The Pokémon Trading Card Game (PTCG) has been around just one year less than the video games it was based on, making it 27 years old this year. And while it generally hits the news when a classic card is sold for a ludicrous price, the actual competitive game it’s created for has never been more popular. This is something The Pokémon Company International (TPCi) is hoping to better take advantage of with a brand-new free-to-play mobile game, Pokémon TCG: Pocket—the Marvel Snapification of the brand. I went hands-on to see how it compares to both Snap and the existing Pokémon TCG Live.
Pocket takes the core PTCG game and strips it down, streamlining it as a concept to make a faster, more phone-friendly game. The live game, while not as complex as Magic: The Gathering, is surprisingly involved, and the ever-changing meta with new cards added every three months means even playing the digital version can be a tricky world to enter. Pocket is very clearly an attempt to sweep all that aside and create a mobile game that’s as instant and speedy as Marvel Snap, except infused with Pokémon magic.
The instant pull here, for Pokémon fans at least, is that Pocket gives every player two free packs of cards to open every day. Each pack, disappointingly, only contains five cards—real world packs have 10, and we’ll get into why this change is a bummer later on—but all have an equal chance of containing some of the rarest cards in the game. And those rarest cards can be something astonishing, putting Snap’s excellent 3D effects to shame. Pocket has, if you’re exceptionally lucky, so-called “Immersive Cards” that, when tapped, turn into gorgeous animations, where the camera swoops into the full-art picture, revealing entire realms, filled with Pokémon in their element, before eventually pulling back out to the original piece of art. It’s actual magic.
The game itself is a lot more different to the mainline version than I was expecting. First of all, while a TPCG game is played with a deck of 60 cards, Pocket has decks of only 20. Energy, a vital part of any 60-card deck that’s used to power a Pokémon’s attacks, isn’t played as a card at all, but is rather a resource given out each turn. There are no Prize Cards—the six cards in a live game that must usually be won by a player in order to win the game—but instead victories are based on scoring three “K.O. points,” earned by knocking out an opponent’s cards. Oh, and there are no damage dice. (Trainer cards are still a part of the game, but during my demo they really didn’t come up, so it’s hard to say exactly how they’ll work at this point.) That’s a lot of change!
However, what’s important to recognize about Pocket is that it’s not an attempt to recreate the live game digitally—that’s what Pokémon TCG Live is (meant to be) for. This is something new, something else, and accordingly it is far more removed from the rest of the TCG.
Let’s take a tangent to Pokémon TCG Live. It’s awful. The previous Pokémon TCG Online, made offline in 2022, was crumbling, decade-old tech, but as a way to play the TCG in the digital realm, it did the job. Both games are played using packs opened by scanning the Code Cards found in every real-world Pokémon TCG pack, box, tin, etc. Scan the code, and you get a digital equivalent to open, and then can build collections and decks, and take part in online battles against other people. But when Live replaced it, it also slashed the number of cards you got from every code card you scanned from 10 to five, deleted swathes of cards if you had more than four of any, and entirely removed the “T” from the title entirely—there is no longer any way to trade in the digital trading card game. It was such a crashing dud that it put me off playing online at all.
Pocket therefore gains a lot more appeal, and exists with no overlap at all. Sets of packs created for Pocket are completely unique—with the 200-card launch set given the astoundingly terrible name of Genetic Apex—featuring a mix of classic art going back as far as the 1990s, as well as lots of original artworks. There are no real-world code cards, and no real-world versions of the original art. (During my hands-on, another journalist asked if there were plans to release any of the game’s art in a future physical set, and the PR began some obfuscatory waffle. I leaned over and said, “Of course they are.” Of course they are.)
We were given a rather unrealistic number of digital packs to open, and during this time I was exceptionally lucky (genuinely—while they were supplying us far more to open than would be possible for free in the real game, the packs themselves were the real ones with the real odds that any player would have), pulling some stunning full-art by both known and new PTCG artists. Cards so beautiful that it kind of hurt that they were stuck on a mobile phone screen, and not something you could hold and store in a binder.
Although, saying that, Pocket has a metric ton more sense when it comes to things like this than Live, with lovely digital binders you can store cards in, and ways to display and share your collection. And talking of sharing, it also features the Wonder Pick—a daily way to try to get lucky and pull a specific card you want from a pack opened by someone else. They don’t lose anything, but you have a chance to gain.
OK, the battles themselves. You need a 20-card deck to play, but the game’s opening sequences and tutorial will guide you toward that. There are also so-called “Rental Decks” that can be “borrowed” and used to play, but not added to your collection.
Like the live game, you begin each game by drawing cards and placing a Pokémon in the Active Spot, and up to three others on your Bench. You then use attacks by matching Energy to cards (here, an Energy Zone generates you an Energy each turn, and shows you which type will be generated next turn), and chipping away at your opponent’s health. You can then evolve your cards as normal, switch cards in and out from the Active Spot, and play Trainers to gain advantages. All of the effects are, in a sense, nerfed from the live game, to make these smaller-scale battles more tactical. It’s far less likely you’ll one-shot an opponent with reduced attack powers, and Trainers will give you the ability to pull a couple of cards from your deck, rather than the fives and sevens possible on a table top.
It works. It’s zippy, less involved, but has enough going on to let tactics be relevant. And, importantly, it plays nothing like Marvel Snap, which is where it could really have come unstuck, not least after “borrowing” the idea for 3D holographic cards and so on. It plays like a diluted version of the TCG, and feels very much a part of that realm.
This all adds up to a simpler game, but not a simple one, that’ll be neat for quick bursts on your phone, whether against the game’s AI or other real-world players. It’s nothing mind-blowing, but it also doesn’t need to be. It just needs to be fun. And this is, after all, an app that’s putting pack opening and card collecting at its forefront.
Which, yes, does also point us toward the dark cloud that’s hanging over this otherwise jolly time. Two free packs a day, one released every 12 hours! Ways to get an extra card with a Wonder Pick! But you need at the very least 20 cards to play at all, and many times more than that to build a solid deck. Oh, and those collections! 200 or more cards to collect in the very first set! Gotta catch ‘em all! And yeah, this is unavoidably a gacha game, isn’t it?
Because, of course, there are ways to spend real money here. The in-game currency is Poké Gold, and it has the magical ability to hurry along access to your next free pack, 1 Gold reducing the wait time by two hours. 5 Gold will cost 99c, and I can only assume a wealth of new ways to use that Gold will be revealed by the time the game is out on Halloween. There’s also the option to spend $9.99 a month on a Premium Pass, which grants you an additional booster pack a day, alongside access to “premium missions,” so essentially a battle pass, with rewards for completing these goals—things like unique promo cards and in-game decorations like playmats, sleeves and coins.
There are also an array of cosmetics you’ll be able to acquire, and then apply to cards to make them your own. These amount to special foil effects and sparkly decor that will show up in play, which is a great idea, but—and again, I’m assuming here—also another way to spend money.
And of course, this is a “free” app, and it’s a business, and it’s looking to make money. But it’s also Pokémon, and as much as we adults would like to pretend, it’s a franchise primarily aimed at and marketed toward children. And gacha plus kids makes me uncomfortable. One of the real joys about Pokémon TCG Live is that there’s genuinely no way to spend money within it. Sure, code cards cost money, but you can also buy nine-hundred-trillion of them for cents if you look in the right places, and the code cards come as an extra with the actual physical (gacha) cards you paid for. It’s an app you can set your kids free on, and never worry about them either stealing your credit card, or nagging you to dig it out yourself. With yet another monthly $10 outlay to beg for on Pocket, you can add it to the teetering pile of VBux, Robux, Minecraft subscriptions, and so many more that you might already be on the hook for.
I dearly wish Pocket could have been built around the same money-free basis as previous digital versions of the TCG, but also recognize how unlikely that would be. As someone who is deeply into the card game and collecting it, I know I’ll be playing this more for the collections than the battles, but I’ll certainly be playing it. It could be huge. I just might be not be telling my son about it.
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