Pokemon TCG Online

Let me just start by saying that since Solitaire became a PC game I wanted all card and board games to be played exclusively online. The main reason I avoid things like poker and Monopoly, in addition to not liking people very much, is that there are a lot of “bits” and I don’t like keeping track of them all in meatspace. So when Nintendo and Gamefreak started getting the Pokemon TCG online I was all aboard from the Beta onward. That was… years ago, but it’s come back into the public consciousness with the recent Ipad release so here’s a review.

For beginners, the Pokemon TCG, in addition to being a gateway drug to the hard stuff like Magic: The Gathering, is a simple version of the games themselves that fairly closely mirrors the experience of raising and battling Pokemon. Your Pokemon evolve, get damaged and get stronger with each turn as you are actively beating, losing to or holding off your opponent. I won’t go into the rules because, since they were designed for children, you should really be able to pick them up almost immediately even if it’s been years since you’ve seen a card. With that being said however much like the games themselves there is a surprising amount of depth and strategy involved in what is essentially a child’s game which maybe says something about why Japanese children are so far ahead of ours… but I digress.

For the experienced but perhaps out of practice Pokemon TCG player I’ll try to tackle the main questions. Is there a single player experience? Absolutely. It’s not what I’d call deep but it is reminiscent of the old Gameboy game and that’s basically all I’ve wanted since I first bought a Gameboy color. You gradually add cards to a theme deck and beat trainers of increasing difficulty.

Two things are lacking from the single player experience, however. First, although you can build decks and deck-test them against AI, you can’t use custom decks in the Trainer Challenge (the main single-player aspect of the game). The theme decks are great and there are quite a few to choose from but I wouldn’t mind being able to fix the errors in the theme decks. The reason this is worth mentioning is because you need to win in the Trainer Challenge to do most of your card accumulating and it can get darn frustrating when you’re losing because of obvious deck flaws. Second, while the first three theme decks are solidly designed and competitive, the unlockable and purchasable theme decks are considerably less so. You don’t have to use these theme decks if you don’t want to, of course, but you get a free booster for your first twelve wins with a theme deck. So you might, to borrow an MMO term, have to “eat glass” for a bit to earn those boosters. But you do end up learning a lot about what not to do when building your deck, so you’ll have that going for you, which is nice.

How is the multi-player? Surprisingly good, actually. Games start almost immediately and take from ten to 15 minutes. Because of the limited player-base and the standard rules there is always a real chance you will win. What I mean is that you won’t have to see six shiny charizards with double fire energy attached on turn two. This is more an aspect of the TCG rather than the online version but still, it makes the experience more enjoyable.

And, the most important question about free to play games, do I need to buy cards? Definitely not, now don’t quote me on this but if I understand the process you start with three theme decks centered around the Black and White starters and the Ruby/Sapphire starters. During the first six to twelve games you unlock more cards for those decks. Most things you do also give you “trainer tokens” which can be used to purchase half-boosters and decks, among other things. Getting a four star rating on any single-player trainer will also net you a full ten-card booster. This takes somewhere between six and eight wins but that happens remarkably quickly once you get the hang of the theme decks. Bottom line, I have more than enough cards to trade/build a standard deck and I’ve only clocked about ten hours after the Beta (unlocking cards in the Beta was… less easy). Want even more free cards? Try boundariescrossed as your code to redeem a free normal deck. It’s legit, straight from Nintendo.

One of the more important but sadly necessary limitations is that you can’t trade any free cards. Cards you buy in meatspace can be added online via handy codes found in the packs/decks and are fully tradeable but cards earned through the Trainer Challenge or purchased with Trainer tokens are not tradeable. This is to deter people from creating dummy accounts and taking advantage of the daily log-in bonuses to trade cards to a “master account”.

With that being said the trading system is excellent. You are free to “give” cards to your friends via private trades, post your cards as general “traders” to your friends and post and search public trades. It takes a little doing but in only two days I was able to find enough strangers to trade me a set to play Blastoise in legal tournaments (so seven cards total) with my fairly limited set of purchased cards. Unlike on the DS/3DS games, people on the TCG online don’t see to want to trade a level 1 Zekrom for a Buizel. Most of the trades are half-way sensible and if you post a sensible trade someone will take you up on it in a day or so.

So how does it look? A little like this:

Pretty yet utilitarian, everything you’d expect from Nintendo. As your game progresses you’ll hopefully start to see things turning out like this:

Bottom line, will this replace the physical card game? Probably not. People will always want to trade/sell their physical cards and, if recent pricing of the original set is any indication, those cards are a great investment. But the best part is, it doesn’t have to. All boosters and decks sold today will have online counterparts included free of charge. In fact it’s actually cheaper to buy boosters and decks in the real world and use the codes than it is to buy those same cards and decks in the game and you’ll end up with the real cards which are super pretty, let’s face it. So keep building your physical collection but in the meantime join us online, it’s the wave of the future.