One thing I’d like to change about Pokémon TCG

Youtube channel Control Players Unite posted a poll with a question and four options

Of the following, if you could change ONE thing about the Pokémon TCG, it would be…

with the options of

• The prize check rule — let us look at them already!
• The power creep — why on earth am I hitting 230 for 1 energy?
• Best of 1 rules (especially relevant for control play)
• Something to fix slow play

All four make sense so let’s go through all options and why or how they should be fixed.

Eliminating prize checking

In Pokémon TCG, at the start of each game, you put aside 6 random cards as “prize cards”. You are not allowed to look at them and each time you knock out opponent’s Pokémon, you get to pick some prizes (usually at least…).

Prize cards create an extra level of randomness and require you to

• build your deck in a way where prizing something important doesn’t completely ruin your game plan and
• adapt your gameplay based on your prizes

Still, the current system creates a problem. Players, especially in higher competitive play, want to know what their prizes are so they spend (and are allowed to spend) quite a lot of time during their first deck search going through their remaining cards to deduce which 6 cards they don’t have access to.

A tournament game of Pokémon is played as best of three wins with a time limit of usually 50 minutes.

I mostly play casual so this isn’t really a problem for me. I don’t prize check a lot myself — I usually make sure I know how many energies I have available and check a couple of the most important cards. In casual play, we also don’t generally play with time limits so I’m only exposed to this when watching official streams.

I really like what Comeback Mechanics group do in their Gym Leader Challenge matches. They have a custom houserule (that they call Matty’s Map) that allows the player to look at their prizes when they search their deck for the first time.

This gives the player same knowledge than rigorously going through their deck but in fraction of time.

Some people argue that efficiently checking your prizes is a skill and they don’t want that skill requirement reduced from the game. I can understand where they come from but I do disagree. Especially in a game where the game clock is shared and there’s no individual clocks like in chess.

In a game that goes to full 3 matches, if both players spend a couple of minutes checking for prizes, that’s easily over 10 minutes out of the general play time just to check for prizes. For example, the first deck search in a recent Latin America International Championship’s 2nd day stream lasted 3.5 minutes.

Being able to check your prizes and make notes would cut these early game searches short and would speed up the game. I think it would be a good tradeoff for the game.

The power creep

I chose the power creep as my answer in the poll. Even though I think prize checking would be beneficial for the game, I really wish the game’s balance would change.

I’ve been lately enjoying my share of retro Pokémon — especially RS-PK format from early 2000s. It’s a format I never played when it was the active format but I highly prefer it over the current standard format.

The biggest thing is that there’s very few one hit KO options. The game is slower, requires better board management and you need to make — in my opinion — more interesting decisions constantly because it’s hard to get rid of all of your opponent’s threats in one turn. So you have to think about how you balance between building your board and being aggressive to chase knockouts.

It’s no wonder why that format has grown to be probably the most played retro format. It doesn’t have quite as broken trainers as the early years and it’s not full of 3-prize Pokémon and one hit KOs like modern standard format.

I really wished that Pokémon Company had learned their lesson after the previous 3-prize cards like Tag Team and VMAX Pokémon but somehow they managed to bring the concept back with the newest iteration of Mega evolutions.

This is also why I like casual Gym Leader Challenge. While some people play the format similarly to modern standard — going full meta and trying to find the best deck in the format — there’s a lot of opportunities to play the format in a slower pace, utilising cards you wouldn’t otherwise play.

I’ve also been enjoying playing Progression Series with our local game group. Your card pool in it is limited so you can’t put 4 copies of the best card and 4 of each card that supports it to build super consistent decks. You need to make do with what you have and that slows down the game a lot.

Best of 1 rules

I’m not sure what the author of the poll means with the better best of 1 rules but I think this game doesn’t lend to the format that well, especially in a competitive format. The game is too prone for donking (winning the game in turn 1 or 2 by knocking out all your opponent’s Pokémon before they manage to set up) that it feels it would create a very volatile format with luck playing even bigger role.

Maybe that could be solved by some of the better rules but especially right now (see previous section), the game is so fast that I’m worried it would lead to even less varied meta game. W consistent early game setup (likely with big basics) becomes a crucial part of not getting donked, the game loses a lot of it charm.

Something to fix slow play

Game is played in best of 3 format but finishing 3 games in 50 minutes is a lot to ask. In the recent Latin America Internationals, each round, 15-21% of the games finished in a draw. That’s a lot. And I couldn’t find data on how many games ended 1-0 with even the second game not having time to finish but it’s a non-zero amount.

Prize checking is one part of the problem but even without it, it’s too easy for the games to run long.

I don’t have good solutions though. It’s not something that really affects me because we don’t really have sanctioned tournaments here and when playing casually over a couple of beers, slow play is usually a result of chatting about life and it’s always worth it.

For competitive play at the highest level, I think chess clocks could be an option. Give each player their own time budget. It’s very easy in Pokémon TCG, within its rules, to manipulate the clock and speed up or slow down the game. A clock could help with that as it would deincentivize slow play. Everytime someone brings it up though, the community gets up and arms so I’m not gonna champion the idea any further.