Reliving Childhood Memories With The Pokémon Trading Card Game

I remember playing the Pokémon Trading Card Game back when I was in the early years of secondary school – you know, before it got banned when kids started gambling and the whole black market economy of cards got a little out of hand. It was the height of the initial Pokémon craze that swept the country and it was great.

But it’s been a good long time since then, and try as I might, I couldn’t for the life of me remember how to actually play the game. There was something about energy, I remembered, you had evolutions (and prized shiny cards) and there were little glass gems that weighed down my blazer’s pockets. If you dug my old cards out from the attic and set them in front of me I wouldn’t have a clue where to begin.

This year’s the 20th anniversary of the series though, and The Pokémon Company are playing heavily on nostalgia. The original trio of games came out for Nintendo 3DS at the start of the year, there was the vastly popular release of Pokémon Go in the summer, and a brand new videogame is coming out later this month. But the card game is also getting in on the act, reprinting the original series of cards and bringing them back into the fold as part of the XY- Evolutions expansion.

Picking from Pikachu and Mewtwo themed starter decks – I went for Pikachu, as the populist choice – it took a while to get the rules clear in my head again. Thankfully, a large play mat is included with a set of rules written on the back. It’s a surprisingly clever analogue to the videogames that holds up well even amidst the current card game craze.

You start with seven cards in hand, a mixture of base Pokémon, evolutions, energy. The game is all about placing your Pokemon, with one active at any time, charging them up by attaching energy cards and then trying to deal damage to the opposing creature. There’s status effects, hit points, tactical retreats and more than a little luck at play.

As in the videogames, you’re trying to knock out a set number of opposing Pokémon, represented here by up to six prize cards drawn from your deck of sixty at the start of a match. Knock out a Pokémon and you draw one of your prize cards and put it into your hand, with the first to get all the prize cards the winner.

With up to six Pokémon on your belt in the games, you play for up to six prize cards that are drawn from your deck of 60 at the start of the game, with the first player to defeat opposing Pokémon and pick up all their prizes the winner.

Playing to the best of two, a lot hinges on the luck of your opening hand. If you can quickly get some of the more powerful Pokémon and evolutions and charge them up with the right energy, you can dish out a lot of pain.

One of my matches had a lowly Magnemite going up against a Nidorino, fighting towards an unlikely stalemate. All Magnemite can do is paralyse – flip a coin and if it’s heads, the opponent can’t attack or retreat for the next turn – and I used this to stall time and time again. The only other option was to self destruct, knocking itself out and dealing 50 damage. Nidorino has 60HP. I was effectively done in by the (bad) luck of my initial draw. Needless to say, I lost very quickly when a fully charged Machamp was put forward, able to deal more damage than any of my Pokémon could take.

pokemontcg-il1

It sounds dull and tedious, but it was a tense tactical battle. When better decks are constructed and meticulously balanced there’s a lot of potential for more exciting fights; looking at other tables and battles at the event, there were some cunning plans unfolding all around.

Bring out a Porygon and it can be used to flip a Pokemon’s weakness to another element, letting you deal double damage. I saw that, alongside a vitally lucky energy card draw, turn seeming defeat to victory. Even more spectacularly, she pulled a tricky series of tactical switches to remove status effects and turn the tide of the final battle in the small knockout tournament.

The one real problem is that, well, there’s a lot of effort in getting started with the card game. A starter deck is a fine place to start, but then augmenting that sees you grab booster packs, each of which has a shiny card in, but will contain a lot of cards for elements that you might have no need for in your deck. After all, you’re then needing to add fire energy to let that Charmander breathe fire, and there needs to be enough to make that worthwhile. You might as well start a new deck at that point.

Of course, the card game has long ago turned into a video game in its own right, now with plenty of online battling and digital card collecting. Each physical pack includes a code to redeem online. However, there’s still a certain charm to playing card games with actual cards, and being able to step back to the nostalgia of playing with some of the original cards only adds to that.

Written by
I'm probably wearing toe shoes, and there's nothing you can do to stop me!

2 Comments

  1. My son got quite heavily into the trading side of it a few months back. After a while he wanted to play a game so I read the rules and didn’t have a clue what it was talking about.
    Then his school banned the cards and that was the end of that.

  2. Still have most of my old collection (sadly the really good cards were kept separately for safe keeping and seem to have disappeared. Typical).

    The online game is on iPad and PC, it’s pretty good. Can easily be played without spending money on it too (although can be a grind at first if you choose to go fully free to play).

Comments are now closed for this post.