I’ve heard a lot aboutPokemon TCG Pocketsince it was announced back in February, but until I actually got my hands on it, I really didn’t understand what it was.The marketing has been focused entirely on the pack opening experience, and even when the game was demoed at the Pokemon World Championship last month, that was the only feature being shown. And yet, Pokemon TCG Pocketismore than a pack-opening simulator.
There’s a slimmed-down version of the classic Pokemon TCG game in there you’re able to grind to your heart’s content. But Pocket is first and foremost for the collectors. In a world filled with competitive TCG video games, the premise of a game built around collecting cards is exciting. But as someone who has invested an unspeakable amount of money into shiny cardboard, it’s also terrifying.
There’s a lot more going on in Pocket than you might expect, but at its core, it’s all about busting open packs. I love ripping packs, I’ve been doing it since I was in third grade and it’s never gotten old, though I have. Tearing the crinkly plastic, slowly revealing each card one by one - first the commons, then the uncommons, the reverse-holo foil, and finally the rare. It’s a deeply ingrained ritual that TCG fans all take part in regardless of the game, and Pocket demonstrates a lot of respect for the relationship between a collector and a pack of cards.
Opening Digital Packs In A Physical Way
Everything Pocket does is meant to replicate the real experience of buying and opening a pack of Pokemon cards. Before you open a pack, you get to select one from a virtual carousel. All of the packs are different, so I’m told, and loaded with cards before you make your pick. Before you open it you can flip the pack around and open them face down, back to front, if that’s how you do it IRL.
Then you swipe across the top and the stack of cards fly out into your open hand. You can even tilt the stack to the side to get a peak at the edge and see if there’s something shiny hidden in there. It’s a very tactile experience designed to be very different from any other digital TCG game.
There’s no code card or energy card to throw out and you can’t do the card trick, which feels like an oversight. I’d like to have the option to move a common or two from the back to the front before I look at the cards inside.
Unlike TCG Live, which aims to recreate the tabletop experience wholesale, Pocket offers its own expansions designed for it. There are five cards in each pack and roughly 200 cards in the initial set, Genetic Apex, which features a mix of classic cards, modern illustration rares, and reimagined versions of some of the most famous Pokemon cards.
Old Cards Recreated In New Ways
One of my favorites is a full art version of Slowpoke from the 1999 Fossil expansion. It’s still standing alone in a field wearing a dopey grin, but the field is even bigger than we first imagined. Expanding our point of view feels like a good representation of what Pocket is trying to do, particularly when it comes to the immersive art chase cards.
Pocket has its own rarity system that’s totally separate from the regular card game, and among the rarest are the Pikachu and Mewtwo immersive art cards. When you pull one of these cards from a pack (you’ll find each one only in their corresponding pack type) you’ll be pulled into the frame to explore the scene the Pokemon is set in. I’ve seen all three immersive art cards in person and they’re stunning, and so much fun to find inside a pack.
When you’re done opening the pack, your cards are added to your Pokedex-style collection, and as your collection grows you’ll get updates on the number of unique cards and the total number of cards you’ve collected, along with some fun Pokemon facts related to those numbers.
Free-To-Start, Expensive To Grind
It’s fun to watch your collection slowly grow over time - and I do mean slowly. You’re given two packs for free every day, twelve hours apart. For a $10 monthly subscription you may open one additional pack per day. Beyond that (and after the initial flood of packs you get to open as a brand new player) you’ll need to buy your packs one at a time.
Or rather, because it’s a mobile game that needs to add layers of complexity to obfuscate how much you’re actually spending, you’ll need to buy items you may exchange to speed up the timer that counts down until your next free pack. You can get five of these items for $1, but you need six of them to speed up the timer one full cycle. I think you know where this is going.
There are actuallytwotimers in the game. The second one is for the Wonder Pick, a system based on the video games’ Wonder Trade mechanic, that lets you browse through packs other people have opened, choose one, then randomly select the cards to add to your own collection. You get to do this twice a day as well and it can be a fun way to snag some chase cards, while also creating a social experience with your friends. During the demo a fellow journalist pulled a full art Eevee that I really liked, and a little while later I saw their pack in the Wonder Pick menu and managed to snag the Eevee for myself.
To accelerate the timer on the Wonder Pick menu, you’ll use a separate type of in-game currency that you can buy with real money.
Pocket is incredibly feature-rich and impressively polished. There are tons of cosmetics to unlock (and buy) that let you organize your cards into custom binders and create display cases to display your digital cards. As you collect specific groups of cards you’ll unlock theme decks with their own deck boxes. You can get playmats, coins, pretty much everything that would be part of a real-life collection. You can play Pokemon TCG in Pocket too, but building your collection is therealgame.
Trading is not available in-game yet, but it’s coming soon.
Also, You Can Play The Pokemon TCG
Pocket’s version of the card game is simplified. You’re only allowed two copies of any card, and you can only have three Pokemon on your bench. Instead of playing for Prize cards, you’re playing for points. First to three points wins, with regular Pokemon KOs rewarding one point and ex Pokemon rewarding two. You don’t have energy in your deck, but rather you can attach one energy to a Pokemon per turn for free. If your deck has more than one type of Pokemon (up to a maximum of three) the energy you can attach each turn will be randomized - though you can see which energy you’ll have access to the following turn.
The cards are close to Base Set power level, with the ex-Pokemon adding a bit more oomph. It has nowhere near the strategic depth of the regular TCG, but it’s not meant to. The point is to pop in for a few games every day to complete missions, earn experience, and work your way towards opening more packs.
I’m impressed by how much Pocket has to offer. Even though trading is still in the works, it’s great that the game is launching with so many social features like the Wonder Pick and the ability to play against your friends. I can definitely see myself checking in two or three times a day to open packs, play a few games, and knock out some challenges, just like how I play Marvel Snap today.
I’ve played enough of these free-to-start mobile games that I know better than to get sucked in, though. Pocket has all the trappings of a mobile game: timers, intentionally obfuscated overlapping currencies, multiple layers of RNG, and the ability to spend as much money as you want as often as you want. This is just the way games are these days and I get it, but I still don’t like it.
The monetization is a shame, because I love the experience Pokemon TCG Pocket offers. A game that caters to collectors is long overdue, and it’s something I expect will bring the experience of collecting cards to a lot more people in a lot more places. I’m interested in seeing the cadence of new set releases and how trading will work, and I can see myself dedicatedly opening my daily packs to find my chase cards and slowly improving my mono-type pet decks.
It’s the kind of game you don’t reallygetuntil you try it yourself, but, having tried it myself, this feels like the next big thing for the Pokemon TCG.
