“Pokémon” is leveling up its trading card game with a brand new app, and it’s looking to get in on the mobile craze that has made “Pokémon Go,” “Marvel Snap” and other collect-athon games so popular.
Releasing on Oct. 30, “Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket” is bringing card collecting, deck building and trainer battling directly to your phone. Now, you can experience the joy and unpredictability of opening “Pokémon” card packs virtually and create a customized deck of “Pokémon” cards to be the very best, like no one ever was.
If you don’t know the rules to the popular “Pokémon” trading card game, you’re in luck because “Pocket” streamlines and shortens games to easy, bite-sized (but still addicting and competitive) matches. Instead of having 60 cards in a deck, “Pocket” players will use 20 cards to battle against other trainers. Energy cards, which are attached to Pokémon to fuel their abilities, are randomly generated each turn — so players will no longer find themselves cursed with no energy in their hands. Prize cards — the six cards players remove from their deck and add back in whenever they defeat an opponent’s Pokémon to win the game — are also gone; instead players will earn a point when they knock out a Pokémon. The first person to earn three points wins the game.
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There’s a 20-minute timer counting down during each match, but the games Variety played in a recent hands-on demo lasted between 6-10 minutes. The same level of strategy when choosing your Pokémon, evolving them and planning their attacks still exists in “Pocket,” so none of the competitive fun of the trading card game has been lost. There are around 200 unique cards in the first expansion coming on Oct. 30, so the possibilities for decks are quite high.
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The cards themselves are a delight to collect. By swiping your finger across the screen, you can rip open packs of cards just like in real life. Certain special cards have a shiny foil to them that sparkles when you move the card around on your phone. There are also full-art cards that have their colorful, eye-popping illustrations take up the whole space. However, the rarest of the rare are called immersive cards, which will play a specialized animation that takes you into the illustration to play out an entire Pokémon scene. For example, an ultra-cool Pikachu immersive card goes beyond the main art to show a serene nature scene with other Pokémon grazing in a field and flying about. These are the most uncommon to open from a pack, and we only saw two immersive cards during our demo and after opening hundreds of cards.
“TCG Pocket” is free to play and offers two card daily card packs to open. If you want to spend some extra money, you can purchase Poké gold to get more packs. And if you’d really like to test your luck, you can try out the Wonder Pick option, which lets you randomly select a card from a pack another player around the world has recently opened. That way you have a slightly higher chance to add a card you have your eye on, instead of opening a random pack.
“Pocket” gives players the fast-paced games and addictive card collecting that makes it hard to put down your phone. Longtime players of the trading card game can enjoy this new take on the classic format, and newcomers, who may have been intimidated by all the rules and cards, can quickly jump into the app. The developers also teased that trading between friends and even more cards are coming, so there is a lot to be excited for in the mobile world of “Pokémon.”
