Pokemon

/Pokemon? Wow, looks like Teatime has lost it.

Bleh, right. This has nothing to do with TFC. This rant is completely off topic.
Yet I have to get this off my chest and in some way it fits in here just fine.So either bear with me or skip this rant.

As some of you may know I work in a comicshop. Besides comics we also sell merchandise and trading cards. As you can imagine we were not spared from the recent Poke-Mania.

One thing extremely popular is the Pokemon CCG (Collectable Card Game).
As you might know one important selling factor is the different frequencies of certain cards (the so-called “rares”). So you have to buy 2 or 3 packs to get one of those rares. And you will need a lot of luck to find one of the popular rares (or a lot of money to buy enough packs).
Of course the rares are more valuable than the commons, and values go up to $50 and more for certain cards.

Now you can imagine that this primarily attracts younger children, starting at 5, 6 years going up to 14, 15 (but it is not unusual to see even older children to buy and collect these cards), many of them spending a lot of money to their new hobby (often leaving us with the question where the kids get all this money from).
But as you might imagine as well, there are a lot of nasty things going on.
These kids trade cards which each other, or sell them. With prices that high and interest that huge the kids get greedy and unscrupulous.
You will find kids stealing cards from others, harassing them to give away or trade cards, betraying them by trading (especially disgusting to see more experienced collectors trading valuable cards against common stuff from kids starting to collect). There were even reports from single incidents of violence (unsurprisingly, considering what I described before). I would not be surprised to learn that kids threaded others to give away cards.
Keep in mind that we are talking of kids mainly between 8 and 14 here.
I see the same group of kids every day in front of our store sitting there like vultures waiting for their prey. And there’s little I can do. And soon I will see them swarming around the kid who just bought his packs harassing him, seeking to fool him, betray him or to steal from him.

Things like this are almost making me puke!!!

And if there’s any relation from my rant to TFC than that a lot of these kids – if they’d play TFC – would be those who’d cheat and pulling any lame stunt in the book to have their personal fun at other people’s cost. This is LAMER BREED of the worst kind!

Okay, rant finished.

Go on discussing if TFC can be successfully played with only 2 type1-grens …