They do. However, there’s several reasons they print bad cards, none of which are really applicable to gems.
They print bad cards for other formats, like Limited or EDH. You know how many real game modes there probably are in Street Fighter x Tekken? Two. One of which is single-player.
They print bad cards because they have exciting, over-the-top effects that need to be priced too high. Obviously, that doesn’t fit Street Fighter x Tekken, where gems are basic and have a set cost.
They print bad cards because some have very convoluted, complex effects that are designed to be comboed with; sometimes those effects never get broken at an affordable cost. Obviously, this doesn’t apply to the basic effects of the gem.
Finally, they sometimes print cards that are worst than past cards intentionally, to balance the overall power level of the game’s standard rotating format. This would be equivalent to replacing powerful gems with weaker ones to fix the game, but it doesn’t apply to the initial supply.
Considering two of the three Street Fighter characters in MVC3 are basically upscaled models from Tatsunoko vs Capcom, and the other is just a modified Ryu, your argument is largely invalidated.
It can’t be Stockholm Syndrome if you were never a hostage.
Based on the fact that we have things like Auto-guard, “gems are basic” might be a little premature.
And they really just do not have a set cost.
Also,
I knew there was one on this! Most of those actually fit gems pretty well. Good and bad are highly context dependent ideas. It’s not hard to imagine even simple effects with really narrow uses or that allow fun and interesting play styles that didn’t exist before.
I’ve got a better idea for this whole gem thing regarding the time it takes. I’ve mentioned it before, but no one responded to it.
Both Melee and Brawl have it where you can have different names listed. Brawl took this a step further to where you have button setups listed underneath said name. Imagine if you had something like Marvel’s reserves system. You can have up to three sets of gems per character under your name. Each character has a side deck of sorts for counter pick gems. For tournaments, all you gotta do is have it where people assign their sets and name before the tournament starts.
While this would be nice, people would definitely want to store more than 3 decks per character. My (example) Kazuya/Poison team may want to have 5-7 different set ups to counter characters AND/OR the opponent’s gem sets.
Three was just an arbitrary number. It could have as many as ten for all we know. Let’s do the math real quick. 100 profiles (again random number), 50 characters, ten slots per character… 50,000 different slots? 55,000 if we include the side deck.
Although, rereading your post, you mentioned that for countering characters. That’s what the side deck is for, your counter pick gems.
If they had gems it’s not so bad, it’s the fact it’s required in tournament play AND they are playing it off as if it’s meant for the professionals. Wow.
I have a scared feeling there might be a Command Throw Invincible Gem. Activates once in awile when you get scooped up too much, by Gief, King, Abel, & etc.
" They"ll be close and try to SPD it whiffs no matter how close they are and get you get a free punish."
I’m waiting for the really crazy gems to drop. I fully expect there to be an alternate win condition jem. Something like, do 40 special attacks, win the match.