Pokémon TCG Pocket Shortens Card Game to Compete with Marvel Snap

The Pokémon Trading Card Game (PTCG) has been around just a year less than the video games it’s based on, making it 27 years old this year. And while it usually makes news when a classic card sells for a ridiculous price, the actual competitive play it was created for has never been so popularThis is something The Pokémon Company International (TPCi) hopes to take better advantage of with a brand new free-to-play mobile game, Pokémon TCG: Pocket Size-the Marvel Snapof the brand. I went hands-on to see how it compares to both Snap and the existing Pokémon TCG Live.

Bag takes the core PTCG game and strips it down, streamlining it as a concept to create a faster, more phone-friendly game. The live game, while not as complex as Magic: The Gatheringis surprisingly complex and the ever-changing meta, with new cards added every three months, means that even playing the digital version can be a tricky world to enter. Bag is very clearly an attempt to push all that aside and create a mobile game that is as direct and fast as Marvel Snapexcept soaked with Pokémon magic.

The immediate attraction here, for Pokémon fans at least, that’s it Bag gives each player two free card packs to open each day. Each pack, disappointingly, only contains five cards – real packs have 10, and we’ll explain why this change is a bummer later – but they all have an equal chance of containing some of the rarest cards in the game. And those rarest cards can be something amazing, making SnapThe excellent 3D effects are ridiculous. Bag has, if you’re exceptionally lucky, so-called “Immersive Cards” that, when touched, transform into beautiful animations, with the camera diving into the full image and revealing entire realms filled with Pokémon in their element, before finally retreating back to the original artwork. It’s real magic.

Mobile Shrinkflation

The game itself is much different from the main version than I expected. First, while a TPCG game is played with a deck of 60 cards, Bag has decks of just 20. Energy, a vital component of any 60-card deck that’s used to power up a Pokémon’s attacks, isn’t played as a card at all, but rather is a resource given each turn. There are no Prize cards—the six cards in a live game that must normally be won by a player to win the game—but instead, victories are based on scoring three “KO points,” earned by knocking out an opponent’s cards. Oh, and there are no damage dice. (Trainer Cards Are (still part of the game, but they weren’t really mentioned during my demo so it’s hard to say exactly how they’ll work at this point.) That’s a lot of changes!

However, what is important to know about Bag is that it is 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 different, and therefore much further removed from the rest of the TCG.

Let’s take a side trip to Pokémon TCG Live. Are terribleThe previous Pokémon TCG Onlineoffline in 2022, was a crumbling, decades-old technology, but as a way to play the TCG in the digital realm, it did the trick. Both games are played using packs that are opened by scanning the Code Cards found in each real world Pokémon TCG pack, box, tin, etc. Scan the code and you get a digital equivalent to open, and then you can build collections and decks, and participate in online battles against other people. But when Live the replacement, the also the number of cards you got from each code card was reduced you scanned from 10 to 5, removed strips of cards if you had more than four, and removed the “T” from the title entirely – there is no way to trade in the digital trading card game anymore. It was such a crashing failure that it put me off playing online.

Genetic Apex

Bag becomes much more attractive and exists without any overlap. Sets of packages that are made for Bag are completely unique—with the 200-card launch set given the astonishingly awful name Genetic Apex—featuring a mix of classic art dating back to the ’90s, as well as plenty of original artwork. There are no actual code cards, and no actual versions of the original art. (During my hands-on, another journalist asked if there were plans to release the game’s art in a future physical set, and the PR started some obfuscatory nonsense. I leaned over and said, “From 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 (seriously – while they gave us far more to open than would be possible for free in the actual game, the packs themselves were the real packs with the real chances each player would have), and I pulled out some stunning full-length illustrations of both familiar and new PTCG artists. Cards so beautiful it hurt a little that they were stuck to a cell phone screen, and not something you could hold and keep in a binder.

Although, when I say that, Bag has a lot more sense when it comes to these kinds of things than Livewith beautiful digital folders to store cards in, and ways to display and share your collection. And speaking of sharing, it also includes 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 win.

I choose you, Pokémon bag!

Okay, the battles themselves. You’ll need a 20-card deck to play, but the game’s opening sequences and tutorial will guide you there. There are also so-called “Rental Decks” that you can “borrow” and use to play, but not add to your collection.

Like in live play, you start 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 with cards (here, an Energy Zone generates an energy each turn and shows you which type will be generated the next turn) and sapping your opponent’s health. You can then evolve your cards as normal, swapping cards in and out of the Active Spot and playing Trainers to gain advantages. All effects are toned down in some way compared to live play, to make these smaller-scale battles more tactical. You’re much less likely to one-shot an opponent with reduced attack power, and Trainers give you the ability to draw a few cards from your deck, rather than the fives and sevens possible on a tabletop.

It works. It’s fast, less involved, but there’s enough going on to make tactics relevant. And, most importantly, it doesn’t play like Marvel Snapwhere it could have really gotten bogged down, not least after “borrowing” the idea for 3D holographic cards and such. It plays like a watered-down version of the TCG and feels very much a part of that realm.

What this all adds up to is a simpler game, but not a simple game, that’s fun for quick bursts on your phone, whether against the game’s AI or other players in the real world. It’s not overwhelming, but it doesn’t need to be. It just needs to be fun. And this is an app that puts opening packs and collecting cards front and center, after all.

This is how they go Gacha

Which, yes, also points us to the dark cloud hanging over this otherwise cheerful time. Two free packs per day, one released every 12 hours! Ways to get an extra card with a Wonder Pick! But you need at least 20 cards to even play, and a lot more than that to build a solid deck. Oh, and those collections! 200 or more cards to collect in the very first set! You gotta catch them all! And yes, this is inevitably a gacha game, right?

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 speed up access to your next free pack, with 1 Gold reducing your wait time by two hours. 5 Gold costs 99c, and I can only assume that a wealth of new ways to use that Gold will be revealed by the time the game comes out on Halloween. There’s also the option to spend $9.99 a month on a Premium Pass, which gives you an extra booster pack per day, as well as access to “premium missions” – essentially a battle pass, with rewards for completing these objectives – things like unique promo cards and in-game decorations like playmats, sleeves, and coins.

There’s also a range of cosmetics that you can acquire and then apply to cards to make them your own. These amount to special foil effects and glittery decorations that appear in-game, which is a great idea but—and again, I suppose this is also another way to spend money.

And of course this is a “free” app, and it’s a business, and it wants to make money. But it’s also Pokémonand as much as us adults would like to pretend otherwise, it is a franchise primarily aimed at and marketed to children. And gacha plus kids makes me uncomfortable. One of the real joys of Pokémon TCG Live is that there really is no way to spend money on it. Sure, code cards cost money, but you can also buy nine hundred trillion of them for pennies if you look in the right places, and the code cards come as an add-on to the physical (gacha) cards you paid for. It’s an app you can let your kids go crazy on, and you never have to worry about them stealing your credit card or nagging you to dig it up yourself. With another $10 monthly expense to beg for on Bagyou can add it to the teetering pile of VBux, Robux, Minecraft subscriptions and much more that you may already be stuck with.

I sincerely wish Bag could have been built around the same money-free foundation as previous digital versions of the TCG, but recognize how unlikely that would be. As someone who is deeply into the card game and collects it, I know I’ll be playing this more for the collections than the battles, but I’ll definitely be playing it. It could be enormous.I may not tell my son.

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