Please remember to follow the manual of style and code of conduct at all times.
Check the Bulbagarden home page for up-to-date Pokémon news and discuss it on the forums or in the Bulbagarden Discord server.

Wizards of the Coast

From Bulbapedia, the community-driven Pokémon encyclopedia.
Revision as of 04:17, 25 June 2008 by Pkmn veteran (talk | contribs) (fixing some minor spelling errors)
Jump to navigationJump to search

Wizards of the Coast, or "WOTC" for short, is the producer of hobby gaming systems owned by Hasbro, including Magic: the Gathering, Dungeons and Dragons, and the Star Wars TCG. From 1998 until 2003, Wizards of the Coast was responsible for translating and distributing Pokémon trading cards created by MEDIAFACTORY (then by The Pokémon Company). In 2003, Wizards of the Coast's license to translate and distribute Pokémon TCG card was transferred to Nintendo by Nintendo. After the license was transferred to Nintendo, Wizards of the Coast attempted to sue Nintendo, claiming Nintendo stole certain insider secrets. Both parties would later settle outside of court.

The following sets were released:

A set to follow Skyridge, titled "Jamboree," was in the works of being released by WOTC, but never had the opportunity to be due to the cancellation of Wizards' license. Other consequences of the cancellation of the WOTC license was that there was only one print run of Skyridge, causing the price of the set to skyrocket.

Criticism

There is a considerable common opinion within current Pokémon TCG players that Wizards of the Coast did a terrible job running the game. Between the questionable tournaments, quality of the game cards and release time of sets, the game during Wizards' era was not up to par with the current Nintendo era. However, proponents of Wizards of the Coast have noted that any wrong doings during the games tortured run was mostly stemmed from the fact that the game was run by five companies: Wizards of the Coast, its parent company, Hasbro, Nintendo of America, Nintendo of Japan and MEDIAFACTORY/TPC. This in turn created a major conflict of interests between what each company wanted, and the game was caught in the middle of it. The majority of the conflict rested between what Wizards of the Coast wanted to do for Western players and what MEDIAFACTORY/TPC would allow Wizards to do (which, at the time, MEDIAFACTORY/TPC was considerably restrictive with what was to be done with the game), as well as between Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro, where Hasbro seemed to be more interested in their financial returns than the players. Since leaving WotC's hands, the game has managed to avoid a lot of these problems, with power now held between TPC and PUI.

External Links

Retrieved from "https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/w/index.php?title=Wizards_of_the_Coast&oldid=395966"