Pokémon Top Trumps is a project being developed by a group of students, using a variety of skills, tools, and programming languages. Our aim is to practice existing skills while also learning new ones.
The main premise of the project is similar to the classic “Top Trumps” card game, where players aim to collect all the cards from their opponents. To win a round, players must have the highest value in a chosen statistic. The winner of the previous round selects the statistic for the next round.
This blog would explain the card designs I have created for the game.
Card designs
Since we are doing a Pokémon theme within Top Trumps, we need to understand what attributes we can use within Pokémon that can be translated into a standard top trump format. First let’s analyse both cards.
Looking at traditional Top Trump cards (as pictured above), they typically feature five different “stats” for users to select, accompanied by a picture and a brief description. Players choose from these stats to determine the winner of each round.
Pokémon cards and their game are very different. To put it simply, they rely on attacking their opponents cards in the best of three, using energy, items and their evolution cards to aid them.
Pokémon cards also feature an image and a short description, but instead of straightforward stats like height or weight, they list “moves” requiring varying amounts of energy, each dealing a specific amount of damage, along with having their own HP and typing.
These two cards are very different.
This is the card that design I had come up with, using aspects of both the top trump cards and the Pokémon cards.
Stats : The stats used will include the base attributes: HP, Attack, Defense, and Speed. These stats are universal for all Pokémon and easy to implement, especially if using a Pokémon API or database, as this information is typically available in Pokédex entries.
Layout : Taking inspiration from Pokémon card designs, incorporating the type symbols and associated colors will help avoid a plain appearance. However, there are 18 Pokémon types (15 in Gen 1), so managing visual styles for each can be a little challenging.
The yellow border around would be like the original Pokémon cards (Before 2023) Make it more Pokémon card esk
Description : (Optional)
This might be difficult to implement, so it is optional. This would be taking inspiration from both. Usually in the pokedex, the Pokedex number, species, height, weight. This could be implemented via a function
The height and weight in the actual English version are in feet/ inches and pounds. I translate to universal conversations. This might always be in the Pokémon API.
The colours of the typing would be based of this github repo:
Type icons would be from here : https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Type#Icons (Pokémon Let’s Go, Pikachu!, Let’s Go, Eevee!, Sword, Shield, and HOME (prior to 3.0.0) used)
The back would look something with a cross between the Pokémon TCG card (back) and the Top Trump (back).
(this would be probably look a little different)
There are also different options for Pokémon images, for the mock ups i have used to the Pokémon Home images, for consistency, but we can stay true to the original images used within the games.
Shinies
Shiny Pokémon are Pokémon that simply have a different colour pallet. They have a chance of a shiny Pokémon (since gen 8) is 1/4096, originally (in gen 2) it was 1/8162). There were no shinies in gen 1.
In the top trumps game, we could have the addition of Pokémon that are shiny within a 1/X chance, maybe even 1/100 for better user experiences
- Within the game, a shiny Pokémon would have no additional value expect it is just shiny
- Could give the user an instant win to the person who has the shiny card
- If both draw a shiny Pokémon, they draw and discard both
- OR they could give the card to one another (to complete all 50 cards)
This is what the shiny cards would look like, in both styles. We do have to note though, that gen 1 did not have any shinies in their game because shinies did not exist in gen 1, so we might need to use gen 2 spirits of the Pokémon.
Here is how I came up with the designs of the shiny cards.
Background : Using the background of shiny Pokémons (Set PAF) , the Pokémon would be shiny as well as some sparkles at the background to indicate they are shiny.
Gold star : Inspiration from the ‘gold star cards’ that were released within 2004 – 2007, showcasing shiny Pokémon.
I’ve used the gold star symbol to show that they are shiny.
If the gold star seems too difficult or we need something simple, we can use the shiny Pokémon cards from Neo Revelation released in 2001. This was actually the first introduction to shiny Pokémon with Pokémon cards, so it would be nice to commemorate that.
For the future (of cards)
Recently (in 2023) Pokémon cards have changed their border from the standard yellow to a silver border at the start of their scarlet and violet bases sets. When we create the Pokémon trump cards for gen 9, we could make our card borders silver as well.
KaiRaiChu 
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