Can you subtract things through alchemizing? I have a nice pokeball mug I can use...

John does this in canon! But it’s an extremely complex process. To subtract the mug from the Pokeball Mug, you’ll need a normal mug, and deduction skills. It may also be impossible for you to do so if you’re unlucky. Okay let’s use this example. You have a captcha card for the Normal Mug that looks like…

Now, there’s two ways to combine Captcha Cards. || takes the hole patterns from both Cards, it’s basically punching a pattern of holes over an already punched card. && only takes the hole patterns that appear on both cards. So, say that your Pokemon Mug Card looks like this:

What we do here is overlap the cards.

The red holes are the holes that coincide on both cards- And you may, in fact, notice, that all of the holes in the Normal Mug card appear on the Pokeball Mug card. So what do we do here?

Whatever the code for the Pokeball Card is, it’s going to have ALL of the Punched Holes in black on it. However, it may have ANY of the ones in red. Given there’s 15 holes in red, there’s a total of 2^15, or 32768 combinations of punched holes that could produce a functional Pokeball.

Now, however, imagine that your Pokeball Mug Card looks like…

What you do, is overlap the cards again. However, this time…

In the previous example, the red represented the punched holes that overlapped on both cards. It was an obvious case of a || combination. However, as we see here, the red represents the holes from the Normal Mug card that do NOT appear on the Pokeball Mug card! What this means, is that this is an && Combination, and the Pokeball Card will have ALL of the holes that appear on the Pokeball Mug card, NONE of the ones that appear in red, and ANY of the non-punched spaces. Given these parameters, there’s a total of 2^33 possible combinations of holes that could give us the Pokeball, or a whopping 8589934592.

As you may have noticed, there’s no WAY you’re going to be parsing through these unless you upgarde the Alchemiter to have some sort of items separator program installed through Punch Card Shunts. However, it could be the case that the specific combination you’re looking for would be feasible. For example, John extracted the Harlequin Components from his Defaced Poster because he was lucky and noticed there were only like, 4 possible combinations that could create a clean Poster.

You’re better off just combining a baseball with a Copy of Pokemon Red/Blue and making it from scratch.