At this very moment, I’ve been playing the Pokémon: Trading Card Game Pocket app multiple times a day for a full month. It’s been a surprising pleasure, something I didn’t really expect to enjoy because, to date, I have completed exactly three Pokémon games in my life: Pokémon Yellow, Pokémon Snap, and Pokémon Ranger. For whatever reason, those are the only ones I liked.
Most of it has to do with timing, probably. I was on the upper-end of the Pokémon age group when it showed up originally, and so many of the younger kids in school talked about Pokémon so much it was easy to get sick of hearing about it. Once there were more than 151 creatures to keep track of, I just couldn’t bring myself to care. That all being said, I enjoyed playing the card game with my friends.
Binders, Plastic Sleeves, & 500 Pokémon Energy Cards
That was more than twenty years ago, which is often cited – and heavily debated – as the amount of time it takes for nostalgia to set in. I’ve been through the full cycle, from liking Pokémon to aging out of it, to actively ignoring and disliking it, to finally having the blissful ignorance of middle-age, which clearly meant I just never was going to “get it” any more.
I tried the New Pokémon Snap but it wasn’t the same. That was fine, too, because I have kids now, and two of them were old enough to enjoy it. They have a stuffed Pikachu and a stuffed Eevee. The franchise is for them now, it’s not for me. Sometimes I wondered if Pokémon ever actually was for me at all, or if I just liked playing cards with my friends and all that other stuff was only tangential.
It’s not like the Pokémon Trading Card Game was perfect. We had to carry around giant 3-ring binders filled with card sleeves to play at each other’s houses – two of them usually, one for Pokémon themselves and one for Energy cards. So many Energy cards. More than anything else, I think I am enjoying playing Pokémon TCG Pocket so much right now because I don’t have to think about Energy cards, they just appear.
Pokémon TCG Pocket Is My Favorite Mobile Game (Right Now)
I was able to keep myself from installing the mobile version of 2024’s Game of the Year Balatro onto my phone, but I heard good things about TCG Pocket and I was intrigued. Nearly all the Pokémon I saw were ones I recognized, and I wanted to see if I remembered how to play correctly. I honestly don’t know if I did remember or not, because some things feel different, but that could just be the translation to mobile.
The fact that almost (maybe all? I’m no expert) of the Kanto Pokémon are included do a lot to target TCG Pocket to me, specifically. As previously mentioned, Yellow was the only “real” Pokémon game I completed, and I still remember my winning team that took down the Elite Four: Articuno, Zapdos, Moltres, Nidoqueen, Gyarados, and, of course, Pikachu. For my first week with TCG Pocket, all I wanted was to get all six of those cards.
By the time I actually did get all six of those Pokémon cards in TCG Pocket, I knew enough not to put them all in the same deck. I also knew that, somehow, against all probability, I was really invested in a Pokémon game again. I did the free two-week premium subscription to see whether that was worth it, and the answer was “Kind of, but not really,” so I cancelled it. However, I have no plans to stop playing any time soon.
Pokémon TCG Pocket Drop Rates
I feel like, unlike most games of this type that I’ve dabbled in over the years, the drop rates in Pokémon TCG Pocket are pretty fair. I got some really good cards early on and continue to find neat ones here and there, but what really pushes it over the edge is TCG Pocket’s “Pack Point” system. This helps everything feel extremely manageable.
Basically, any time you open a booster pack filled with cards you get 5 Pack Points. Single Pokémon cards can be purchased using the Pack Points at increments of 35, 75, 150, 500, and onward, depending on the card’s rarity. This means that if you are looking for something specific you have two options – hope you get a random drop, or just save up points and “buy” it. I never got the Ditto I wanted, so eventually I purchased one using Pack Points and that felt just as satisfying.
Yes, the rarest cards in Pokémon TCG Pocket do have very low drop rates. That’s what rare means. But I’ve got more EX cards than I know what to do with as it is, so they must be doing something right, even if I have yet to come across a Mew in the wild. I’ve been tempted to spend actual money, but never more than for a brief moment, and when I finally do the company will have probably absolutely earned it through hours played.
The Best Decks in Pokémon TCG Pocket
Even I, a relative Pokémon TCG novice these days, have been able to notice the meta rising up around this game. Lapras EX decks were popular when I started playing, but seem to have faded into the background by now. I’m sure everyone has their own opinions on what the best decks in Pokémon TCG Pocket are (a whole lot of ya’ll sure like using Mewtwo EX and Gardevoir, huh?) but I’ve got my own favorites.
My first favorite deck is my “Adam Sandler” deck. Blastoise EX, Starmie EX, Articuno EX, couple of Mistys, a Poliwrath… you know, the Waterboys. My second favorite deck is called “La Blanco” and it’s all normal Pokémon, headed up by the always-loveable Ditto and a stunning-looking Pidgeot. I’m also quite a fan of my FyreFest deck, with TWO Charizard EX cards, Ninetails, Flareon, Magmar, the Blaine twins, and double Sabrinas just for funsies. Also my Wigglytuff EX & Drowzee-headed sleep deck named “The Itis.”
There are also decks I hate facing, so those are likely some of the best decks in Pokémon TCG Pocket too. Articuno EX with double Greninjas as backup is EVERYWHERE right now, and I’m tired of seeing it – I blame the Pokémon Promo Card drops from the Venusaur EX event for this. Pikachu EX with a bunch of buffs can be pretty irritating (especially for my Adam Sandler deck) and I had even one person absolutely demolish me using a Strength deck headed by Machamp, which has been surprisingly rare – all the better for La Blanco.
Pokémon TGC Updates The Card Game In Weird Ways
Now I want to get into my problems with Pokémon TCG Pocket. It’s weird that I prefer to start playing second instead of first. Players who go first seem to be in a harder position, with the players who go second getting a free Energy before the other player does. This feels backwards.
Some Pokémon TCG cards feel wildly overpowered compared to others. Is there a point to having a Rattata/Raticate in your deck? Ever? Meanwhile, I feel like I want to slip in a cheeky Ditto or Farfetch’d in every deck, just on the off chance of catching an early KO with little effort. If I see a Pokémon TCG Pocket Fire deck that starts with Moltres EX and has two Charmanders on the bench, sometimes I feel like I might as well concede.
I wish battling came with extra rewards besides just the same amount of XP every time. There should be randomized rewards that are similar to the ones in Pokémon TCG Pocket’s Lapras EX and Venusaur EX events, where winning a battle without letting the opponent get a single point or using all rare Pokémon results in some other type of ancillary bonus. This would make battling random people far more enjoyable.
How Long Will Pokémon TCG Pocket Be Fun?
This is the question I keep coming back to. So many mobile games try to be “forever” games that keep you logging in day after day, week after week, for months on end. Some games become “forever” games organically, through just being fun and digging a hole into your brain. (Again, Balatro.) Many, many more games are designed, from the ground up, to be forever games. Pokémon TCG Pocket clearly is the latter. Pokémon Go tried it, too.
TCG Pocket has a lot of ticks in the “will be around for a long time” column. There’s only like 200-and-something Pokémon cards available at the time of writing, when last I checked the series was somewhere near the 900 creature mark (which is, let’s be clear, absolutely unnecessary). That’s a lot of future cards to add, a lot of balancing to do, a lot of booster packs filled with stuff I already have and maybe one new one and HOW DOES THIS CONTAIN TWO ZUBATS I SWEAR TO FU-[Editor’s Note: Please refrain from using profanity in future columns.]
The better question is, how long will I remain hooked on it? That’s hard to say. I’ve already got almost all the cards I want, and none of the upcoming ones will mean as much to me as the original 151 Kanto Pokémon. It depends on whether or not the next Pokémon TCG Pocket update will be the one that adds trading, whether or not I can convince more of my friends to play it, and whether or not the monetization gets more predatorial than it already is.
The Biggest Problem With Pokémon TCG Pocket
I sure wish this was a game I could just spend $20 (even $40, honestly, with the hours I’ve put into it) and have access to everything. I’m not saying “Give me everything at once.” I want to earn it. I want to open booster packs. I want to buy cards. I want to build decks slowly. But I don’t want to have the option to pay real money to do so.
It’s different when the cards are physical. You have a real, tangible thing to hold in your hands. Paying money for time-saving elements like Poké Gold is the absolute worst kind of monetization. Players who don’t want to build their decks slowly can just pay $99.99 and have enough gold to (maybe, hopefully) buy enough cards to build the exact deck they want. That’s different than the Premium Pass, of course, which costs $9.99 a month, but, hey, you can open one more booster pack a day, and have access to special missions and better coins, playmats, and card sleeves.
I thought those people who had the cool Mewtwo cards had just gotten them in a monthly drop before I ever downloaded the game. Turns out you can just get those by buying the Premium Pass. Same with the fancy Gardevoir coins and sleeves, those are just bonuses in a Poké Gold purchase. I hate all of this. Just make these unlockable and let me pay one single price for a product, please.
On The “Just Ignore It” Stuff
I can. I do. But it’s annoying. And it actively makes the game worse. And it keeps people with addiction issues, and people with problems handling FOMO, and just poor people in general, from having as good of a time as other people could have with the game. And that’s an irritating roadblock to intentionally set up for your audience to move around. It’s understandable in the same way that charging every disabled person a 15% surcharge is.
Pokémon Yellow. Pokémon Snap. Pokémon Ranger. I played these games as much as I possibly could, wrung every bit of enjoyment possible out of them, and remember the experience fondly. I loved beating the Elite Four in Yellow. I found every secret Pokémon in Snap. I liked doing the little circles with the stylus in Ranger so much I did them until I could do little circles no more. I dearly, dearly wish I could finish Pokémon TCG Pocket and add it to my list. I wish this was a “full game,” even though it very clearly is. What I mean is, I wish I could “beat” it.
That’s just not possible in an app translation of a trading card game built off the template from a Game Boy game from 1996. It’s persistent, it’s always around, it always has something new. It’s Pokémon, again, and now I don’t have to carry around a 3-ring binder full of Energy cards to the same four people’s houses. I just have a phone, all the Energy I can ask for, and a button constantly in the corner of my eye asking if I want to pay money to make things a little bit easier. After playing the app for a month straight, I wasn’t expecting to prefer the binder.
THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED MEDIA:
- As some readers may be aware, I spent the first decade and a half of my professional life as a cook, chef, BOH manager, and every other position you can think of in between. These days I tend to avoid kitchens but still enjoy good food-related stories and television, and one of the best channels I’ve discovered in the past year is Alexander The Guest. In the most recent episode linked below, Alexander visits one of his viewer’s restaurants after being invited there and has an absolutely lovely experience. For anyone who enjoys cooking and/or travel media, this is worth a watch:
- I’ve suddenly realized we’ve never done a music recommendation in this section, which feels extremely out-of-character for me. From now on, this section of the column will always contain one song recommendation. To start it off, for no particular reason at all, let’s go with this:
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