Published , by Will Borger
Published , by Will Borger
I have a near-mint first edition Charizard card from the original run of the Pokémon Trading Card Game. I traded for it, about 20 years ago, back when Pokémon was new and I was young and nobody’d even considered that grown adults with too much money would livestream themselves opening booster packs for a game designed to be played by children to make money. Times change. I know exactly where that Charizard is. Sometimes I think about selling it and buying a house. But I remember the day I traded for it. I remember who I traded for it. And I am reminded of a time when the Pokémon trading card game was more about having fun with your friends than it was about pulling the right card on Twitch, scalping booster packs, or getting something graded so you could sell it for money. I miss those days. I miss that feeling.
Last week, in a hotel in New York City, I got to go hands-on with Pokémon Trading Game Pocket, and I found that feeling again. Also, I beat the tar out of a few friends in one one-on-one battles. It was a good time. Developed by DeNA, Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket is all about opening packs. You can open at least two a day for free, and you get one every twelve hours. Each pack contains five cards, and the entire first set contains more than 200 cards, so there’s plenty to collect. The first set will have three different booster packs — one featuring Pikachu (natch), Mewtwo, and Charizard — and each will have cards exclusive to that pack.
But you don’t just build your collection by opening packs. There’s also Wonder Pick, which lets you pick a random card from a pack that was opened by another player. Sometimes you get something great. I got a rare Pikachu once! Other times, you get a Sandshrew. Some days you’re the bug, some days you’re the windshield, but it’s fun regardless.
Of course, Creatures Inc., The Pokémon Company, and DeNA aren’t doing all of this out of the goodness of their hearts. There’s shareholders to appease and capitalism to do, so there are, naturally, microtransactions. You can buy the ability to open packs faster, and there are also currencies you don’t have to spend money on, and it’s all kind of confusing in text, but it makes sense and is easy to understand in context, so, for your sake and mine, I am not going to spend time explaining all of it. The point, then, is you can spend money or not, and while I did spend a lot of (free) premium currency to get a lot of cards really fast because I was on a time limit, I wasn’t doing too badly before I did. So you can spend money, but you don’t need to open your wallet to have fun.
Pocket gets that a lot of the joy of Pokémon cards, just like the core games, is collecting them all and making them yours. Naturally, you can use the Card Dex to see what cards you’re missing, put together custom binders of your favorite cards, and place them on backgrounds to put your rarest, most stylish stuff on display. Naturally, you can share this stuff with other players, but it doesn’t stop there. You can get card sleeves, playmats, coins to show off your style, and repeat cards can be turned into Shinedust, which can then be spent to gussy up your cards with custom animations and the like.
When I spoke to the developers, they told me that one of the major focuses was to allow people to show off their cards, which makes sense. As anyone who has spent time with a card game knows, it's not just about having the rarest, shiniest card or winning when you’re throwing down on the playmat. It’s also about the tactile feel of holding the cards in your hands, seeing the way the light hits them, and exploring the little details. Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket is a digital game, so it can’t quite translate all of that, but it’s trying, and for my money, it comes pretty close. That’s quite the achievement.
And then, of course, there are the cards themselves. Some are references to cards you’ll see in the physical game, while others are completely unique to Pocket. Every card has depth to it, and many of them combine cool designs with fancy holographic patterns or full card art. I could go on, but you get the idea: these cards look good. The real showstoppers, though, are the immersive cards which are… well, they're pretty sick. Immersive cards take you inside the world of the card; you ever wondered what other Pokémon might be chilling in that forest behind your Pikachu or what the rest of that area looks like just outside of the frame? Immersive cards will take you on a tour and show you. It’s very, very cool.
But it’s not all cool cards. Naturally, you can play the actual game, too, if you want. Things have changed a bit, though. Decks are twenty cards as opposed to sixty, and Energy is auto-generated each turn, though you’ll have to specify what kind(s) you want when you’re building the deck, and if you choose more than one, the type of energy you’ll get is random. The Bench can hold up to three Pokémon, and there are no damage dice and no Prize Cards; instead, you’ll gain one victory point for KOing regular cards and two for KOing EX Pokémon. First to three points wins the whole enchilada. There are Deck Missions and play against the computer if you’re looking for something a little more low-key and Rental Decks you can use. For me, though, the joy comes from building your own and squaring off against real people, though there is a deck-building function to help you assemble something if you don’t wanna do all the work yourself.
All of these changes, the developers told me, were in service of a couple of things: they were aware that, for many people, Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket would be their first experience with Pokémon cards, so they wanted it to be easy to pick up and play. Secondly, they don’t want matches to be too long. The Pocket in the title isn’t there for show; these matches are travel-sized for your convenience. But that doesn’t mean there’s no depth, and I had to play around with strategy — and bet the farm on some coin flips — to pull out close matches. That’s what you want.
Of course, the game will change over time. There won’t be trading or ranked play at launch, though the development team is thinking about how to do both; initially, it’s going to be about building up your collection and playing with your friends. Maybe that’s how it should be. I had fun playing Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket, whether I was opening packs and showing off my cards, spinning the Wonder Pick roulette wheel, or battling friends, and I can see it becoming a short but welcome and regular part of my day when it releases. Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket brought me back to playing the real game on the floor of a friend’s living room as a kid. It made me want to pop open one of my old binders and see those old cards again. Especially that Charizard. And no, it’s still not for sale.
This preview was based on a pre-release version of the game provided by the publisher.