Pokemon TCG Pocket isn’t technically out yet, but players have already managed to break it. While we’re still a full month away from the global release on October 30, a soft launch in New Zealand has allowed Kiwis (and VPN users) to start ripping packs and building decks a few weeks early.
In just the first few days, players have discovered a potent combo using Articuno ex and Misty to effectively end the game on the first turn. Here’s how it works:
Congratulations, you’re now starting turn one with a fully powered Articuno ex that has 140hp and the ability Blizzard, which deals 80 damage to your opponent’s active Pokemon and 10 damage to each of the opponent’s benched Pokemon. You’ll be KO’ing your opponent’s Pokemon in one or two hits, and there’s almost no way to stop you.
This deck isn’t an automatic turn one win of course. You have to have Misty in your hand, for one thing. If you don’t, you have a few ways to help find her. A Poke Ball will draw your other Articuno and thin out your deck, then Professor’s Research will let you draw two more cards. A Pocket deck only has 20 cards, so you should be able to find one of your Mistys in the first couple of turns, which is quick enough to take control of the game.
The chance of flipping heads three times in a row is 12.5 percent.
You also need to get lucky on your coin flips. Three heads in a row will give Articuno full power, but even if you get one or two, that’s plenty of energy ramp to help you get its powerful Blizzard move online before your opponent can respond. This deck can brick if you don’t find a Misty in the first couple of turns, but more often than not it will allow you to lock down a win as soon as the game starts.
There’s a couple of specifics about the way Pocket works that make a deck like this possible. The slimmer deck and forced basic Pokemon make these kinds of combos incredibly reliable, but what makes energy ramp so powerful is the fact that Pocket doesn’t have energy cards. Every turn you automatically have access to one energy you can attach to any of your Pokemon, and if you have a card like Misty, you can attach an infinite amount of energy to a as long as you can continuously flip heads.
For these reasons there are a few other incredibly fast decks in Pocket, all built around heavy-hitting ex Pokemon of course. An Electric-type variant of this deck uses just Zapdos ex and Pikachu ex for a similarly explosive start. Then there’s the Mewtwo ex and Gardevoir deck, which allows you to replace two energy you have to discard from Mewtwo ex every time it uses its Psydrive move by activating Gardevoir’s Psy Shadow ability. In the normal Pokemon TCG you couldn’t rely on a strategy like this because you would eventually run out of energy, but the Energy Zone is infinite in Pocket.
I’ve seen some speculation about what the developers might need to do before the global launch to address this problem. In his video about the Articuno deck,YouTuber Jake “Spragels” Sprague suggests a couple of rule changes, like setting a minimum number of basic Pokemon required to build a deck, or delaying how early players are allowed to use Supporters. There might be ways to fix it, but I’m not convinced the devs even considered this a problem that needs to be addressed.
With as much hand-wringing as I’ve seen on Twitter from people who are nervous about the competitive viability of Pocket, I think it’s important to remember who this game is for, and what it’s designed to be. Pocket is a pack-opening simulator that’s targeting casual Pokemon fans and those who aren’t already engaged with the TCG, particularly in regions where the game isn’t very accessible or popular.
The real game here isn’t the trading card game, it’s building a collection. Managing timers, designing custom binders and displays for your cards, adding flare to your favorites, and building theme decks is the main draw of the game, while the TCG is really just there to give you a little something extra to do when you log in, or when you need to kill some time.
That’s not to say that Pocket’s battle mode is lazy or tacked on. It reimagines the classic card game in some interesting ways that help streamline, simplify, or increase the pace. But those changes are also creating some fundamental issues, and I can only assume the developers are well aware of that fact.
I haven’t gotten the impression, either from my time playing Pocket or frommy interview with the developers last month, that building a competitively viable battle mode is a high priority. There’s no ranked ladder, no progression built around battles, and nothing to be gained or lost from battling, other than the odd daily challenge here and there.
There are only two queues: a Beginner queue where you’re encouraged to slap together whatever cards you’ve unlocked and call it a deck, and Trading Card Game Player queue where people are just slamming ex Pokemon down and hoping they’ve got the right Trainer cards in their opening hand, and that their opponents don’t. To a competitive player that may sound terrible, but I feel like that’s the way this game is meant to be.
If I knew someone that was getting really into Pocket, someone that enjoyed building decks and was excited to play competitively, I’d encourage them to take their new found passion over to Pokemon TCG Live, or even just pick up the TCG itself. Live isn’t a perfect game. Believe me,I know. But it is the competitive Pokemon card game experience that it seems people want Pocket to be. Both games have collecting, both games have battling, but , ultimately, Pocket is built from the ground up to be a game about collecting. If you have strong feelings about the shape of Pocket’s meta, it’s probably not the Pokemon game you should be playing.
