Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket has rekindled my love for this card slinger without entirely preying on childhood nostalgia, and that’s the strongest compliment I can give it.
The early days of the Pokémon Trading Card Game hold a special place in my heart. I fondly recall playing the base set with childhood neighbors in 1999 and obtaining the Ancient Mew card at screenings of Pokémon the Movie 2000: The Power of One. However, the card game never had the same staying power for me as the video games, largely because collecting physical cards was quite a hurdle. I wouldn’t play again until I picked up the digital PC version of the game around two decades later. I longed to play it more seriously than with pre-made decks, but buying physical boosters (which come with free codes) just wasn’t in the cards. When those pre-made decks were phased out altogether, so was I. Thankfully, Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket—a reboot of the game built from the ground up for mobile—was exactly the re-entry point I was craving.
Starting Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket on day one with an even playing field and limited card pool took the intimidation of lifelong players’ collections off the table. This is the key ingredient that makes the game work for the massive player base it’s accrued, especially if your interest lies in online matches. Better yet, it’s easy to obtain every base card, while rare cards are prettier versions for big spenders to chase after. You’re naturally going to build out the toolkit to create competitive decks, even if you decide not to spend a dime.
The ruleset is pared down from the traditional format, further mitigating the intimidation factor. Decks contain only 20 cards, energy generates automatically once per turn rather than through cards, you only need three points to win (with prize cards removed), benches allow for only three Pokémon, and card mechanics are simpler than modern Pokémon TCG norms. This may sound like it dumbed down battles, but miraculously, it retains its strategic edge while keeping matches short and the board space reasonable for mobile play. Proper deck building and playing around your opponent still wins matches.
The meta is also incredibly diverse. While the initial release favored a few decks intensely (I admit to being Pikachu EX rushdown scum and loving it), its first single-booster expansion blew the doors down for dozens of viable decks with plenty of room for tweaking. The new Diamond & Pearl set looks to only push this further. The designers had a tall task in easing both new and veteran players into Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket’s mechanics and format, and they’ve achieved it with flying colors so far.
Solo battles, random multiplayer, and private matches are available. The single-player content involves facing off against increasingly different computer-controlled archetypal decks, with extra challenges that require you to win under certain circumstances. Your first clear of any level or challenge provides rewards such as currencies that let you draw more packs, making it a fantastic place for beginners to hone their skills and build their collections. Tutorials also provide substantive rewards that reward players who properly learn the ropes. After the rewards, there isn’t much value to this content, but every new set and booster expansion includes a ton of new levels to conquer.
Online multiplayer is less tangibly rewarding, though is personally fulfilling, nonetheless. There are two queues for random play—one for newcomers and another for everyone else—and it can be a thrill to tussle with meta decks or attempt to make wild concepts work despite low odds. But, if you don’t find satisfaction from the mere act of play, you’ll probably struggle with the lack of after-victory rewards beyond small amounts of experience for leveling up your account. Some sort of season-based ranked play with rewards based on ladder placement would go a long way toward making battling more meaningful for core players. However, I find so much intrinsic value in online matches that they remain enjoyable, and I don’t say this lightly, given that I’m often reward-oriented in my gaming habits.
The two versus events currently in rotation are pretty uninspired, even if I love the more intense matches they bring out of players. Racking up 45 wins for a profile emblem asks nothing beyond playing the game as one usually would, while five-win streaks can lead to utter frustration given the innate random elements of a TCG. I’d love to see more creative events that properly shake up the decks people play online, like having to build around low rarities or banning a handful of types. The community has taken this desire for variety into its own hands by creating private match passwords that strongly encourage a specific playstyle, such as “NOEX” pairing you with other players not using the powerful EX cards that typically define the meta.
That’s a lot said about battling, but it’s only half of what Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket is about. In fact, given that every monetized aspect of the game revolves around collecting, it’s safe to say that’s the intended primary purpose of the game. The main means of doing so is through the typical gacha skinner box central to TCGs since their inception. Packs here have five cards each, and you get two free packs per day (and a third if you subscribe to the game’s Premium Pass). Each booster is loaded with several rare cards to luck into, often with multiple varieties for a single easily obtained base card. There’s a pity system in the pack points awarded with every unwrapping, allowing patient players or big spenders to get a rare card they desire or nab an elusive common card that you need for a deck. It’s ultimately better than nothing, though rare cards cost you quite a lot of points, and those points aren’t transferable between sets.
Wonder Pick is the more unique method of obtaining cards and one of the distinctive social elements in Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket. This presents randomly selected cards obtained by friends and other players and allows you to select one at random. The stamina necessary for picks changes based on the highest card rarity, creating a risk-reward luck of the draw when chasing rare cards. The moments when you get exactly what you’re looking for are absolute euphoria (the back-to-back days when I pulled full art Moltres EX and Zapdos EX—both of which cost the most possible stamina—is a high I’m still feeling). Wonder Pick also has its own events that (most importantly) offer up free themed picks and promotional cards, making this a part of the game to check regularly.
Sadly, the newly introduced trading feature is the ugly duckling here and an unfortunate stain on the game. I have no problem with limiting trading to cards of the same rarity and not including high-rarity cards, but what’s unacceptably egregious is the currency needed to initiate a trade. You essentially have to destroy a bunch of cards to collect enough currency to trade one, making the system only viable to whales who have no use for trading, and unusable for free-to-play or new folk who would benefit from filling out their collections. I always had a suspicion that trading was a titular obligation held back because it doesn’t provide the same monetary benefit to companies that opening packs does, yet even then I didn’t expect the implementation to be this greedy by proxy of making it worthless. You might as well take the “T” out of TCG.
The actual card collection takes the form of a scrollable list of every card. It becomes a bit unwieldy as your collection grows, though filters make it easy to sift through. I find it extremely satisfying to pore over my virtual binder of beautiful Pokémon art pieces, especially as there are many easter eggs to discover. The game’s heavily marketed Immersive Cards are also quite cool, even if they don’t retain much luster after watching their flashy videos a few times (which is easily done on YouTube). What I love even more are the full art cards covering a wide swath of art styles, with a caliber of artwork that would be the envy even of physical card collectors. Gacha games live or die based on the desirability of rare offerings like these, and Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket absolutely nails it.
The game goes for clean simplicity with its UI and is largely easy to navigate because of it, slight slowdown when moving between tabs aside. A bit more personality would’ve gone a long way, though. For example, a filter to make your card binder look like an actual binder would’ve been a fun throwback. Also, the entire UI sits upon a blindingly white background. A dark mode would make using the app more comfortable and should be the norm for any software in the modern day.
I’ll also give brief mention to the music, which is to say I turned it off very quickly because it’s extremely generic with nothing resembling any of the iconic Pokémon motifs. The sound effects are slick as you’d expect from a gacha game but don’t add much either. I don’t put too much weight on this, though, as I would mute the game’s audio regardless. I figure that’s the case for many people, resulting in a lack of budget toward it.
Lastly, you probably want to know how free-to-play and new-player-friendly Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket is. The answer is complicated and likely subject to change. At present, you get a generous two packs (ten cards) per day alongside regenerating Wonder Pick stamina, and you level up quickly early on, which nets you even more packs. Single-player rewards are also a surefire way to boost your collection from the start and whenever a new expansion drops. The trainers and items making up the backbone of nearly every deck are also virtually free in the shop, giving you a solid base to start from. If you go in with an idea of the deck type you want to build and the packs that have those cards, you should have a deck you enjoy in short order. But, given the useless implementation of trading, Creatures, Inc. and DeNA need to employ more catch-up mechanisms if they want to capture new audiences.
While it’s easy to highlight all the nags and negatives in a review, I want to be clear: I truly love Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket. It’s a game I’ve played regularly throughout the day every day since it launched, and the expansions have only made me increasingly excited to keep playing. It’s also been a fantastic social experience, with RPGFan staffers still chatting about it daily. Oh, and we gave it our 2024 Mobile Game of the Year award. This is easily the most accessible and immediately satisfying way to break into Pokémon TCG there currently is.