family futures, as told by pokemon cards
I had a conversation with my sister at dinner last night about how it made sense for our brother – who'd shifted into data and analytics from life science – to work in the field he's in now, based on how he played Pokemon.
He doesn't play anymore, but my brother was always strategic with his teams. He was careful to use Pokemon who had the exact Natures he thought would maximize their stats, releasing them and searching for another if they didn't. I'd always just find whatever Pokemon I thought was handsome or looked strong, and keep my first catch – a method he teased me for, good-naturedly.
My sister agreed with this observation. I was too young when they started collecting Pokemon cards, but she told me he would play the actual game with kids at his school, looking at the moves' effects/damage and planning out his 60-card deck meticulously.
"Meanwhile, I'd just look at the cards because they were pretty," she said, and I laughed with her because I was more like her in that way.
We had a couple of really cute ones I liked, but my sister appreciated all of them – everything down to the energy cards, which were just a symbol on an orb with swooping effects around them. Her liking the card art made sense, too: She'd turned out to be an illustrator.
I inherited my siblings' collection and continued buying booster packs until our mom finally refused to spend money on more of an item that a) we had an abundance of and b) I did not really utilize in a visible way. They stayed in a box in my closet, and one night, after talking about how they might be worth something these days, my siblings and I went upstairs to look through them.
We didn't really know how to identify first editions (and didn't really care – we just wanted to look through old stuff). Our main discovery was that we had more counterfeit ones than we thought. Our favorite was this one for Gengar, AKA "Bag Dragon."
Best features include its HP vs. move damage ratio, and the quote at the bottom: "When feel algid, Degost must be nearby."
(Based on context clues, Bag Dragon might have been a typo, and his real fake name was Degost.)
What did I do with the Pokemon cards? I would take them out and sort them, putting them in protective cases my brother bought when he was playing the game. I'd sort them a different way each time (by name, by HP, by color) and I think I tried to catalog our collection too, though on paper and in clumsy kid handwriting.
(I'm wondering now – not for the first time – if I should go into library science...)