Pokémon TCG Pocket

[CTNC]

I'll be honest a turn 4-5 rare candy feels mostly indistinguishable from a turn 4-5 "you actually found your middle & last stages in quick succession"

Turn 5? Maybe. Turn 4, literally impossible because without Rare Candy because that's the second player's second turn.

I guess it's just from my perspective:
-opening hand has your basic but nothing else
-next turn you get rare candy, but obviously can't do anything else so your guy has to either stay active & survive or stay in the back until ready
-final turn you get your final stage and can go to town (or begin to go to town)

is not that dissimilar to this:
-opening hands has your basic but nothing else
-next turn you get your middle stage, and evolve but you still have to decide to either stay active & survive (but now you do chip damage) or stay in the back until ready
-final turn you get your final stage and can go to town

I run rare candy + gabite (I think just 1 rn) in my garchomp deck and I've ran into both scenarios enough* that it still feels similar. Obviously the bigger appeal of rare candy is the other scenarios, like a mid/late game ramp up where you get your basic going and then can evolve straight away next turn (imo I think THIS is the most consistent scenario and its existence alone makes rare candy worth running), or that coveted turn 2 rare candy gg ez next. But the one I'm specifically outlining is very close to just breaking even on luck.

Okay. We were definitely thinking of turn numbers differently. I was saying Turns 3-5 in the way the game means turns instead of the player's third to fifth turn. (First players first turn is Turn 1, second player's first Turn is Turn 2, first player's second turn is Turn 3, ect.)


Here's what I was complaining about.

Turn 1: Player 1 does nothing that matters.
Turn 2: Player 2 benches a Skull Fossil and put an Energy on their active Pokemon.
Turn 3: Player 1 fail to get a second Pokemon to play.
Turn 4: Player 2 uses a Rare Candy on the Fossil, switches to Ramparados, and 130 Damage OHKO. GG


I admit it's not extremely likely, (and it's rarer than Misty instantly winning the game) but it's for from impossible and losing before you even get to play is just painful.

 

[Bakugames]

But the one I'm specifically outlining is very close to just breaking even on luck.

this is true! but its like you said, rare candy has more value because its other scenarios are much better. to put it in a different perspective: rare candy will almost always ramp up your board one turn earlier, and it can even be faster because it can lead to pokemon communication being a more effective tool to guarantee a rare candy + stage 2 ramp

 

[ant4456]

DISCLAIMER: I STOPPED PLAYING LIKE A MONTH AGO BECAUSE I FELT THIS GAME IS JUST A GACHA DAILY AND I WASNT HAVING FUN

imo ex pokemon are a red herring for tcg pocket's issues as a game game

the problem is deckspace

20 cards is just way too little to have an interesting game

 

[Bakugames]

20 cards is just way too little to have an interesting game

Do u think it should be 60 like the main tcg, or maybe an inbetween like 40?

I don't mind the deck space that much but i do wish i had at least 10 more slots for cards lol

 

[DrrT]

DISCLAIMER: I STOPPED PLAYING LIKE A MONTH AGO BECAUSE I FELT THIS GAME IS JUST A GACHA DAILY AND I WASNT HAVING FUN

imo ex pokemon are a red herring for tcg pocket's issues as a game game

the problem is deckspace

20 cards is just way too little to have an interesting game

?

The game is a gacha. They have never tried to hide that. The entire nature of even the physical TCG is literally gambling. Like don't get me wrong it's totally understandable but I have no idea why you were expecting otherwise.

That being said, I also disagree on the later aspect because this has been the most varied meta since...probably the entire lifespan of the game, even trough as pointed out by others Rare Candy is kind of a mistake. There is plenty of different strategies even with decks this size, I guess it depends on what you consider "interesting" but I'm seeing more counterplay here than in TCGs with way bigger decks.

 

[Bakugames]

I dont see rare candy as a mistake, it IS the reason why the meta is so varied. Chomp ex, shiny zard ex and solgaleo ex are only viable because of it, and otherwise darkrai ex would completely outclass most of them, which would make meowscarada the best anti meta pick that also invalidates all these decks (and even non ex decks like rampardos) pretty easily. hell, darkrai ex is still really good despite all those updates, let alone if the stage 2 decks didnt have a rare candy tech tool

 

[R_N]

20 cards seems fine for this kind of thing, honestly.

once more draw stuff gets added things will probably get spicy though.

 

[ant4456]

?

The game is a gacha. They have never tried to hide that. The entire nature of even the physical TCG is literally gambling. Like don't get me wrong it's totally understandable but I have no idea why you were expecting otherwise.

That being said, I also disagree on the later aspect because this has been the most varied meta since...probably the entire lifespan of the game, even trough as pointed out by others Rare Candy is kind of a mistake. There is plenty of different strategies even with decks this size, I guess it depends on what you consider "interesting" but I'm seeing more counterplay here than in TCGs with way bigger decks.

yeah gachas suck

they got me until they kept releasing entire sets like every month which made it feel basically impossible to keep up and i dont care if its "naive" to have thought maybe they'd keep the game fun lol

 

[ant4456]

tcg pocket is the kind of boring gacha game design that can take the fun idea of waking up to a fun surprise and turn it into a dull encounter where you're just speedrunning doing your chore in bed

instead of having fun im opening app, spam click, open the pack, spam skip for 20 sec, back animation, go to wonder pick, do low cost if nothing i want for the quest, otherwise go, take like 40 sec anyways, get jack shit, go back, then click on the quest to finish and get my reward

takes 5 mins and even if i get something "cool" what is the reward. what i get a card that is stuck in this game that will go offline in 10 years? a card that will be meta irrelevant in 3 months? something i'll see and get a hit now and then feel nothing 30 minutes later after i told my friends, and now it's meaningless

we used to have real mobile game. subway surfers clears unironically

and what did i get for grinding the game daily for months? an update that made wonder pick take longer and they basically gave up the pretense of the idea of keeping up f2p as a collector lol

"well its a gacha what did you expect"

refer to the following screenshot:

 

[Count Bleck]

tcg pocket is the kind of boring gacha game design that can take the fun idea of waking up to a fun surprise and turn it into a dull encounter where you're just speedrunning doing your chore in bed

instead of having fun im opening app, spam click, open the pack, spam skip for 20 sec, back animation, go to wonder pick, do low cost if nothing i want for the quest, otherwise go, take like 40 sec anyways, get jack shit, go back, then click on the quest to finish and get my reward

takes 5 mins and even if i get something "cool" what is the reward. what i get a card that is stuck in this game that will go offline in 10 years? a card that will be meta irrelevant in 3 months? something i'll see and get a hit now and then feel nothing 30 minutes later after i told my friends, and now it's meaningless

we used to have real mobile game. subway surfers clears unironically

and what did i get for grinding the game daily for months? an update that made wonder pick take longer and they basically gave up the pretense of the idea of keeping up f2p as a collector lol

"well its a gacha what did you expect"

refer to the following screenshot:
View attachment 739996

This has nothing to do with gacha and everything to deal with beong a tcg. I dont know what you were expecting from a simplified mobile tcg. Like be honest, im curious how many tcgs you have played previously, and how many were the mobile versions. What are you missing from this outside feeling like releases are too frequent to amass a collection?

 

[ant4456]

This has nothing to do with gacha and everything to deal with beong a tcg. I dont know what you were expecting from a simplified mobile tcg. Like be honest, im curious how many tcgs you have played previously, and how many were the mobile versions. What are you missing from this outside feeling like releases are too frequent to amass a collection?

the gameplay is bad idk what else you want me to tell you

instead of doing a "what were you expecting nerd emoji" literally just understand that I WAS EXPECTING IT TO BE FUN AND IT WASNT FUN

 

[Mad Ram]

When all your issues are intrinsically connected to the game's genre, you do deserve the "what were you expecting" comments. What you said applies to literally every digital trading card game on the market. All of them have power creep where newer sets will have cards that make older cards unviable. All of them only really get you things that stay in the game and can go away if the game's discontinued. All of them depend on opening more packs. Whether it be TCG pocket, Duel Links, or even just the standard online clients for the big three tcgs, it's all the same because it's part of the genre. It's like wanting to play a new multiplayer shooter and then complaining because you keep getting shot. It's not even as if you said this game does it worse than the others. It's that it has those traits in the first place. If anything it makes you look like this:

 

[Count Bleck]

Here comes the Ultra Beasts! New mini set, Interdimensional Crisis, comes out May 29th!

 

[R_N]

With that set on the horizon I may as well ask here: Does anyone have a Beedrill EX or (Shining Revelry) Pikachu EX to trade? I have the pack points for one but I still need the other.

 

[CTNC]

I already despise this set.

Good News: Misty is finally competitively unviable. It's a miracle! :D

Worse News: Team Rocket Grunts is still a thing. With all due respect to anyone using that card, I hate you. A lot. I wish upon you more tails than there are in the largest furry conventions.

Misty is now my THIRD most hated card in the game and it's a DISTANT third place. Team Rocket Grunts already pissed me off, but a REPEATABLE Team Rocket Grunts?! Fuck you game devs and fuck whoever uses this! It better be competitively unviable!

 

[Bakugames]

lol these cards are funny to me because theyre obviously made to try to counter darktina, which needs 7 energy in total to function proper. i play rampardos so these energy removals r useless vs my deck

 

[DrrT]

Very late reply but let me share some ramblings:
- I'm still saving hourglasses for Zekrom's debut, or a Paldea/Hoenn/Johto set if I'm feeling nostalgic, so I expect nothing from most of my pulls, but fucking damn it next subset already announced, got all full art Tapus but somehow not a single Solgaleo? come on
- Ultra Necrozma as a promo is crazy. I like it despite being such a gimmick because it using both M and P energies is a fun callback, but how is literally the most hype Ultra Beast ever not the headliner but a promo? Are they that confident a Dragon ex would never sell?
- I was initially disappointed Ultra Beasts didn't keep their physical TCG gimmick until I remembered Pocket only has three prize points so it was jusy imposible to do and they kinda of call back to that with Lusamine so good job I guess. Thay does bring me to my later point tho...
- I'm still worried about the pacing in terms of hype. The sets being in seemingly random orders is fine and understandable but I keep getting more and more worried about the anniversary. The game is not even 1 year old and we already have Regional Forms, shinies and now Ultra Beasts. There is nothing really big to debut on the anniversary other than Megas which would be an absolute disaster in every way. I don't understand how they are seemingly saving up Johto so the nostalgic fans don't just flee after gens 1 and 2 are done but they has no issues at all releasing Alolan forms, or why they saved Arceus' gimmick for some weird reason but we are now still getting Ultra Beast. I know, it's just a tag/archetype not a big deal on itself, but what worries me is what plans they may have ahead. They already released shiny Charizard for crying out loud! It just doesn't feel like they are spacing things enough for the average player, at least in my eyes.
- speaking of shinies I still think them being in every pack is such a mistake. I only do free pulls and I already have repeated shinies. What a way to miss the entire point of what made them special in the physical TCG.
- lmao at Guzzlord. Just lmao

I guess I should say something nice too...uh the music genres attacks on the Ultra Beasts are cool! And we are getting all of them!

yeah gachas suck

they got me until they kept releasing entire sets like every month which made it feel basically impossible to keep up and i dont care if its "naive" to have thought maybe they'd keep the game fun lol

I'm not saying it was naive to expect the game to have fun. I'm saying it doesn't make any sense to say "this gacha was feeling like a gacha", that's not even naive that's just like...playing a shooter and complaining you had to shoot. Gachas are not supposed to allow f2p players to keep up, because that ruins their business model. They are predatory in nature. And Pokemon is not strange to those things, just ask the arcade machines in Japan where you literally need to "pull" every single capture.

I just can't understand how you started playing a game that is Pokemon + a TCG + a gacha and somehow thought you would be able to keep up without it feeling like the random luck game it is. Like the fact it even has trading is a miracle by gacha standards.

 

[R_N]

- I'm still worried about the pacing in terms of hype. The sets being in seemingly random orders is fine and understandable but I keep getting more and more worried about the anniversary. The game is not even 1 year old and we already have Regional Forms, shinies and now Ultra Beasts. There is nothing really big to debut on the anniversary other than Megas which would be an absolute disaster in every way. I don't understand how they are seemingly saving up Johto so the nostalgic fans don't just flee after gens 1 and 2 are done but they has no issues at all releasing Alolan forms, or why they saved Arceus' gimmick for some weird reason but we are now still getting Ultra Beast. I know, it's just a tag/archetype not a big deal on itself, but what worries me is what plans they may have ahead. They already released shiny Charizard for crying out loud! It just doesn't feel like they are spacing things enough for the average player, at least in my eyes.

I guess the easy answer is they don't really do anything special for hype. The half-anniversary was an alola set and a rayquaza promo; the actual prizes was all the hourglasses and stuff. Anniversary will probably be similar; just some region-focused set (or, if we've gone through all the regions by then, a more regular TCG-styled potpourri set) with the real thrust being a promo of a popular Pokemon and a bunch of resources to do pulls.

(& probably have a shiny set every year for Pokemon Day)

I'm curious if they're ever going to routinely double dip on some of these passive gimmicks moving forward. Like release more Arceus-enabled cards, more UB "support" and whatever else moving forward (I bet they bring in the Strikes when we get to Galar, Ancient/Future with the Paradoxes but I assume some original stuff too eventually). In the real TCG there's usually "blocks" where those are relevant, but thus far it's just been single sets...but also single sets released really early on. Would be easy to release a couple more in the future if they wanted to.

 

[Count Bleck]

The year of the Eevee is upon us. New set, with a huge Eeveelution focus, including trader cards to further focus on eevee decks!

 

[R_N]

Eevee EX is pretty not great and feels like it exists mostly to facilitate being able to run 4 eeveelutoins in one deck. But not entirely sure you would WANT to do that with how energy works in this game

 

[CTNC]

Here's my thoughts on the new set's revealed cards.

Eevee EX: The first (and probably only) EX with less than 120 HP has less than 100 HP! It can't have more HP than the Eeveelution with the lowest HP, so I get why, but if you look at this as just an EX, it's easily the worst EX in the game. If you look at it as a way to use 4 Eevee cards, I can see Espeon and Sylveon EX being a good deck.

Side note: I made a deck with Exeggutor, Exeggutor EX, and Alolan Exeggutor for fun. If you ever want to try it, don't. It sucked. Eevee EX could make it so decks with 6 Pokemon that Evolve from the same Basic could actually be somewhat goodish or at least not terrible. Bonus points for not needing to use Celestic Town Elder.


Vaporeon: I'm not going to rant about Team Rocket Grunts or Guzzlord EX again, so I'll just say this. NO. JUST NO. If you play this with Misty and Team Rocket Grunts, words can not describe how much I hate you.

Jolteon: Probably worse than Genetic Apex Jolteon. 60 Damage for one turn then 40 every other turn? It only takes one energy, and 4 coin flips makes it consistent enough that it's worth the risk. 1/16 chance to do nothing, 2/16 chance for 40, 13/16 chance to deal more damage.

Flareon EX: 150 HP, an attack that deals 130 Damage, 2 Retreat Cost, an Ability that gets it extra Energy, and attacking every turn means dealing 20 Damage to itself every turn... Why would you use this instead of Giratina EX? If you really want to make it work you can try it with Moltres EX. You could use it alongside Genetic Apex Flareon if you want 4 Eevee and 4 Flareon, but that just makes me wonder if Genetic Apex Flareon is better. It's 20 less damage, but it's not an EX.

Espeon: After seeing what Tapu Lele can do, this scares me. You can play around Espeon easier because it can't hit benched Pokemon, but some decks are just screwed. As a shameless Darktina player, I may have to switch finally decks. As someone who thinks it looks fun, I hope I can get the cards for a Psychic Eevee deck. Isn't it nice when something is the solution to the problem it causes? If I can't get the cards needed, I can always switch to Ultra Beasts. Speaking of...

Umbreon: If you think this could counter Ultra Beasts, Celesteela says hi. Even without Celesteela, the Grass weakness means it's going down quick. Most other decks either have low retreat costs or Evolutions, so I doubt this will be that good. If I'm wrong, sucks to be playing Darktina.

Leafeon: There's no avoiding comparing this to Celebi EX. +20 Damage per Energy vs +1 50 Damage Coin. You either have to deal with the inconsistency of needing a Basic Pokemon first or the inconsistency of coin flips. Eevee EX makes me lean towards Leafeon because of Triumphant Light's Leafeon EX being a perfect partner that happens to evolve from the same Pokemon.

Glaceon: 50 Damage to any Pokemon for 2 Energy... Not good enough to consider, but not bad enough to say much about. It'd be interesting if it was good enough for Glaceon EX decks, but Mythical Island's Vaporeon would probably be better for that.

Sylveon EX: Draw 2 when it evolves. Wow. 70 Damage is weak for an EX, but it still 2HKOs all the 140 HP Pokemon and you're getting lots of value from the Draw 2 either way. I'm not good at judging power, so I don't know how good it will be, but Psychic Eevee Decks are going to be a thing and I really hope I can try it.

Swirlix/Milcery: That's a cute gimmick, but what makes a Sweets Relay deck worth playing?

Alcremie: Oh! Oh... 40 damage per time you used Sweets Relay that game. 3 times is 120 Damage, 4 is OHKO almost anything. 0_o Um... That's going to be halarious when it works. It's a shame everyone in the deck has low HP though...

Penny: Of course. The Eevee guy. Let's see what she does with Eevee! *reads card* Nothing. She has nothing to do with Eevee... Still better than Looker I guess.

Eevee Bag: Being the first Trainer card in TCG Pocket to give of options alone makes it interesting. The choices being Potion for every Eeveelution or Giovani for Eeveelutions. Giovani as an item AND healing as an alternate option is INSANE! I'm calling it now, this is going to be a must for Eevee decks and it's going to be the one card in the deck won't be able to get it from opening packs or Wonder Pick. (I've been having bad luck with getting the one 2 Diamond card I want. I get tons of every other 2 Diamond Card and using Pack Points for a card that common feels bad.)

 

[Count Bleck]

So it seems like the trade system is going to be reworked. Trade Token are going to be phased out and seems trades will take Stardust now, and you can trade the tokens surplus you guys have for some hourglasses and said stardust. In addition, the next core main set (2 pack set) will drop on the 30th of this month, so expect a new gen focus around then. So far we've had gen 1, 4, and 7....wonder what will be next? I feel like gens 6 and 3 are going to be saved for a post ZA launch to cash in on mega hype, so maybe a gen 8 set? gen 9 with mini sets focusing on the dlc mons? gen 5, maybe?

 

[R_N]

We knew about the trade system rework, but being able to exchange (one at a time, presumably, considering how everything else in this stupid game works) for some hourglasses is neat.

As for the next main set.... kinda feelin Gen 2? Could even directly build off Eevee Grove by having Espeon & Umbreon EX. Dare they finally add Kimono Girls as a supporter

 

[Volt-Ikazuchi]

This got me absolutely hooked and I've only been playing for one day.

My only complaint is that they really shouldn't have been so stingy with the starter decks. Having to let RNGeez take the wheel and scrape your deck with whatever good cards you pulled from packs is crazy.

Yeah, I know about Rental packs, but they ain't mine.

Also, am I dumb or is trading broken and the only thing stopping people from sending you a Woobat for an Articuno EX is the value thing?

Edit: Fuck Wonder Trade with a rusty rake. Just watched a Garchomp EX slip through my fingers and got a Golbat instead. This is truly Gacha hell.

 

[Mex]

yeah the value thing is doing a lot of work for trading, but they'd also never allow you to trade without implementing some kind of rarity barrier given this games existence as a gacha game. Be way too easy to abuse if they didn't do some kind of restriction like that