Gaming Squad

Pokémon TCG Pocket arrived this week on iPhone and Android, and it’s a surprisingly crisp and streamlined version of the card game after years of really bad alternatives. Pokémon is pretty much a license to print money, but TCG Pocket does a great job of spotlighting what people love about about the game—the cards themselves—and getting most of the other stuff out of the way. Still, as a big fan of Marvel Snap, there are a few things I wish the mobile game would steal from Second Dinner’s 2022 comic book phenomenon.

I’ve been spending most of my idle smartphone moments the past two days playing Pokémon TCG Pocket instead of doom scrolling Twitter or ingesting AI-slop on Instagram, which is exactly what I want from a good, daily grind mobile game. All of the currencies and sub-economies aimed at getting you to spend money on the otherwise free-to-play game are a bit convoluted and hard to parse, but the battles are fun and opening virtual booster packs by slicing wrappers with a finger swipe is a surprisingly effective simulacrum of the pure joys of doing so in real life.

I’m not yet as obsessed with Pokémon TCG Pocket as I was with Marvel Snap, however, and I think there are three reasons for that. The first is match length. Marvel Snap battles breeze by, making it feel relatively low-stakes to start up another no matter what’s going on around you. TCG Pocket is a bit more involved. Players have a cumulative timer of 20 minutes, with countdowns starting at over 60 seconds for individual turns. The clock rarely gets milked, but matches can still feel a little drawn out as players stack their benches and build up their Pokémon’s power. More than once I’ve finished a match and thought, “That was neat but do I really have time for another.”

The second thing holding Pokémon TCG Pocket back a little for me are the match rewards. In addition to bite-sized matches, Marvel Snap has an ingenious progression built around acquiring extra cards to level them up and earn points that can be spent on acquiring new ones. It’s a clever twist on the traditional booster pack RNG formula. TCG Pocket, as an adaptation of an existing card game, doesn’t have that same luxury. Unfortunately, as things stand, the only rewards for winning matches are miniscule amounts of XP that contribute to an overall level. Raising it nets additional rewards but none of them feel very distinct. The result is that finishing matches feels a bit anti-climactic, rather than giving out that dopamine hit that makes you immediately want to play another match.

Finally, there’s the cards themselves. Outside of building your collection, Marvel Snap has the secondary goal of acquiring, sometimes by outright purchasing, cool alternate card art for your favorite decks. It provides something else to strive for as well as a way to express your particular flavor of popular deck type. Again, TCG Pocket runs into trouble here because its working off of existing card art, and while there are multiple versions of certain cards to unlock, there aren’t many, and there’s no real way to chase them directly. If you open a pack and get a full art variant, great! If not, well, wait for the next random pull.

It’s still early and TCG Pocket is otherwise doing a lot right, certainly more than probably every other digital version of the Pokémon card game I’ve played in the past. There’s only one set of cards to collect at the moment and not much eye candy to salivate over in the paid in-game store. I’m sure that will all change soon enough but for now the game hasn’t quite conjured the full magic of my early days with Marvel Snap. Maybe that’s for the best. I eventually had to delete that game from my phone because it was consuming way too much of my free time.

I’m really averse to trading card games. Despite loving me some Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh as a kid and tween, I’ve largely kept my distance from them in the time since. I’ve played a few hands of Hearthstone, I never touched Artifact, and I am straight-up dogshit at any card game baked into an RPG, except for Queen’s Blood in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Maybe it’s all the stories I’ve seen of players spending exorbitant amounts of money to pull rare cards from booster packs, but the pastime seems dominated by greed and status more than the fun of the tactics and interplay between cards that I always valued.

It’s for reasons like these that I didn’t start playing Magic: The Gathering until a few weeks ago. I was going on vacation and knew I’d be around folks who play the game, so I relented and tried it. Unsurprisingly, I found that Magic is deeply fun and rewarding, but when I texted my roommate who plays the game, he warned me of the cost of it all. As did my best friends when I shared that I’d successfully been Magic-pilled. Of course, that did little to stop us from heading to a shop hosting a ludicrous sale on singles, purchasing about $45 worth of cards I simply thought looked cool, and playing another few games before I left town. My first go was a bit rough around the edges, but by the second game, I’d already been able to take out another player in a fashion that even impressed me!

With that experience in mind, as well as a single (and might I mention, triumphant) game of the Pokémon TCG under my belt, I took the plunge into Pokémon TCG Pocket, the mobile and gacha-infused adaptation of the popular card game that has ravaged my friends and their wallets the last few years. Unfortunately, it’s good, bite-sized fun, and it feels like a trap.

The slow tutorial of Pocket does a great job of introducing the fundamentals: play and evolve Pokémon, attach energies to use devastating attacks, and use items and other support cards to pull cards from your deck and keep your critters standing. There’s more to know, like retreating, benched Pokémon, abilities, and so on, but Pocket is actually a wonderful place to start if you’re looking to get into the actual card game. It plies you with prebuilt decks and solo challenges that’ll familiarize you with the ebb and flow of battle in increasingly difficult increments, eventually letting you challenge other players. Bouts in these modes are pretty generously timed, making them perfect for beginners who are dipping their toes in for the first time, and the winner is the first to three KOs, which happens quicker than you might expect. It’s no Marvel Snap, but fights in Pocket aren’t exactly drawn out like they can be in the anime or video games.

However, all of this is secondary to Pocket’s real allure and danger. Its home screen consists of a bunch of icons, buttons, and panels, but the three biggest ones in the center of the screen are booster packs, a feature called Wonder Pick, and a shop. Let’s work our way down.

First up, the booster packs: there are currently three available, all within a larger promo called Genetic Apex, and they’re centered on Pikachu, Charizard, and Mewtwo. (You can pick between the three packs at any time and it’s free to open one.) Clicking on the panel brings you to a screen where you can preview the offerings inside each pack, and cracking them is how you first gain literally any XP in the game. Before you do anything, even battling, you must open a booster pack and become familiar with Pocket’s many currencies and systems.

For example, slicing open a pack, which comes complete with a satisfying sound and vibration from your phone, generates pack points, which can then be spent on picking out single cards that range in value depending on their artwork, whether they’re holographic or not, and more. The most prominent of these currencies, though, are Pocket’s hourglasses.

Underneath both the booster packs and Wonder Pick icons are timers. The one under the former is counting down to the next time you are allowed to crack a pack—you can snag two each day, or one every 12 hours basically— and the latter’s timer is counting down to the next charge of a Wonder Pick, which can hold five charges max. The Wonder Pick allows you to spend charges to select a randomized card from booster packs that random players or your friends have recently opened. (Don’t worry, they won’t lose the card.) Say someone gets a uniquely good haul. You can then spend an appropriate amount of Wonder Pick charges—which will scale with the value of the cards included—to kind of get a chance at at least one high-value pick!

At the moment, I have two Wonder Pick charges, with a third being restored within the next eight hours. That limits the packs that I can freely pick from, meaning I can do a trio of poorly rated drops, try my hand at a slightly better one costing two charges, or wait and see if I can pull one for three. Of course, these agonizingly long waits can be reduced by simply using hourglasses, which cut down timers by an hour per unit, and the game is sure to remind you of what you’re missing out on by featuring the extravagant pulls of everyone you know on the Wonder Pick page.

The early leveling experience and tutorial also make you flush with hourglasses, to the point where I was in the hundreds within about an hour of playing. It wants you to spend those hourglasses so badly to speed up the booster pack timing, reward you with some paltry offerings and a lone full art or EX card, and then hook you on that high. There’s also already an offer in the game to upgrade to a premium pass that allows you to open a third pack a day for two weeks with no charge and access premium missions with more rewards, like card sleeves, playmats, coins, and as of this moment, even an exclusive full-art Pikachu card. The obvious hope is that you’ll forget to cancel and lapse into becoming a full-blown sub, or worse, willingly offer it because you’re that hooked.

None of these systems explicitly get in the way of you just hopping into solo or online battles, but already, I’ve run into scenarios where I’ve just narrowly eked out victories over players who’ve obviously spent the dough (or just gotten lucky enough) to pull EX Mewtwos and the like. Meanwhile, I’m using fairly rudimentary decks and building my Pokedex and binder very slowly by comparison. While surveying the cards that friends of mine had pulled, I actually felt a pang of jealousy so great that I used hundreds of hourglasses to splurge on ten booster packs, which yielded me a lot of cards, but ultimately a whole bunch of nothing.

Pocket, just like the base TCG and every gacha and service game in the world, is banking on its systems to create these kinds of frustrations—these pockets of FOMO, if you will—and push you to spend so you keep enjoying the game. And since this is Pokémon we’re talking about here, y’know, the biggest media property in the world, there’s no telling the damage it’ll ultimately wreak.

I’m also wary of investing too much into Pocket because, frankly, I’ve little trust in digital media anymore. Years of shows being cut from streaming services, as well as games getting delisted and pulled from players’ libraries, have been a stark reminder that these companies are more than happy to sell you empty promises. A physical card can at least be tucked into a sleeve or binder that you can safely put away and bring back out. The Criterion Collection movies I’ve been assembling in my entertainment center aren’t going anywhere unless I want them to. Those physical things, be they cards or movies, are things that will last with care, care that I and many others willingly give them.

So long as Pocket makes Nintendo and The Pokémon Company richer, it’ll be around. The moment it stops benefiting them materially, though, I’m sure they’ll have no problem taking it all away from us, and that awareness is inevitably going to color my experience with it.

Which is a shame, because I really am enjoying Pocket. It felt good getting to trounce that player with the Mewtwo by simply outsmarting and outplaying them. The TCG version of Pokémon will be mostly familiar to someone who’s played the games before, but there’s just enough of a tactical twist in the management of energies and the whole party to promote smart plays over raw power sometimes. It’s still very early days for Pocket, meaning it’s impossible to divine its staying power or whether all of the problems I’m flagging will remain as such. For as much joy as it might bring, just never forget to treat Pocket, as well as its developers and publishers, with the caution they deserve.

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