Pokémon TCG Pocket Simplifies the Card Game to Compete with Marvel Snap

It also includes gacha elements, which might feel a bit unsettling when introducing them to your kids.

The Pokémon Trading Card Game (PTCG) first appeared just one year before the video games it was based on, making it 27 years old this year. While it often makes headlines when a classic card is sold for a ridiculous price, the actual competitive game it was designed for has never been more popular. This is something The Pokémon Company International (TPCi) hopes to capitalize on with its brand-new mobile game, Pokémon TCG: Pocket—a Marvel Snap-like version of the brand. I got hands-on experience to see how it compares to both *Snap* and the current Pokémon TCG Live.

Pocket takes the core PTCG game, strips it down, and simplifies it into a faster and more mobile-friendly concept. The live version, while not as complex as Magic: The Gathering, is surprisingly intricate, and the constantly shifting meta with new cards every three months makes the digital version a tough world to break into. Pocket is clearly an attempt to set all of that aside and create an instant, fast-paced mobile game like Marvel Snap, but infused with Pokémon charm.

What will immediately catch the attention of Pokémon fans is that Pocket gives every player two free card packs to unlock each day. Unfortunately, each pack contains only five cards—real-world packs have 10 cards, and we’ll talk about why this change is frustrating later—but all packs have an equal chance of containing some of the game’s rarest cards. These rare cards can be truly stunning, making the cool 3D effects of Snap look weak in comparison. If you’re exceptionally lucky, Pocket has what it calls “immersive cards” that, when clicked, animate beautifully. The camera zooms into the full artwork, revealing entire worlds filled with Pokémon in their element, before eventually zooming back to the original artwork. It’s pure magic.

Mobile Shrinkflation

The game itself is quite different from the main version, much more than I expected. First and foremost, while TPCG is played with a 60-card deck, Pocket uses decks of only 20 cards. Energy, a vital part of any 60-card deck used to power Pokémon attacks, is not played as a card at all; instead, it’s a resource distributed every turn. There are no prize cards—the six cards in the live game that a player must usually win to claim victory—but rather, wins are based on scoring three “KO points,” which are earned by knocking out opponent’s cards. Oh, and there are no damage dice. (Trainer cards are still part of the game, but they didn’t really appear during the demo, so it’s hard to say how they work exactly at this point.) This is a big shift!

However, it’s important to realize that Pocket isn’t trying to digitally recreate the live game—that’s what *Pokémon TCG Live* is for. Pocket is something new, something different, and as a result, it’s far removed from the rest of the TCG.

Now, let’s move on to Pokémon TCG Live. It’s terrible. The previous game, Pokémon TCG Online, which launched in 2022, was old and creaky, with decade-old tech, but as a way to play TCG in the digital space, it got the job done. Both games use packs that you unlock by scanning code cards from real-world Pokémon packs, boxes, tins, etc. Scan the code, and you get a digital equivalent to open, allowing you to build decks and collections, and battle online against others. But when Live replaced it, it also reduced the number of cards you got from each code scan from 10 to five, deleted large sets of cards if you had more than four copies, and completely removed the “T” from the title—there’s no longer any trading in this digital trading card game. It was such a huge failure that it completely turned me off from playing online.

Genetic Apex

So, Pocket has gained more traction, and there’s absolutely no overlap. The bundle sets designed for Pocket are completely unique—especially the launch set of 200 cards named the impressively ominous “Genetic Apex”—featuring a mix of classic art dating back to the 1990s along with plenty of original artwork. There are no physical code cards in the real world, and no actual physical versions of the original art. (During my hands-on experience, another journalist asked if there were any plans to release any of the game’s art in a future physical collection, and the PR rep started spouting some vague nonsense. I leaned over and said, “Of course it is.” Of course it is.)

They gave us a rather unrealistic number of digital packs to open, and during this time, I was exceptionally lucky (fact: while they gave us far more to open than would ever be free in the real game, the packs themselves were real packs with the same odds any player would get), and I pulled some stunning full-art cards by both established and new PTCG artists. The cards were so beautiful that it was almost painful for them to be stuck on a mobile screen, instead of something you could hold and store in a binder.

That said, Pocket has a much more logical approach when it comes to these things than Live, with beautiful digital binders to store your cards, and ways to display and share your collection. Speaking of sharing, it also features Wonder Pick—a daily method to try your luck at snagging a particular card you want from a set someone else has opened. They won’t lose anything, but you might gain something.

I choose you, Pokémon… In a way, all the effects have been toned down from the live game to make these smaller battles more tactical. You’re less likely to one-shot an opponent with low attack power, and trainers give you the ability to draw a few cards from your deck, rather than the five or seven that might be possible on a tabletop game.

It works. It’s fast, less complicated, but still has enough going on to make strategy relevant. Most importantly, it doesn’t feel like Marvel Snap, which is where it could’ve truly failed—especially after “borrowing” the idea of 3D cards and such. It plays like a simplified version of the TCG, and feels like a real part of this world.

All of this leads to a simpler, but not dumbed-down, game that’s perfect for quick bursts on your phone, whether you’re playing against the game’s AI or real players worldwide. It’s not mind-blowing, but it doesn’t need to be. It just needs to be fun. And after all, this is an app that puts pack opening and card collecting front and center.

This is how they play the Gacha game

It also highlights the dark cloud that hangs over this fun time. Two free packs daily, one released every 12 hours! Ways to get an extra card using Wonder Pick! But you need at least 20 cards to play, and often more than that to build a strong deck. Oh, and those collections! 200 or more cards to gather in the first set! Gotta catch them all! And yes, this is an unavoidable Gacha game, isn’t it?

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 the time to your next free pack, with 1 Gold reducing the wait by two hours. Five Gold costs 99 cents, and I can only assume that by the time the game releases on Halloween, there will be a wealth of new ways to spend this Gold. There’s also the option to spend $9.99 a month on a Premium Pass, which gives you an extra booster pack daily, along with access to “premium missions”—essentially a battle pass with rewards for completing these goals—like unique promo cards, in-game decorations like playmats, sleeves, and coins.

There’s also a range of cosmetics you’ll be able to get and then apply to the cards to make them your own. These are special effects and shiny decorations that will show up during play, which is a fun idea, but—again, I’m assuming here—also another way to spend money.

And of course, this is a “free” app, and it’s a business, seeking to make money. But it’s also Pokémon, and as much as we adults like to pretend, it’s a franchise primarily aimed at and marketed to kids. Gacha plus kids makes me uncomfortable. One of the really nice things about Pokémon TCG Live is that there’s no real way to spend money in it. Sure, code cards cost money, but you can also buy 900 trillion of them for pennies if you search in the right places, and code cards come as a bonus with the actual physical (Gacha) cards you’ve already paid for. It’s an app you can let your kids loose on, and never worry about them either stealing your credit card or bugging you to extract it yourself. With another $10 monthly spend you can beg for on Pocket, you can add it to the teetering pile of VBux, Robux, Minecraft, and so many other subscriptions that may already be on the line.