Review: Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket (Mobile) – A Breezy, Beautiful Take On TCG, Gacha Aside

Digital card games like Marvel Snap have seen a lot of success in recent years with short, satisfying matches that you can finish in a few minutes. The mobile release of Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket almost seems like a direct answer to this trend. From uncomplicated card text to simplified rules, it axes much of the complexity of the original Pokémon TCG while still wrapping it up in an addictive collection loop that looks to have players checking their phones daily and maybe even spending real-world money on microtransactions to get more cards.

After spending a little too much time opening booster packs and battling friends and randoms, we can say TCG Pocket is as predatory as a Pidgeot stalking a Caterpie and more mesmerising than a Swoobat using Attract. On the collection side of things, at least.

TCG Pocket adopts quite a few mobile game tactics to capture your attention and never let it go. When you first sign up, you’re presented with a pack of Pokémon cards to rip open that automatically gifts you a rare EX card. These are more powerful versions of certain Pokémon Cards. This kinetic, satisfying process requires you to swipe your finger across the pack to open it. After opening dozens of packs, we haven’t tired of it.

From there, TCG Pocket introduces the Wonder Pick system, which allows you to select one random card from the pack of another player (and sometimes a friend if you’ve added them). Don’t worry – you don’t steal their card it gives you a chance at nabbing a rare card another player pulled. You can see what cards you’ve pulled before you pick the deck, too. The first time you do this, TCG Pocket also makes sure you get the rare no matter what, which just entices you to keep trying further down the line.

Then, much like getting slammed with a Hydro Pump, TCG Pocket floods you with Pack Hourglasses – a currency used to unlock more packs – from completing simple beginner missions. Normally you can only open a pack every 12 hours, but these beginner missions will ensure you have about 20 to open within the first hour or two of play as each Pack Hourglass removes one hour from that timer. In these packs, you’ll likely pull a handful of rare cards and you’ll be riding as high as a Rayquaza.

But this isn’t the norm. Once those are gone, opening booster packs become a lot less frequent, and that pull to spend real-world money to open more hits hard, especially when faced with multiple different in-game currencies to keep track of.

By our count, there are 10 different tokens to collect along with a paid premium pass. You’ve got the Pack Hourglasses that we’ve also mentioned, but there’s also Wonder Hourglasses, which let you reduce the time it takes to recover Wonder Stamina and dive into more Wonder Picks. Shinedust is used to buy a cosmetic called ‘flair’. There are also Shop tickets, which you can use to purchase items in the in-game store. We’ve only named a few here, and as you can see, it’s a bit overwhelming.

Marvel Snap hit the ground running with its consumer-friendly approach (before they slowly eroded it away with increased monetisation). With the weight of the Pokémon brand behind it, TCG Pocket isn’t pulling any monetisation punches. We wouldn’t say it’s aggressive but the game does slow down to an unfriendly crawl if you’re not able to spend the money on Poké gold, which is also used to recover pack stamina or buy items from the shop.

If you can look past all this and have patience, opening packs, pulling full art cards that pull you inside them to show off a little Pokémon diorama, and putting together binders to show off your favourites to friends satisfies much the same way doing so decades ago in the schoolyard did. A lot of the art is stunning, making it a delight to pull something particularly rare or to just enjoy some cute little designs. Despite our qualms with the game’s currency structure, we look forward to logging in each day to open a of couple packs.

As for the battles, there are too many changes from the original TCG to list here, but everything has been hugely simplified. Most notably, playing decks are much smaller and energy is awarded each turn rather than players drawing energy cards from the deck. TCG Pocket also pares down card text dramatically with most Pokémon only having an attack or two with some easy-to-parse effects.

At launch, there is no ranked ladder or rewards for battling other players other than a minuscule amount of experience, though a rather robust battle tutorial does grant a sizable chunk of the aforementioned currencies. So they’re worth diving into.

These quicker matches are a double-edged Doublade. On one hand, they’re easy to jump into – perfect for a handful of matches a day and a good starting point for beginners. On the other, you’ll know whether you’re going to lose or not within the first turn or two if you don’t draw your key cards and your opponent does, which can be discouraging.

We can’t count how many times we went up against an opponent with a Moltres EX that instantly began farming fire energy for a Charmander – and eventually a Charizard EX – while we languished, praying we’d draw our Dragonair so we could get our powerful Dragonite rolling. We quickly learned to retreat if our opponent started strong and we lacked our win condition because with simplified cards we had no recourse for a comeback.

The heavy monetisation also makes TCG Pocket somewhat pay-to-win unless you re-roll your account to open the initial glut of packs over and over again until you pull meta standard cards (yes – that’s a thing. We tried it ourselves).

At the same time, if you’re less competitively inclined, we enjoyed hunting for specific cards to make certain types of decks work. Our favourite Pokémon is Cubone, for example, and we managed to pull two full-art Cubone cards. While we only have one Marowak EX – two are necessary for a competitive deck – we enjoyed battling with our skull-wearing crybabies all the same.

Conclusion

All told, Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket’s collection loop is heavily monetised with about six too many currencies to keep track of, but the kinetic feeling of opening packs and pulling gorgeous cards of your favourite Pokémon transcends most of the annoyance that the monetisation causes. The battles, on the other hand, function as a great baseline for newcomers but currently lack the competitive or strategic edge to invest a lot of time into them. In this way, Pokémon TCG Pocket mirrors the real-world TCG as the collection aspect once again proves much more appealing than battling despite reworked mechanics.