It's All In The Cards

When all hope of returning home seems lost, Gennai guides the kids to his secret underwater home, where they're presented with a solution to their problem.

thumb|225px|left|Episode recap for It's All In The Cards.

Synopsis
With no clue of what to do, the group are led by Gennai to his home, hidden at the bottom of a lake. There, they rest, and Gennai goes over the current situation - Myotismon arrived in Highton View Terrace in Tokyo, Japan. He then gives the kids ten cards with Digimon on them, nine of which can be used to open the portal in Myotismon's castle, but only in the correct order. The next day, the group leave with the cards and Izzy's laptop configured by Gennai, and they raid Myotismon's castle. With him and his best servants gone, getting to the door is easy, and the group now try to work on figuring out the order of the cards. Izzy figures out how to order them, leaving Tai to decide on one of two more cards to insert into the sequence. When Dokugumon, one of Myotismon's servants, attacks, Tai must decide quickly, and just by luck, he gets it right, opening the door and taking the group into the real world.

Subsequent continuity
The card method used in this episode is used again in the 02 episode Oikawa's Shame by the character Yukio Oikawa, who places the Agumon card into the vaccine-rookie slot, while Tai in this 1st-season episode placed the Gomamon card into this same slot. This difference may have contributed to the resulting destinies of the two characters: Tai's successful opening of the entry to real-world Tokyo, and Oikawa's fateful opening of the entry into an alternative world (into which, it seems, he, his cohorts and the children who were seeded with black spores were unwittingly led by MaloMyotismon, who had possessed Oikawa for such ends).

Continuity errors

 * In the English dub, when discussing how the cards must be laid out, Izzy says that the order of one, two, and three stars indicates In-Training, Rookie, and Champion Digimon. However, none of the Digimon are In-Training level, and the cards are laid out in rows of Rookie, Champion, and Ultimate Digimon. Also, the vertical columns represent Vaccine (Leomon), Data (Centarumon) and Virus (Etemon). Izzy sums it up in a wrong order, calling Leomon a Data, Centarumon a Virus and Etemon a Vaccine Digimon.
 * The recap of the episode shows events that happen in a later episode.

Animation errors

 * The gate to the human world is shown to slide open, but is then shown as if opened outwards.