Pokemon TCG Pocket Brings the Joy of Opening Pokemon Cards to Your Phone
Restart went hands-on with Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket at an event in New York City.
Posted a month ago
As long as trading cards have existed – from the bubble-gum baseball cards of the '60s and '70s to the multiple card games on the market today – they've triggered this hard-to-describe sensation that comes with opening up a booster pack. Removing the packaging, seeing your new cards for the first time, and finding that one incredibly rare card is a hit of dopamine to the brain that's hard to replicate – though games have tried with things like loot boxes.
The Pokemon Company is well aware of this feeling thanks to its ultra-successful Pokemon Trading Card Game (TCG), but now the company is trying to harness that rush through Pokemon TCG Pocket, a new mobile game that centers around opening packs, building a collection, and then turning that collection into decks for battling other players. We had some demo time with Pokemon TCG Pocket at a recent event in New York City, and while there's more to this than simply being Dopamine Rush: The Game, that certainly seems to be the focus.
Crack a pack
The core feature of Pokemon TCG Pocket is opening packs of cards from a set specifically curated for this new app. While the artwork, attacks, and other components have featured in real-world Pokemon cards before, both the sets and the cards within the game have been uniquely designed for this new mobile experience.
©The Pokemon Company
For example, we may open a five-card pack and see a Pikachu card with the original "fat Pikachu" art from 1999, along with a Slowbro with the art from the Fossil set two releases later. In this app's world, however, those cards might have different abilities than their real-world counterparts that fit better into this game's battle system. One card could give you the nostalgia pop and the intrigue of learning new strategies at the same time, which is impressive.
Every card in the game looks like we could take it out from our screens and slap it on a real table, with a depth and substance to the images that look really cool on our screens. Holographic cards – more specifically EX or alternate art cards – produce a 3D effect of sorts with the Pokemon bursting out from the card's face while the light shimmer all around it. TCG Pocket really nails what makes these cards so unique and so sought after; these are some beautiful pieces of digital cardboard.
The showcase cards for TCG Pocket are the Immersive Art cards, which are special cards that, when tapped on, transport the player into the card's artwork, taking them on a journey through a brief snapshot of the Pokemon universe. The Immersive Pikachu card, for instance, changes the scene to a lush forest with Butterfree flying about and another little Pikachu sleeping in the foreground.
Only two Immersive cards were found during our playthrough – the aforementioned Pikachu and a Mewtwo card that zoomed through the laboratory the psychic Pokemon escaped from. Both are amazing to behold, as the scene twists and turns with surprises at every moment. These cards also serve as a terrific flex during a battle; you can activate the scene change when the card is played, sending both of you into the card for a bit.
Time to d-d-d-d-duel!
After filling our collection with a wide assortment of Pokemon, it's time to build a deck. Unlike the real-world version and its 60-card minimum, decks in Pokemon TCG Pocket only require 20 cards each. You can choose between a single color or a color pair for your deck's theme, and then either auto-generate a deck or choose each individual card yourself, before naming and saving the deck to your device.
©The Pokemon Company
While 20 cards in a deck sounds very tiny, there's a major rule change that accounts for the lessened deck size: Energy does not require specific cards in this game; instead, one energy is earned per turn to be used wherever you see fit, with an indicator letting you know which color energy is coming next. Without the need for energy cards, decks can focus on loading up with Pokemon and Trainer cards as needed.
This also means battling becomes much different, as games are now far shorter here than they are in real life. Each time a Pokemon is knocked out, the attacker earns a point (or two points if it was an EX Pokemon), and the first to three points wins. Benches can only hold up to three Pokemon at a time as well, which puts some limits on how many Pokemon you can deploy in a turn. After that, it's the usual card game loop: Draw a card, put an energy on, play any Trainer cards, and then pass the turn.
This new system is not without flaws that need to be ironed out, as we encountered a few decisions that don't exactly pan out as the developers are intending. First and foremost, whichever player goes first does not earn an Energy point on that first turn. Instead, all they can do is play Supporter or creature cards before passing the turn. This decision was made in the hopes of balancing the experience, but all it does is punish the player who goes first – and often results in a game loss for that first player.
The other prime issue comes with those who wish to play multi-colored decks; the energy you're given at the start of each turn is randomly decided, so you might wind up locked out of a certain color's energy through no fault of your own. We played one match with a Fire/Grass deck where all of our creatures were Fire-type, but the first eight Energy generated were Grass-type. It's impossible to win that way, and we took the loss in the end.
That being said, the new battle system's fast pace and simple ruleset makes for a neat little side offering. At its core, it's not much different than the full Pokemon TCG Live experience connected to the cards, but TCG Pocket makes a great stepping stone to that style for players who may not have dabbled in the TCG before. Building decks and working on different strategies is always a good time, too.
Poke-Golden opportunity
Pokemon TCG Pocket is a mobile game, of course, and with that comes microtransactions. The main currency, Poke Gold, is used to either buy more than the two free packs per day you'll earn, or to lessen the time between opening packs once you run out of packs to open.
©The Pokemon Company
Along with opening packs, there's also a Wonder Pick option, which lets you randomly select a card from a pack opened by someone on your friends list to claim for yourself. This doesn't take the card away from the friend, however; it just gives you a new avenue for card collection. Poke Gold can also reduce the time between Wonder Picks, which hammers home the focus on microtransactions.
We cheekily mentioned dopamine earlier, but this game sometimes feels like it was made to be a dopamine assembly line. We could, feasibly, log in for the first time in a day, open our two free packs for that dopamine rush, then do our Wonder Pick for another dose, and then buy Poke Gold to get the rush from that to repeat the process over again. While it's fun to do those things, it can become a dangerous loop in a hurry, and one that we suspect will overtake some people soon after launch.
Pokemon TCG Pocket is indeed fun; opening packs, building decks, and battling is the essence of what the Pokemon TCG as a whole is supposed to be. However, the less savory aspects of free-to-play games on mobile lurk under the surface here, and the loop is enticing and easy enough that someone with money to burn could become one of this game's Wailords very quickly. If you can resist the temptation and stick to opening what you can for free and building decks from there, there's a lot to like within Pokemon TCG Pocket. One trip into an immersive card, and you'll see what we mean.
Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket launches October 30 for iOS and Android devices.
