique, life-of-death-stakes-feeling, yet totally coherent economy of the schoolyard Pokémon ecosystem. We were ready for the full blast tomorrow.

And while it wouldn’t last (#84), for that first day and those first few weeks, it delivered.

And before you complain of overlap, just note that the contents of this story could’ve easily been three separate stories that justified their place on the second list—by virtue of mostly the Pokémon content alone.
No, not the best-in Canada Carleton sports camp (#142, #41) where four years later I got drawn into another Pokémon product (Ruby and Sapphire), but a smaller, more local sports camp I went for three straight summers, including the one before and after this one.
I hadn’t seen the famous Charizard before, either. But thankfully, the first page of the rulebook that showed the anatomy of a card used Charizard as the example. Good call there.
Naturally, nearly as memorable were the logistics of making that meeting happen. Harry and I have multiple calls—one of which gets interrupted when my fifteen-month-old brother randomly throws a full container of multivitamins into the trash and my grandparents react like a natural disaster has occurred. And in the middle, I get a prank call from someone vaguely threatening my eternal happiness—Harry later tells me that person (who I never actually met) traded him a (very poor condition) Gyarados for three of his cards plus the phone number.
Actually, I knew about that page already. I was just afraid of navigating to that page, since I thought that would commit me to actually buying the cards at the auction. Until my dad says it’s fine since I don’t have credit card access.
This was well before the days where card scans or visual spoilers or even a semi-effective search function existed on the internet.
He reassures me that Electabuzz, the only one I haven’t seen, is trash—which turns out to wholly inaccurate as it becomes the centerpiece, along with Hitmonchan, of the early “Haymaker” archetype.