What does the Ancient Mew card actually say?

It says exactly what a card should say. It just says it in runes, and for twenty years most owners could not read it.

Ancient Mew looks like a prop because it was one. In Pokémon: The Movie 2000 (in Japan, Revelation Lugia), the collector Lawrence III treasures an ancient Mew card, the piece that started his collection; in the English dub he says so outright. The real card was made to match: a Mew in a stone frame, its text carved in a mixture of Germanic runes, drawn from Futhark and related alphabets, with Mayan-style glyphs in the art. The runes are not used for their sound values. They are a cipher: each rune stands for a letter of the Latin alphabet, so the card can be read, letter by letter, by anyone with the key.

With the key, it is an ordinary card wearing a costume. Ancient Mew, 30 HP, Psychic type. Its single attack is Psyche, for two Psychic Energy, doing 40 damage, the Pokémon move Psychic under an older name. Its Pokédex line reads "New Species," and its flavor text asks the question the whole film asks about Mew: "Little God... or Evil?" Even its weakness and resistance are printed only as symbols tucked into the stonework, findable, as collectors later noticed, on the Xatu totem pole on the cover of the Neo Premium File 2.

The key was never secret for long. Japan's CoroCoro magazine published the complete lexicon in its September 1999 issue, runes, translation and the meanings of the four Mayan glyphs, and Wizards of the Coast handed out rune cheat sheets at its events in the West. None of which saved the card in organized play: a card your opponent cannot read is a card that cannot be argued with fairly, and Ancient Mew was banned, one of only two cards ever banned even from the anything-goes Unlimited format. It shares that distinction with Birthday Pikachu, the other page in this shelf where the joke was the rules. Who designed it, fittingly, is unknown: the card carries no illustrator credit.

Ancient Mew, front and back

The international print · CGC archive photographs

Ancient Mew card front: Mew in a stone frame covered in runes — **The front**Mew floats in a carved frame. Every word on the card, including its name, is written in the runic cipher.

Ancient Mew card back, a unique design used by no other Pokémon card — **The back**Ancient Mew does not use the standard Pokémon card back. Its reverse is part of the artifact, a design unique to this card.

The four glyphs worked into the artwork are Mayan in style, and the official reading gives them as Birth (upper left), Enthronement (upper right), Right of Succession (lower right) and Death (lower left): a whole royal biography in four marks.

THE CARD IN THE FILM

Lawrence III's first treasure

The prop

In The Power of One, the card appears as the first object of Lawrence III's collection, and the only piece of it still in his hands at the end of the film.

A bigger role, cut

The film's writer, Takeshi Shudo, revealed the card was meant to matter far more to the plot; most of its role was excised, leaving the brief appearance at the end.

The 2019 footnote

When the card was reprinted in Japan in 2019, its runes were quietly edited: the flavor line now reads "Little Good... or Evil?" The versions page in this shelf tells the prints apart.

What does the Ancient Mew card actually say?

Ancient Mew, front and back

THE CARD IN THE FILM

THE FIRST WORD