Pokémon TCG Pocket review – uh oh, it’s really good

The last thing I needed was for Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket to be good. But here we are! It’s a cracker, and annoyingly, worryingly, compulsively so. Over the past week or two since The Pokémon Company unleashed this fearsome dopamine machine onto the world, I’ve been hard pressed to put it down, filling erstwhile empty moments during tooth brushing, kettle boiling and, erm, definitely not working with just one more quick game.

A central question here, of course, is how TCG Pocket balances its worst instincts – its reliance on loot boxes, and all the patently compulsive effects they surface in its players – with a sense of health, balance and, crucially, actual intrinsic fun. The surprising answer is: quite well, actually.

Nevertheless, Pokémon TCG Pocket undoubtedly sets itself up as a game centred around obtaining and opening booster packs – at least at first. On starting the game for the first time, you’ll be given a guided tour of the pack opening experience, plied with in-game resources for opening more, and then sent on your way through a twisting nebula of objectives, incentives and rewards. At the time of writing, there are 226 unique cards (plus around 14 additional “promo” cards) available, split across three choices of pack (one each themed after Charizard, Mewtwo, and Pikachu) and all together making up the game’s first expansion. Each booster pack contains just five cards – reduced from the 10 you get in real-world Pokémon boosters, in part because there are no energy cards to pad things out here.

Your ability to open packs meanwhile is governed by a 12-hour timer, which you can accelerate with an in-game currency called Pack Hourglasses, and given the level of rarity of different cards – and the scarcity of packs – that means collecting ’em all is going to take a very, very long time. One player ran the numbers and suggested completing the entire expansion without paying anything would take something between approximately 500 and 1100 days of consecutive play on average, depending on what in-game rewards and mechanics you factor into the equation. Either way: that is a very long time.

But here’s the rub: collecting cards is really only a part of the game’s wider, cyclical mechanical journey. Here’s an example. Open a pack and you get some cards. The new cards fill out your Pokédex, while any duplicates are automatically kept in storage. These can be used for creating decks to battle with (more on that shortly) where having more than one of a certain card is often essential for success. Or they can be traded in, alongside a resource called Shinedust, for a special flair – essentially a fancy sparkle or themed effect that triggers when you play a card from your hand in a match. You can also create collections and binders of cards to put on display in your profile, which is all a form of essentially highlighting favourites or showing off your rarest acquisitions.

This is not the end of the pack-opening sequence, however. With each opened pack, you also get a small amount of another resource, called Pack Points. These can be used in exchange for effectively ‘buying’ a specific card outright. You get five Pack Points per opened pack, and cards cost anything from 35 points for a lowly Caterpie to 2,500 points for the absolute rarest cards in the set, such as a rather garish gold, full holo Pikachu EX. That’s not all! You also get experience, which counts towards your player level, which, when it goes up one, offers you more rewards in Pack Hourglasses and the like for, you guessed it, opening more packs. And round and round it goes.

If you’re beginning to glaze over at all that, I don’t blame you. But there is a point to all this. TCG Pocket’s many systems and currencies are cleverly woven together, but they’re also done in such a way as to create a kind of closed loop, one which gently tugs you through each of the game’s separate systems in turn. The upside is, the more you engage with TCG Pocket, the more you’ll get out of it, not just in literal rewards but in your actual enjoyment of it. The downside is, a gentle loop around the systems quickly becomes a well-trodden path, and then inevitably a more compulsively marched one, ultimately leaving that familiar footprint trail on the mind – the one of automated, invisibly compelled muscle memory.

Sticking to the good bits for a minute longer, though, I’m a fan of Wonder Picks. This is yet another side mechanic of sorts that helps you flesh out your collection. A version of the video games’ beloved wonder trade system, these are a series of five randomly (or most likely, very cleverly and not-at-all-randomly) selected cards from the collection of either another random player, or an in-game friend. Again, limited by time, you spend Wonder Hourglasses to recover wonder stamina for essentially a game of lucky pick: you select a group of five cards on offer, they’re shuffled up in a whirl, follow-the-cup magic trick style, and you pick one in the hope it was that fancy full-art Pidgeot or one missing, mid-stage evolution for that deck you’re building. The clever bit, though, is how you can just slightly nudge the system in your favour.

Pokémon TCG Pocket’s friend system is appropriately basic for a series from the Nintendo school of online play: you add someone via their lengthy friend code and then can only interact with them either by viewing their profile and collection, having a private battle, or, from time to time, having five of their cards pop up in Wonder Picks. But when you battle someone – and that someone happens to have a rare card that you don’t – you get the prompt to add that person as a friend at the end. Which makes their cards eligible for Wonder Pick inclusion. You can see where I’m going: yet another overlap of systems which encourages you to make, simultaneously, safely anonymous, platonic pals with randomly encountered players, take part in battles, take part in Wonder Picks, and think about your collection as a whole all at once.

Brief interlude: while we’re on the topic of systems and their interlooping, it’s worth taking a second to talk about monetisation here, too, the obligatory cloying hand of obscene profits that are already reportedly flying in. I’ve not spent a penny on TCG Pocket, and never plan to, aside from redeeming and, I promise my deeply forgetful self, cancelling the free two-week trial of the premium subscription down the line. This is one of two key monetisation points, allowing you to open one extra pack per day and, through other special objectives, get a bit of faster progress and limited cosmetics in other ways, too. The other is the more blunt option of buying premium currency and spending that on Pack Hourglasses and the like to let you blitz through opening packs faster.

There’s no getting around the grubbiness of it, as with almost all free-to-play games of the modern age. But by mobile standards, and indeed other live service standards, there are things that could be worse. For one, unlike certain other pack-based online competitive games, spending money doesn’t really gain you any meaningful advantage: there’s no online transfer market, for instance, where you can hawk your wares for in-game megabucks to then buy an otherwise unobtainable good squad. It’s the same 200-odd cards that everyone else can access and, more importantly, only one or two of the rare ones are required for you to build a highly competitive deck around – after less than a week of checking in daily, I had enough for at least one, and probably with a bit of targeted play two or three, of the main competitive decks already. There is effectively an in-built system for countering any destabilising effects from whales: the rarest cards are just even fancier-looking versions of the functionally identical, already-rare ones most non-spending people build their battling decks around.

And it is worth talking about those battles. They’re quite brilliant, as much as some hardcore TCG players may wince at reading as much. TCG Pocket’s battles are indeed slimmed down a little from the standard real-world ones (and those of the somewhat quaint-by-comparison TCG Live and TCG Online, which replicate the real-world ones precisely). But the tweaks here are smart, and work wonders for simplifying things just enough to make battles faster, snappier, and eminently more snackable without dulling too much of the sophistication involved.

The key tweak is the shift in how energy works: rather than filling your deck with specific energy cards, you simply select the type (or types) of a deck when building it, and energy is automatically generated once per turn for you to attach how you wish (for two-type decks, which are required for the Dragon Pokémon lines such as Dragonites, which type comes up next is randomised, which effectively replicates a multi-type deck equivalent in real life).

There are smaller tweaks, such as how opening turns work, which have generated a bit of discussion among the aforementioned hardcore. But the real impact here is another change: the cards themselves. Being a single expansion that so far exists in a vacuum, and contains quite mechanically basic cards, TCG Pocket’s battles currently benefit from the beauty of simple design. Supporter cards and item cards, for instance, focus purely on things like drawing another two cards, dealing 10 more damage with an attack, switching out opposition Pokémon or reshuffling opponents’ hands. There’s the odd bit of flair in type- or Pokémon-specific benefits to the gym leader cards, with one for each of the original Indigo League’s eight leaders from Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow – Koga, for instance, lets you pick up an active Weezing card and its pre-evolution Koffing and put them back in your hand, making it a handy stalling or recycling tactic.

Once you get into it, you start to see how these simple moves dovetail wonderfully with the cards made available so far. The early days focused heavily on a couple of EX card decks based around Pikachu EX, Mewtwo EX, and Charizard EX – unsurprising, given they’re the poster children for the moment. They have some lovely synergies: Mewtwo has a super-powerful attack that requires you to dispose of two energy from it every time it’s used, but Gardevoir, a third-stage evolution that takes just long enough to find and lay down to be somewhat balanced, has an ability that can be used from the bench, allowing you to attach one more Psychic energy to a Pokémon of your choice. That and your once-a-turn standard energy lets you restock your Mewtwo perpetually, for highly effective results.

And then, naturally and brilliantly, counters start to appear from off-meta picks. I had great success with a Marowak EX deck, which was heavily chance-based (Marowak does massive damage or no damage, based entirely on two coin tosses), but can be set up super fast, allowing you to get in there and, with a bit of luck, wipe out a powerful EX card of your opponents before they can properly set up. All of this together benefits from the largely excellent balance work of co-developer Creatures Inc: rushing, setting up, stalling and so on are all strategies from the standard physical game that have made it over nicely here. Every powerful strategy has its downsides. I’m currently trying out a Dragonite deck that can do massive damage, but is dealt out at random and takes a while to get going, requiring some smart manoeuvring and stalling.

Knowing the strategy is openly chaotic makes it fun when things go wrong, rather than hugely frustrating. As does, crucially, the snappy pacing of the games themselves. With three points to gain, and two gained for claiming an EX defeat, games last roughly ten minutes or so. There’s also no consequence to conceding early – in fact, if anything it’s really an act of politeness to do so when you know you’re stuffed. It means you can squeeze that game in while on a tea break, at the bus stop, or during a definitely very important and relevant compulsory remote meeting about nothing to do with your department, without worrying about damaging your ranking or score if you have to duck out early or just make a silly mistake. You can also self-select how seriously you take battles before heading in, which I really love: another example of simplicity working to beautiful effect. As far as I can tell, there’s no difference in rewards between the two, it’s just a tacit acknowledgement that you’re up against opponents who’ll probably know their stuff, or not.

Of course, there are yet more metagame mechanics woven in here. At first, a concern of mine was how separate battling felt to the rest of the game, particularly the online element, which just rewarded a little XP for a match and nothing else. But then an event came along – one of seemingly many more to come – which offered basic rewards, but just enough to give you a bit of a nudge and feed back into that overall loop. It really is basic: get a certain number of wins in competitive games for a special profile badge people briefly see before you battle them, and get more wins for a snazzier one. Suddenly, I’m rethinking my decks, going back to Wonder Picks or spending a few of those Pack Points to get the final card I haven’t already picked up from my free daily boosters, and round and round I go again.

For those not inclined to play online, there is also solo play, with events of their own, and yet more objectives and rewards. These offer a lot more for completion than battling online, in fact, and once you tick them all off you can still repeat the battles infinitely for fun. But aside from somewhat limited events, there is a cap on how much fun you can have here (at least for me, anyway). The highest difficulty isn’t particularly high if you have even half an on-meta deck of your own (speaking as a lapsed, at most casual TCG player myself), and so once you know what you’re doing they can get a bit repetitive.

For me, it’s the online play that’s where it’s at – and that’s also the core of why I’ve fallen a little ungracefully for Pokémon TCG Pocket despite my own initial reservations. Yes, it feeds into all these other loops. And gosh, there are a lot of loops. I’ve barely mentioned half of them, with further objective types, event objectives available for limited time – but again, very generous and doable challenge – letting you pick up some special cosmetics like playmats and card covers. And there are a handful of secret quests too, like one for Mew, that remain a delight when you discover them.

But what it comes back to is the intrinsic joy of it all, that word I mentioned earlier for a quite specific reason. So many – so many – online service games these days focus ferociously on maintaining perpetual engagement that they forget the actual fun of the game themselves. Often the engagement then actually gets in the way: you end up ticking off specific tasks within a match, rather than playing the game itself for its own good, and only come back for extrinsic rewards: skins, XP, packs, or whatever else. TCG Pocket has, in a way, almost worked backwards – it’s an engagement system with a really quite brilliant, timeless game on top of it, which, if anything, has actually distracted me from all the funny business with engagement.

The same goes for the cards themselves and how they relate to real-world card-collecting. Yes, you can collect cards for their value, real or perceived, and their scarcity and out of the very human compulsion to tick off tasks and complete a collection alone. But these things are also beautiful, if you just stop and look at them, and TCG Pocket carries that beauty over surprisingly well, most obviously with the handful of snazzy “immersive artwork” ones that take you on a guided, 2.5D tour of their own little goldfish bowl worlds. But also with the old classics, like a rejigged cartoony Slowpoke from Miki Tanaka, the classic Viridian Forest “fat” Pikachu a from Mitsuhiro Artia, or the reworked, mournful Cubone of his looking up longingly at the night sky.

It’s just the same for the actual game here itself: it’s a pocket-sized version of the Pokémon Trading Card Game. They were called Pocket Monsters, after all – I shouldn’t be so surprised this all made so much sense.

Eurogamer sourced its own copy of Pokémon TCG Pocket for this review.