Pokémon Brings the Flashiness of The TCG To Phones: A Pokémon TCG Pocket Review

By Teepu

Player(s): 1-2
Platform: Android, iOS

Pokémon is no slouch when it comes to creating tons of spin-off games of varying quality. Mobile especially has had a ton of games, most of which have shut down by now, and yet they keep trying to experiment with the brand in new ways. Oddly, the latest experiment is a game that steps on the toes of a game that has been playable for quite a while. Despite this, is Pokémon TCG Pocket worth playing?

Let us have a quick history lesson first. The TCG has not had a lot of releases over the years in digital format. First, we had the Game Boy game which was fun, but limited due to there not being a lot of cards to pull from at its release. They later made a PC only game called Pokémon TCG Online, which had a rocky start but was a very solid representation of the TCG and allowed you to redeem codes from real life boosters, participate in tournaments, and even trade cards. It kept up with every set that was released since its own release in 2011. In order to streamline and modernize the experience, they cut a lot of the extra features and created a barebones successor that is now on mobile and PC since 2022 called Pokémon TCG Live, which is now where the game is active and contains all the sets from Sun and Moon all the way to present. Despite its issues, it is a very solid representation of the game and the best part? It is entirely free to play and does not have any microtransactions.

Knowing all this, and the fact that we have had an active digital platform to play the TCG since 2011, the release of Pokémon TCG Pocket is very strange. Its selling point is that it gives the joy of opening booster packs in a digital format, with unique artwork and designs that simply would not be possible on paper. They also promised a simplified version of the battles to keep people busy. While these features sound great on paper, from the beginning it sounded like they were trying to compete with themselves, but I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and have been playing daily since it launched to assess the quality, features and viability of completing a set while it’s active.

With the background information and my complaints that stem from that laid out, let us look at the actual game. First off, and arguably the most important part, is the card collecting aspect. About every 12 hours you are given a pack to open for free. It has a genuinely nice animation, which then allows you to swipe to "rip" the top of the pack off and then swipe through the five cards you acquired in the pack. The thrill of opening a pack and going through each card one by one is preserved quite nicely here. You can tilt the cards a bit to get a hint to whether you have a holo or not, which is also neat. If you end up getting a rare card it will give you a flashy animation and then you can tilt the card to see the holographic animation from different angles. If you get one of the especially rare (I believe there are currently only 3) expanded art cards, it’ll briefly run you through an animation that will show you an expanded art that shows you the entire scene of the card, rather than only what you can see through the card window. All these elements together make for a fantastic experience that not only emulates opening packs in real life but goes beyond it a little too. I do wish there were more than five cards per pack, and that there were more than three expanded art cards initially, but I cannot argue with the effectiveness of the process.

When you first start, you are given many opportunities to get more packs so that you have a decent influx of cards, but by the time you reach around two-thirds completion you hit a wall. This is where my issue with the game really shows. There are dailies you can do which are easy and reward you four hourglass currency. You need about 120 of those to be able to pop ten packs. While there are some other ways to earn hourglasses, you will quickly learn that you will run out of income and start opening packs at a painfully sluggish rate. Two packs a day is frankly not enough to complete a set, and definitely not enough to start unlocking flairs and other tidbits to show off. You can use excess cards and "shine dust" currency to add effects to your cards that can be shown in your display case or in battle. The issue here is that it costs to get each individual one, and there are multiple options per card. So, say you wanted to get two of the basic flairs for a Pidgey card, you would have to have the currency and excess cards to pay for that twice. Instead of unlocking it for use on as many cards as you want, you must unlock it for each instance of you using it. Thankfully, you will not ever need more than two per card since that is the maximum per deck, but it is yet another greedy layer of money gouging that is in this game that is quite horrible. Finally, if you want you can pay real money to unlock a ‘battle pass’ or just get currency to keep opening packs. It is quite predatory that it draws you in with a wonderful exterior and a very welcoming initial experience, then when you start feeling like you want to complete your set, they trap you into either super slow progression or forced real money spending. The worst kind of gacha system you could ask for.

Despite all this, maybe we can at least get some enjoyment out of the battle system, where once you have hit that paywall, you usually will have enough cards to make some decent decks. The concept is straightforward: take the standard rules for Pokémon TCG, and simplify them significantly to allow for quick matches that let you do more with your collection than just look at pretty pictures. It sounds novel but is quite repetitive. There are some wonderful things here that I wish were implemented in the regular TCG Live app (that used to be in the original TCG Online app). The biggest being the solo offerings. There are various solo battles you can partake in that get progressively more challenging, going through archetypes that are offered within each set and provide some decent rewards. There are also challenges to overcome for each solo opponent. They are not particularly creative challenges but give you something more to do all the same. They also do time-limited solo events as well as having added new solo battles for the new mini-set that recently came out. Overall, the solo offerings are fun. You can of course also play online via limited time events or normal battles.

This is where the issues with the battle system really start to show. Pokémon TCG was already created to be a remarkably simple and kid friendly game, so further simplification takes out most of the strategy which bottlenecks gameplay into a very select few archetypes to be successful. The deck size is reduced to twenty cards, with a limit of two of each card in the deck. You do not put in energy, but rather get one energy to use per turn, randomly from the chosen energies you want in your deck (which leads to most decks being only one type, further neutering strategy options). You get four instead of six total Pokémon allowed on the board and due to power and HP balance, fights are over in 2-5 turns. Due to this lack of foresight and balance you will quickly learn that if you want to succeed, there are only really two, maybe three decks you can make to climb the ranks, which then turns into a very repetitive form of play. That is not to say that TCGs do not have metas in general, but the overly simple gameplay takes away all the heart and fun of the game. The game does let you earn "rental" decks which you can use a few times to get an idea for some suggested archetypes, but you are still pigeonholed into a small handful if you play with other people. Had they simply kept the standard rules and used solo mode to teach the player how to play, the combat part of the app would be significantly better. This is especially true since they have an auto-build function to fill a deck with cards of a type of your choosing. Auto-build does not make good decks, but it gives you something functional if you are brand new so you can get an idea of how to build, then do it yourself.

Overall, there are a lot of promising ideas in Pokémon TCG Pocket, but there are just too many issues that are easily solvable but clearly will not be for me to recommend it. They really should have retained normal battle rules and had a better card collecting rate and currency rate. Which comes back to how I started: I do not understand why this exists as a separate app instead of simply upgrading the features of the already well-made TCG Live app that has been developed over multiple iterations and a decade. I played a couple of weeks into the release of the mini-set and still have not finished the base set and have about 54 of the 64 or so mini-expansion’s cards. I played every day and paid no money since launch, which is very discouraging considering I always finish a set in the TCG Live app before the next set releases, and that does not have any microtransactions. I am extremely disappointed in how The Pokémon Company and DeNa (especially considering they made Pokémon Masters EX, my favorite mobile spinoff Pokémon game) managed their ideas and execution. I would suggest you spend your time in Pokémon TCG Live and avoid this one, despite the pretty shell it presents itself in.

For More Information on Pokémon TCG Pocket:
https://tcgpocket.pokemon.com/en-us/

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Story: N/A
Gameplay: C-
Graphics: A+
Music/Sound: C+
Value: D-

OVERALL: C-

Pros:
+ Card presentation and pack opening is gorgeous and satisfying.
+ Solo battle challenges are welcome and fun.
+ The presentation and UI are quite nice.

Cons:
- Predatory gacha mechanics make collecting without money nearly impossible.
- Battle system is laughably simple and limiting.
- Not enough currency income for free to play players to make it worthwhile.

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