Recent advances in the field of Egyptology have bizarrely revealed that the Yu-Gi-Oh card game was not an invention of a young American businessman named Maximilan Pegasus, but a dangerous game of sorcery which permeated all levels of Egyptian society until it was suppressed during the reign of Pharaoh Atem of the Twenty-first dynasty, known to history as the King of Games. This edict is believed by many scholars to have been followed less stringently in Egypt among the nobility after his death, and records of the game are recorded as surviving as late as the age of the Ptolemies.
Less well-known is the fact that the sport of Pokemon battling, long thought to have reached the apex of its popularity in the late 1990s, has its roots not in bug collecting, but in Roman gladiatorial combat. Although cheaply produced pokeballs are a luxury of the industrial age, a pokeball was not out of reach for a senator, and poorer men would often challenge pokemon to one-on-one combat in the hopes of winning their loyalty, while children would attempt to befriend the local pidgey or rattata in the hopes of having a pokemon of their own. Pokemon battles in these days, like their gladiatorial antecedents were as often as not to the death; Pidgeot were originally preferred as the standard of the Roman legions, and only the enormous rarity of a Pidgeotto surviving to level thirty-six created the switch to eagles. (Later legions, despite the obvious advantages of a battling symbol, would prefer to use bronze standards to living ones – a switch made all the easier by the fact that eagles, unlike pokemon, make for poor soldiers.)
As a newly-discovered document recovered from a monastery in Hoenn shows, Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh met during the late Republic's civil wars at the decisive battle of Actium.
The gulf of Actium was shrouded by a rare and wholly unnatural sandstorm, a fact thought to benefit the Egyptians, who were used to desert warfare. Except that desert warfare was not typically naval, and there was nothing natural about this sandstorm: like the Kyogre who brings endless rain to the English, it was an uncontrollable and quite annoying storm which had followed Octavian's legions whenever he opened his Tyranitar's pokeball.
As the galleys rammed one another amidst a hail of arrows and a howling wind which blinded Egyptian and Roman alike, Mark Antony, former ally of Octavian and oft-derided as a puppet of his lover, the Egyptian queen Cleopatra, shuffled his deck and played a card in face-down position.
"Tyranitar, Hyper beam!" Octavian shouted, the young consul's pokemon ripping towards the enemy's commander in a beam of orange light.
"Not so fast. I activate my trap card, Negate Attack!" Marc Antony answered, and the beam was engulfed in a swirling white, blue, and pink vortex. "Now, I play Yami," he said (or named the ancient Egyptian equivalent card, whose wholly non-Japanese name has been lost to history) "shrouding the battlefield in darkness!"
"You fool! Is this the triumvir I've been warring with for so long? Tyranitar's a dark type, and you've just increased his attack power!"
"Take a closer look, Octavian!" Caesar's adopted son blinked, but the darkness engulfed his eyesight. "Your fleet may outnumber mine, but that won't do you any good when your soldiers can't see who they're attacking!"
A few calls of "foresight" went out from the lines on both sides. Among those few Egyptians who played Pokemon, the fascination with the afterlife remained, and ghost-types were therefore more common on Marc Antony's side, although not enough to turn the battle.
"Next, I sacrifice two soldiers to summon my Blue Eyes White Dragon and attack your Tyranitar!" With pinpoint accuracy and blue eyes which pierced the darkness, the dragon shot a ball of white electricity at the Tyranitar, sending it hurtling to the back of the boat while Octavian desperately used his shield to keep it from falling into the water; rock pokemon had their weaknesses.
"Tyranitar, trample!" The beast leaped from boat to boat, using its adept sense of hearing to manuever and thick, rocky body to avoid spears as it decimated Mark Antony's fleet.
Mark Antony silently pulled a card from his deck. "I play Pot of Greed, allowing me to draw two more cards!"
"What happens if you draw more than that?" Octavian asked.
"Suffice it to say that Nyarlathotep will not be pleased." Antony answered with a shudder, then his face twisted into a victorious smile as he pulled the second card from his deck. "As you may have forgotten, Tyranitar is a rock type, not a ground type, and therefore has no resistance to lightning! Raigeki!"
"That's right!" Octavian shouted in dismay, the young general clearly displeased as a bolt of lightning from the sky, perhaps from Jupiter himself (or at least his Egyptian equivalent – but when did Ra throw thunderbolts?) struck his Tyranitar. "But I think you're forgetting something too." He said with a short, sinister laugh.
"And that would be?"
"Pokemon don't die as easily as duel monsters!
"But can it also survive a combined attack from my Blue-Eyes and my Dark Magician?" Antony asked, sacrificing two more soldiers and inficting a devastating attack on the tyrant's pokemon.
"Man, if only I had started with a normal starter. You'd be so dead. Blaze, storm, or overgrow... as it is, this is all I can do." Octavian yelled, tossing an enormous golden berry from his ship to his Tyranitar, which devoured it in one chomp, its lightning bolt-shaped wound closing up as he regained forty hit points. "Earthquake!"
"Earthquake? This is a naval battle!" Marc Antony shouted incredulously.
"And what do you think happens when a sufficently strong earthquake occurs underwater?"
Marc Antony gulped. "Tsu...tsunami?"
"Tyranitar, tsunami!" The enormous wave destroyed ship after ship, damaging his own fleet more than his rival's – but unlike Antony, Octavian could take the extra losses. Soldiers continued to fire arrows and tried to steer their uncontrolled ships into one another at properly destructive angles, but half of them were washed up on shore and another quarter lay dead in the waters of Actium. Antony's monsters had vanished, engulfed in the wave along with a portion of the triumvir's life points. "Beat this, Antony!" He taunted as damage from the water knocked out his starting pokemon and he returned it to its pokeball.
Unfortunately for the fortunes of his cause, Marc Antony was relatively new to Egypt's ancient games of darkness, and his deck was not without its imperfections. On this turn, it was all he could do to summon a La Jinn to attack a couple more of Octavian's ships.
"Gyarados, waterfall!" Octavian hurled his second and final pokeball into the water, releasing a blue serpent who swam with such force as turn a level sea into a deadly rapid, creating a current which drove most of the remnants of Antony's fleet off the falls to be smashed upon the desert sands. Their morale broken, the few remnants of Antony's force made a hurried, disorganized retreat, which their commander reluctantly joined.
After the battle of Actium, Cleopatra killed herself with a baby Ekans, and her lover Antony, long derided for going native, slit his neck with a paper cut from his beloved Blue-Eyes White Dragon. Octavian, after restoring order to Rome, was inspired by this battle to invent a game of his own which melded Egyptian trading cards with Roman pokemon: the Pokemon TCG. It caught on with a popularity greater than even the emperor's encouragement accounted for and his skillfully built Charizard/Chansey deck soon made him the envy of the senate.