With the influx of digital card games gaining popularity over the years, it’s unsurprising to see a new one pop up here and there. With that said, seeing Pokemon releasing a new digital card game with Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket has had some fans confused – including myself. With the existence of Pokemon Trading Card Game Live, the crossover is quite apparent, but the team at The Pokemon Company and Creatures have a different goal in mind for this new game. From what I’ve seen so far, Pocket is less about the competitive meta of the physical Pokemon trading card game and more about the collecting aspect of the beautiful cards fans know and love – and that’s not such a bad thing.
After a brief presentation, I was given a phone with Pocket installed and played with it for about two hours. Much of the early parts are similar to many mobile games. This includes completing tutorials to better understand the menus, in-game currency, and the gameplay loop for both opening packs and battles. It can be daunting learning all these new menus and currencies, but it’s not too out of the norm regarding mobile or Gacha games. As you level up through various tasks, other parts of Pocket become available and you accrue more free goodies to get your card collection rolling.
First and foremost, the focus of PTCGP is indeed the card-collecting aspect. Keita Hirobe, who is the Executive Corporate Officer at The Pokemon Company, mentioned to me in a video call that one of the goals of this new digital card game is to have players “focus on the fun of opening packs and collecting cards” and eventually get to know the card game. A lot of the commitment to playing any physical card game is the cost of getting cards and the experience of playing matches often, which are large barriers of entry. So being able to just land on Pocket’s home page and see a big button to open up a free pack is an easy way to get into the Pokemon TCG world. From picking a booster to sliding your finger across the top to slice it open, all the feelings of opening a pack and seeing what you get are all there. If you come upon a very rare card in your pack, the music changes and the card does a little twirl showing off the digital card effects.
Currently, the first set consists of over 200 cards, and this particular set has three booster pack versions representing Pikachu, Mewtwo, and Charizard. The versions matter because certain cards will be unique to a specific booster pack version. For instance, if I choose to only open up the Pikachu booster pack, I have a chance at pulling the Pikachu immersive card, which brings the player into the card in a cool little cinematic tour of the card’s art. One of the coolest experiences of the event was seeing someone pull an immersive card and everyone crowding around to see the full card effect. It was very reminiscent of being a kid and everyone showing off their foil Pokemon cards to each other or when someone pulls a rare full art card in draft with friends.
That’s not the rarest card in the game though, as I quickly learned through Pocket’s pity system, Pack Points. For those that don’t know, a gacha game’s pity system allows players to guarantee a particular character or item if they have failed to pull it through normal means. If you gain enough Pack Points through opening packs in Pokemon TCG Pocket, you can use those points to create any card you want for your collection or maybe your deck. I found out that the highest rarity so far are crown rarity cards, which are gold full-art cards. These crown cards cost a whopping 2500 pack points, so players have to commit to saving if they want to guarantee one of those cards. Another interesting option for getting cards is the Wonder Pick. Players can get one card at random from a booster pack that was opened by another player. These players’ packs also rotate, so it’s yet another incentive to check into Pocket daily. After pulling any sweet-looking cards, Pocket has options to show them off in a binder or display board as part of your profile. The personalization options are very similar to Pokemon TCG Live like swapping out your coins, sleeves, and playmats, but there is a new option to add custom animation to the cards, similar to what Marvel Snap does. These custom animations, or flairs, can be made using Shinedust, a currency accrued by converting duplicate cards. Otherwise, getting new cards to fill out your card dex seems to be a wait-and-see approach.
When it comes to getting booster packs, you have various opportunities to do so, but the main free-to-play option is checking in for your free booster every 12 hours. Players can accumulate two free packs this way at most, so you have to open them up as often as you can. With that said, there is an in-game currency called Pack Hourglass that helps reduce the refresh time of your next booster pack, which can be attained through normal play. If you run out of these for any reason, Poke Gold or the real money currency covers the rest. In my demo, I could fake purchase Poke Gold, which I then used to rip open packs to see what I could get. Five hundred gold at $99.99 was the highest available option in the store so I spammed that a few times for the sake of seeing if I could pull a rare immersive card unique to Pocket. In addition to opening one pack at a time, you have the option to open ten in one go if you choose to hoard your pack hourglasses or use 60 Poke gold. For me, I ripped open about 50-80 packs before I ran into my first immersive card. It felt like I opened up fewer packs before I eventually got my second immersive card. Pocket does show the pull rates of cards, with some of the rarest having a 5% chance of being pulled. In the end, it’s a lot of luck, which is not a fun factor to base your primary gameplay loop on.
On the other hand, one feature that I finally got a chance to see more in-depth is the battle system for Pokemon TCG Pocket. Unlike the physical Pokemon TCG, Pocket has simplified the TCG rules to keep gameplay swift. It focuses on teaching you the basics of the Pokemon TCG without the complexity of some meta cards or routes of play. For instance, instead of six prize cards, the player who gets 3 points or defeats 3 points worth of Pokemon first wins. Another departure is that a deck is only 20 cards vs the normal 60-card deck, so decking out is not a losing condition here. There are also no energy cards to bloat the deck. Instead, energy is automatically generated giving players the chance to always add one energy to any of their Pokemon once a turn. If you plan to use multiple types of energy, the max is three types and energy is randomly generated in battle. Among those changes, the cards themselves have also been altered for this format. It’s not easy to one-shot Pokemon and even Poke Abilities and Trainer cards have reduced effects. For instance, a trainer can draw you two cards, but in the core physical game, you usually discard your hand and draw seven. All these changes can effectively shorten a normal game, but there’s still room for matches to go a little longer, with each player given 20 minutes to make moves in PvP. I honestly don’t see matches ever going to time, but I thought it was interesting that there was room for such lengthy games.
Being a fan of competitive card games both digitally and physically, I was excited to check this out. At a certain point, I do see folks who ultimately want to lean into the Pokemon TCG switch over to the Live digital game or play the physical card game. But that just leaves Pokemon TCG Pocket to mainly be a card-collecting destination, and maybe that’s all it needs to be. Pokemon Go already sees a similar collecting behavior with their players, so this is just a card version of that. So as someone who has recently revisited the Pokemon TCG meta, especially with the recent Worlds Championship, I’m looking forward to checking out more of Pocket later in the year.
