Press B 244: Pokemon TCG Pocket In 2025?

[00:00:00] Gotta catch them all, or do you? Today on...

[00:00:25] Welcome everybody to another episode of Press B To Cancel, your favorite, I can say it again, your favorite retro video game podcast, where this week we're talking about a brand new card game from last year called Pokemon The Card Game Pocket Edition. This is the mobile only game that came out in October of 2024, and I didn't realize how popular it was. I mean, I should have guessed it's Pokemon, but as of December 2024, it had 60 million downloads, which is wild. Wow!

[00:00:55] To talk about this great app that has sweeped my house by storm, at least for the last couple of months, is Werewolf. Wolf, how are you doing this week? I'm doing alright. I'm interested in talking about this because I used to play the card game back in the 90s. When it first came out, I want to say one of the first booster packs I opened had the Charizard first edition in it. And it's a sad story because I traded it away, and now that's worth like thousands. I was going to ask, do I want to know what happened to that Charizard?

[00:01:25] I traded it for like seven cards because it was so wanted. So at the time, I was like, Pokemon cards are never going to be as valuable as some of these magic cards. It's Pokemon. People don't care. It was what, 1998, I think? And so I was like, yeah, whatever. We're going to have fun playing this. So I was looking to build a very specific deck based on the water decks.

[00:01:50] And so I traded it for like, I want to say a Blastoise, a Gyarados, and maybe a couple other throw-ins just because it was so wanted by this other kid who was playing. And I was like, yeah, sure. Like, I never use this thing. I don't play fire decks. I hate it. And I had a really good idea for a water deck. So it was practically unstoppable. The only person who could really beat me was a friend of mine.

[00:02:18] Yeah, we'll get to balance in a little bit because that's my main issue with this game is the balance of the game. I remember when this came out in the 90s, I was a Magic the Gathering kid. We all used to play at lunchtime, lunch period in high school. And I played a shit ton of Magic, a bunch of the early expansions. And then occasionally I would go to the comic book store. For those who are in Toronto, there's a place called 401 Games. Before they moved, I used to go there and play Magic. And occasionally I would buy singles. I'd buy cards. I'd buy packs there.

[00:02:47] And then all of a sudden, people stopped playing Magic. Grown men at the store started playing Pokemon. And like, I have nothing against Pokemon, but I was too old for the cartoon. It's like me watching Power Rangers. It didn't feel right. I was too old for the show. So I never really got into Pokemon. And I don't even think I was into anime at that age, to be honest with you. I came a little bit later on. Well, you were, what, 17 at the time? Yeah. So I was just like a hair too old. Yeah.

[00:03:15] So two years makes all the difference, right? So I wasn't really into it. But yeah, at the time, it felt like a lot of the people I used to do, you know, pick up tournaments with or just pick up games with at stores were now switching to Pokemon. And I did not get it. I played a lot of TCGs back then. I played Battletech and Star Wars, a little bit of Star Trek. But Pokemon, I never really gave the time of day. And it's just, I just never kind of, I just never really got into it.

[00:03:42] And then, you know, as the years have gone by, I've actually sat down and played the Pokemon video games, which I like a number of those and it's fine. But nowadays, my kids are kind of at that age now where I want to introduce them to maybe a card game. I thought about it. We slowly do board games and certain ones. But the last time I went to go buy Magic for them or even Pokemon, the cost of the card game is pretty ridiculous right now.

[00:04:11] So have you looked at the price of just like basic in like current expansion starter decks are outrageously expensive. I don't know if you've taken how much, how much I have not. How much are they? Because I want to say back when I was playing, there was like the Machop Machoke Machamp deck. That was one of the starter decks you could buy. And I feel like there was one or two others, but that was the one you saw most often.

[00:04:38] And I want to say that one was like 27 to 35, depending on, you know, what local shop you bought it from. I'll just keep going here. Pokemon Charizard EX League Battle Deck is 75 bucks at Walmart. That's Canada prices, right? And what do you get for that? It's still like 60 here. You get one ready to play. Well, this is Canadian dollars too.

[00:05:03] So you get one 60 card ready to play deck, six counter dice, one coin flip, two condition markers. So you get in a deck box. So you get some, some, you know, accessories and crap. That's what the Machoke box came with. Really? Even back then? It came with the counters and a coin and all that stuff. So like to get my kids to play Pokemon at home today, I'd have to buy two of those, right? Because I have two kids. So that's like, you know, that's, I mean, that's almost a cost of two video games, which

[00:05:31] I mean, I guess, you know, hobbies are hobbies and they're never gonna be, they're never gonna be cheap. And board games to be fair, board games are quite expensive these days. Although $75 is a high end board game even up here. Yeah. Like I'm thinking of something like Ticket to Ride or something, right? Yeah, that's, that's up there. That's like, like you say, Ticket to Ride or what I think Hero Quest was 75 when that was re-released recently.

[00:05:58] Um, yeah, like even, even a lot of the, uh, Gotham horror board games are only like 50 to 65. I want to say. Like the ones that are 70 plus are the ones that usually have miniatures, plastic pieces inside, right? The ones that are straight up cardboard and paper are never that much money. So Pokemon's ridiculous. And you get a Surtick and that's not the, that's not this, that's not the end of the purchasing. Like these games live off of your buying packs.

[00:06:26] So my big worry is my one daughter is 11 and she's got a, she's a bit impulsive. She's not really great with gauging the value of things. So when you said Charizard and trading it away for, for water cards, she would do that, but she would trade it away from magic beans. Like she, she has no concept of value of Pokemon cards. Cause we've gotten, we've gotten the free Pokemon cards, McDonald's occasionally when those come out. And like, I, I mean, I've, I've made my peace with giving her collectible stuff. I know they're not going to last. I know they're going to disappear.

[00:06:56] If it's not her trading it away for something crazy or stupid, my three-year-old's going to tear him up. So I've kind of given up on valuable pieces of paper for now with her. And my oldest doesn't care about card games anymore. She's, she's a teenager now. She doesn't care. So I've kind of put it off. I stick to board games, games I can put away right now. But, um, I'm interested in the gameplay itself. Cause it's, it's absurdly popular. And I had heard this came out last year, but I never really gave it the time of day.

[00:07:26] I thought it was just collecting cards because there are, there have been apps where all you do is collect fake cards and no gameplay, but this actually has gameplay. So did you, did you play this at all last year when it came out or did you just start it this year? Uh, I started it. I want to say, you know what? I think I started it like maybe the 20, maybe like the 30th. Or 31st of December.

[00:07:55] Cause you were talking about it and I had seen some articles about it and stuff like that. And I was like, eh, I don't care. And then the funny thing is I got to my brother's, he just got a tablet like a month and a half before I got there. So he was like still messing around with that and all that. And I walked in and he was like, dude, I just pulled a Celebi on a wonder pig. And I was like, what are you talking about? And he was like, I had a one in five chance of getting this card and I got it. And I was like, all right, that's pretty cool.

[00:08:24] And I had no idea what it was, but he was like, yeah, it's pretty neat. Uh, and he was, you know, he played a little bit of it when I was younger. Cause he was adjacent to it. He never really got into Pokemon. He got into Yu-Gi-Oh! He was that era cause he's 10 years younger. Okay. Um, but he understands and you know, he, he loved Pokemon regardless. So he was checking it out and I was like, fine, I guess I'll check this out. And so that's when I friended him and I think I messaged you to friend you on there a couple

[00:08:54] of days later. But yeah, I have been, I've lost more time to this than I care to admit. I guess me as well. Like I thought I picked it up and started playing it because, cause it had battles in it and deck building. And like the only other deck building game I played recently is much to you guys are sick of me talking about is Marvel snap. So I'm like, you know what, let me, let me try Pokemon. Cause that's an actual more classic card game, right?

[00:09:23] Cause Marvel snap, I think it's like 10 cards or something very small deck sizes. So I picked this up and I gave it a go. My kids all saw me playing it and they're, they're into Pokemon. So they're like, well, we want to play now too. So I ended up installing this in everybody's phone and tablets over the Christmas break. And we, we gave it a go. And I guess we'll break down the parts of the app itself. But the big thing is it's, it's not as true to the card game, the cardboard card game. Like I thought it was high. And that's mostly comes down to the deck building rules.

[00:09:53] So like I never played the original, but just to run down really quickly about the digital version, uh, it's 20 cards in a deck when no more than two of the same card in your deck and no energy cards. Yeah. And by two of the same card, they mean two cards with the same name. So while you might have, uh, here's a good example to explain that there are cards of Pikachu. And then there was a limited edition card of Pikachu EX. That's way more powerful.

[00:10:20] You can have two Pikachus and two Pikachu EXs in your deck. The weird thing is you can't evolve a Pikachu EX into a Raichu. Oh, can't you? No, nope. I've tried. It doesn't. Well, I wonder if they've patched it since, but when I tried early on, it wasn't letting me and I, I was really confused by it. And I was like, I guess that's something I have to plan around when I'm playing fights. Well, cause I know in the card, the original card game, um, you'd have cards with level numbers in the title, I guess.

[00:10:50] So you could have a Gengar 43 and a Gengar 58 or something, and that still counted as two Gengars, right? For example. And when it came to evolving, it didn't matter which one, as long as it had Gengar in the title, but there were, there were special Pokemon. Like, um, I think there's, um, uh, like ashes Pikachu, I think was a special card and that one can't be evolved into Raichu, but any other Pikachu can. So even the card, the original card game had special rules and they kind of tweaked that a little bit in the digital version.

[00:11:19] It's not quite, it's not one-to-one like I thought it originally was going to be. There was, they, they started having like variations on that after the first couple expansions back when, cause there was, uh, there was the base set. And then I think there was jungle, then fossil, then rocket. I think was the fourth expansion. Not super sure, but I know rocket was still around there. And so that was when you started to see dark Pokemon.

[00:11:45] And so you could evolve a Pokemon into a dark version, but you couldn't evolve a dark version into a standard Pokemon, I think was the rule. And so confusing. Yeah. So if you like, if you had like a, you know, a basic stage one, stage two Pokemon set of evolutions, if you got to let's, I don't think there was, but here's an example. If you had a squirtle and you went to dark war turtle, you couldn't go back to blastoise.

[00:12:15] Blastoise. It had to be a dark blastoise. Dark blastoise. Okay. Interesting. I didn't know that was a thing. Stuff like that. Yeah. And I mean, not before we started recording, um, I'd asked, you know, how many expansions there were for the original card game. And you said there was what? A hundred. I, I hesitate to believe this because this is the answer that Google AI gave me. And so I don't know. Okay. Um, oh no, this is from the war game.

[00:12:45] Hammer website. Okay. So yeah, there have been over 100 mainline Pokemon sets with booster, with special boosters and promos adding even more. So that's wild. Oh, I'm looking back. Uh, wow. This is such a throwback. There were looks like five starter sets for the original Pokemon card game, but one of those was a two player starter set. So it came with two decks in it.

[00:13:14] And I think that was the one that was like 30, 35 bucks. And the other ones were more like 20. Right. And that makes sense. Cause like you're basically getting it. That's what I would probably get for my kids. I'd want a two deck starter set, but I don't want to pay $150 for it. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. It's funny seeing these old names. I'm like, Oh man, I had completely forgotten about these. So I'll not, I'll not linger on them, but seeing these titles is like, Oh fuck. I forgot. We used to name our decks.

[00:13:44] It's like my water. I named rain dance. Like name and decks. Okay. Oh, and you know, I actually did that with some of my magic decks back in the day. So that's, I've done that before. Um, so it's, it's kind of crazy. So I thought the digital version might be a recreation of the card game, but it's totally not. The, the sets are completely different. Yeah. The, uh, the base set, they actually split the base set up and I think it's, was it Pokemon apex or something?

[00:14:12] And there's actually three different versions of boosters. Genetic apex. There's right. And there's cards that can be found in all three and then cards that can only be found in the Pikachu or the Charizard or the Mewtwo boosters. And I saw that and I was like, oh gosh, what a mess. Well, cause like you're, you're trying to collect and like the worst thing in any kind of card game when you're collecting is to get duplicates. So when you're, you have three expansions that very sets that you can pick from and you're

[00:14:40] going to get duplicates and across the board, it does suck. I don't like it. They did release an expansion late last year called, uh, was it mythical Island with Mew is the focus. And that was just one type type of booster. And I'm like, oh, that's much better. I'll collect that one. And I got almost all of the mythical Island cards. I got the base cards. I have most of them as well. I've actually, I drew two Celebi. So I started, I I'm able to build that stupid meta deck you hate. No, I have it as well. I just hate to use it.

[00:15:09] I feel dirty afterwards, but we'll get there. But I like that. I like that style of expansion where it's smaller, easier to collect. And that was kind of my, my, my jam. I get to collect a card. Maybe I can, maybe I can get the whole set. It was neat. I thought that was cool. And then they were announcing that they're bringing trading this year and that they were going to bring a new expansion. So I was kind of interested in that, but then the new expansion, which is what is it? Space time Smackdown. Yeah. What a name. And there's two types of boosters.

[00:15:36] And it's the same freaking deal as, as a, you know what? Yeah. I got to say, like when I first saw that they had separated the three with the first set, I thought it was like a huge pain in the ass. And to a degree it is, you kind of have to pick and choose what pack do I want to pull from this time to try and get what pulls, you know? But at the same time, once you have everything from one of those, you can stop pulling from that one or everything you want from one of those.

[00:16:03] You can stop pulling from that one and raise your chances of getting the stuff you want from the other one or two that are available. So in that sense, it's not terrible, but you know, you might end up with one or two of the cards you really want. And 17 of some card you could care less about because it's in all three of them. Right. Yeah. Like you end up getting a ton of duplicates and it's, it's not the end of the world. So they do what, um, actually Merle snap does this as well.

[00:16:30] What you can do in, in Pokemon is you can take your duplicates and you can convert them to, uh, you can basically, um, trash them and do cosmetic upgrades to your cards. So for example, I have, um, Pikachu and I had a bunch of Pikachus. So I trashed a bunch and now when I play my Pikachu, lightning bolts show up on the screen, like small stuff like that, like small cosmetic. Yeah. I do like that. That's neat. Yeah. Yeah. I like that kind of stuff and that's interesting. So that's fine. Um, I don't know.

[00:17:00] It's, it's the collecting thing is okay. You get two packs a day for free, which I think is more than enough. You also get, um, a free, uh, package from the store, which usually includes, um, special hourglasses, hourglasses. You trade in, uh, one to knock, you know, an hour off of the, the wait timer in the game. So if you really like when the new expansion hit, I had about a hundred of these hourglass things. I used a bunch of them to open up a bunch of packs of the new expansion. So I feel even for free, I was never really lacking or wanting packs.

[00:17:29] And like the sets are not huge that you want to buy like a hundred packs. I felt like I had a competitive deck within, within a day, honestly, of opening packs. What about you? Um, not within a day, but you know, within a few days, but I was, I was, I had a decent deck within about three or four days where I could, you know, beat the odd person. But most of the time I was still losing to that stupid Celebi superior, superior deck,

[00:17:57] which I was, I was getting real tired of seeing just that deck constantly. And then of course, you know, I got myself a Celebi and I was like, well, I got a bunch of superior, so I'll build that deck too. And just have my one Celebi. And every time I'd use it, they'd be like, nah, you're playing a flyer deck. And I'm like, sucks. So that ties back into the, I guess the deck building rules again. So I felt I had a competitive deck.

[00:18:25] I did fighting off the, off the bat and, uh, I did a little bit of Morrowack and then I did a little bit of Marshadow, but the, uh, because it's 20 card limit, it's, it's much easier to get, I think a workable deck together. You don't have to worry about energy cards in your deck building. It's, um, you sign an energy type for your deck and then it basically comes up every round. You get one free energy. And, uh, if you want to play, although if you want to play a multi energy type of type of deck, I don't know how great that is because it's random, which one you get, you, you can

[00:18:53] put like a, if I'm doing fighting and I don't know, I, uh, water, then I put those two energy types in my deck type and it will give me a random one every turn. I've been kind of screwed by that. So I don't see many multi-type decks online. I'll see a few that will use normal type Pokemon because they can take any kind of energy, but, um, yeah, but, and that's, and that's fine. Um, the issue, oh, the other difference is, um, weaknesses, right? Everybody knows from the video games, you know, Pokemon's are weak to different types.

[00:19:22] And I believe in the game and on the original card game, it was double the damage if your, your unit was, uh, weak to another type, but in this it's just plus 20 damage, which still hurts, but it's not, it's not double damage. Um, but one of the things that is weird for me. Double damage back then. Cause it just says weakness. It doesn't tell you, you know, weakness minus 20 or something. Right. Yeah. So that's, that's a bit different. It makes it a little bit fair. Oh, did they? Okay.

[00:19:52] So yeah, so far we haven't seen any resistances here, just weakness and it's plus 20 damage from certain types, I guess. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And in the original card game, some cards had weaknesses or, uh, resistances. And so if you did that type of damage to it, it would be that. And I don't remember if you rounded up or down, but it would cut it in half. Okay. So what's interesting to me is, is the mechanics of the game. And I want to know, cause you played the original, a lot of cards.

[00:20:20] I feel like a lot of, especially the meta cards, we can, we can start with celebrity, honestly involve coin flipping. So, right. So even the Marowak is like, I think Marowak was, um, flip a coin twice and it does 50 damage per each heads. And with my luck, half the time is doing nothing, but a lot of the best cards are coin flips. And if you want to explain what celebrity is, cause that one's an interesting one. Okay. So it's not a Pokemon I'm familiar with. I couldn't tell you what generation it's from.

[00:20:49] However, it is a, in the, in the card game, it is a leaf type Pokemon. Um, and starting at two energy put on it for every leaf energy it has on it. It flips a coin for every heads you flip. It does 50 damage. And then you've got, let's, let's, let's talk about that meta deck a little bit. Once you've got, you know, you put your little, uh, snivy out there. I think it was.

[00:21:19] I think so. Yeah. And then that evolves into, Oh, I don't remember what it's called. The middle one, the set, the stage one, and then it becomes superior at stage two. And once you've got superior out, it's every play, every leaf type energy you have on a Pokemon counts as two energy. So now, you know, if you've got Celebi out there and you've got three on them and you, you've got superior there, you've got six coin flips to try and do damage.

[00:21:48] And it's just absurd. Yeah. Like I sent you a screenshot of somebody did 450 damage to my, my Pokemon that was in the active slot. And I was like, Holy crap. I couldn't even be mad. It was just so overpowered. The first time I saw that deck, I think they dropped 10 coin flips on me. I'm just, I'm just like, what, what the hell is the first week I played the game. And like, this is what a lot of people are playing with was this deck. Yeah.

[00:22:14] I guess they try and bounce it out a little bit with, um, there's regular Pokemon and then there's the EX Pokemon. I don't know if they had those in the, in the, in the original game, but in this game, it's a first three points wins the match. Taking them one Pokemon is one point, but if you take down an EX Pokemon, it's two points. So there is a risk to using the EX Pokemon, but they are so absurdly more powerful than anything else. It's almost crazy not to use one. I don't know. Yeah.

[00:22:41] Um, so I will explain, uh, the winning conditions in this. Uh, it's, it feels very different from the original card game. So in this, you, you only need to get three points. It's not three kills. It's, it's three points. So EX Pokemon being more powerful are worth two points if you knock one out. So, you know, in some games you only need to beat two Pokemon.

[00:23:09] In the original card game, it was like the game where, you know, you each had up to six Pokemon. You had like one in play, five on the bench. Okay. And if you knocked out six Pokemon from your opponent or they ran out of Pokemon, you win. And the way you would keep track of how many you got was when you first shuffle your deck, you take six and set them aside for every Pokemon you knock out, you get a reward card.

[00:23:41] Okay. That is different. Which was interesting, but could also screw you because you might have all your good cards in there if you had a bad shuffle. So it's. Yeah. Yeah. Cause like in the mobile game, I feel it's actually like we just mentioned the Celebrity deck and how it kind of relies on Celebrity, which is an EX card, which is fine. But then you have to evolve the other one twice. And that I think in a regular 60 card deck would have been cumbersome. But in this, in this one, there's only 20 cards.

[00:24:11] There's, you have very easy access to Professor Oak and Pokeball cards, which basically let you pull Pokemon from your deck or shuffle things. And I found it very easy to get the cards I want almost every game. There's still the occasional game where I get shafted on, on, you know, not having the cards I want, but more often than not, I get the cards in my build. If I have a combo ready in my deck, I usually get it. And I guess that's not the same thing with the original game. Well, okay. So here's a good example of differences in deck building, right?

[00:24:40] Let's say with superior Celebi deck, that's two of each of those Pokemon is what you'd ideally want. So that's eight of your card slots out of 20. Right. If you could, if it were built the way the original card game was built, a 60 card deck, you would probably want four Celebi's because you could put four of the same card and you'd probably want to do like four, four, three up to, from Snivy to superior.

[00:25:10] And so that would put you at 11, 15. So a quarter of your deck. It's, it sounds like a lot, but it's actually a smaller portion of your deck than it is in this game. Yeah. Cause deck building this one, you have 20 cards. Realistically 12 to 15 or 12 cards are Pokemon. The rest are like support cards.

[00:25:35] So yeah, I, I generally keep it, you know, 12 to 14 depending. Cause some of them there's, I don't know if you've done a lot of the solo battles, uh, but some of those have challenges where you have to do it with all one, two or three diamond Pokemon. And for that, like the easy way to explain that is, you know, there's tier one, two, three and four, and those are represented by diamonds.

[00:26:05] And then there's the rare ones that are one star, two star, which super confusing way to do it. I don't understand why they changed what kind of thing it is. Like the star cards, five and a star maybe like, well, I think the start of star cards just the like nicer looking versions of diamond cards. Usually. Yes. And that's so frustrating because I have some, I'll explain this real quick.

[00:26:31] I have some really good decks that if I could do Pokemon that qualify as one, two or three diamond cards, I'd have a real easy time on these fights, but no, I drew them as one star versions or two star versions. Stats and moves are identical. They're just neater looking. Like I don't care. I just want the card. I don't give a rat's ass that it's fancy. Look, it's a video game. I'm not interested in the foil.

[00:27:00] I just want the moves. Like with the real cards, I get it. That's the collectible aspect of it. Cause I found like, I love collecting the cards and I got excited because mythical Island, for example, had 68 cards in it. So it's a small size expansion. That's only the diamond cards, right? I guess the core cards that actually are with unique abilities and whatnot above that 68 diamond cards. There is a ranking of stars and there's even a crown as a chase card. And you're right.

[00:27:28] They're all, they're all cosmetic rainbow borders. The one celebrity, it's a, it's an immersive celebrity. It's the same as the original celebrity and that's diamond ranked, but the immersive one zooms in when you first get it. And there's a weird painted scene. It's neat. I don't know if you can look at it again, but it's neat. I believe you can. Let me find out real quick. Okay. So while you're looking at that, it's. Oh yeah. Here you go. Uh, there we go.

[00:27:59] I held the card. So let's watch the YouTube video. Yeah. It zooms in and it's, it's cool as shit. Right. But it's like travels around the forest around it and shows you some other Pokemon in the area. And it's really cool, but it pisses me off because my Celebi, I have two of this card. I can't use them in those challenges. Oh, okay. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:28:21] So like one of the challenges that was, um, over the holidays, I think it was, was there was like a blast twice challenge and it was a series of computer battles. You fight against the computer and, uh, they got harder and harder water decks and you're right. Each deck had kind of Chivo challenges you could do for each, each one. And you got items if you, if you beat them. And one of the final ones was, I think it was like beating with electrical deck and then beating with not electrical deck and then beating it with a deck with only the diamond rank cards. Basically nothing fancy.

[00:28:50] So, and I, and I see why they do that. That's, that's fun. It helps like restricting what deck you can use as a neat idea. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:29:36] Yeah. When it comes to the trading system, I guess we can talk about in a few minutes. It was hard to find the cards I still need and I really don't like it. Oh yeah. Like I, I eventually found a way if you, if you go into one view, I think like when you buy or when you use booster packs, you, um, for any booster pack you use, you get like five pack points. And the idea is you can use those points as a consolation prize to buy a card. If you're not getting the one you really, really want. Yeah.

[00:30:02] And on that screen, if you scroll down, you can see the blank ones where you're missing. So I remember going through each of the 20 cards I still needed that were hidden rares and, and wishlisting them so that when I'm going to, um, one of the other apps in the apps called wonder pick, at least it would highlight on the wonder pick. If one of the cards I want is there. So, and we should explain wonder pick what that is. That's just another, another way to feed the gambling addiction.

[00:30:26] I guess if you're, you get the two packs a day, but if you go to wonder pick, you have another currency and you get to see, I guess the idea is, um, packs that are open. And, but other players, uh, especially friends, like I'll see the ones that you've opened up. Right. Yeah. If you have friends, their pulls are take precedent in this list before you see random other players polls. And I think you only see like 10 to 12 booster polls from other players at a time.

[00:30:55] So, and then like the most recent two or three that have expired and you can wake those back up to pull from those as well. With yet another currency. Yeah. It's an online game for, it's a gotcha game for sure. But yeah, you go to the wonder pick and when you use a currency to do a wonder pick and you can do, you get free currency every day. Uh, you can usually do one or two and, uh, it basically gives you one card from that booster. So it gives you a little bit more lean, like a agency in saying, okay, here's a booster pack that Wolf got.

[00:31:25] I could use that rare card. I'll take a gamble on it and you might get that card. And I'll say, honestly, more often than not, I do get the rare card in, in a pick. Like wonder pick has been pretty generous in terms of what I get from it. But I never feel like I want to spend money on more packs. I never feel like I'm missing anything by not, not doing it. No, I did. Uh, they have a pay to get an extra pack a day. Premium thing, like premium license or whatever they call it. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:31:53] But, um, you kind of don't need that. I did it for the two weeks for free that they offer everybody, at least at the time. I don't know if they're going to keep doing that over time, but, um, yeah, it didn't, it didn't seem like it made a huge difference. And honestly, it kind of frustrated me that it seemed like it also got reset when you'd pull the 10 decks or the 10 boosters at once. Yeah. If you do the 10 boosters at once, it doesn't just reset your 12 hour.

[00:32:21] It resets the 24 hour one too. Oh, that's kind of weird. But I'm wondering if maybe the amount of hours was pulled from that first to reduce the cost. That might've been the case. So, okay. But yeah, it was, it was weird mathematically to try and figure out what's happening with that. Yeah. The poke, I did the trial too, for Pokemon gold, just to see what it was offering. There's cosmetics, right?

[00:32:51] And I mean, we can mention that too. The app has a few different ways you can display your cards and your profile, right? There's badges to put in your profile. There's deck boxes. You can customize a little bit. There's something called display boards where I guess on your profile, you can make a highlight one card. On a special album. There's, there's stuff like that. But again, to manage a collection is still pretty cumbersome in the app. Yeah. And to find what cards you want, especially when it comes to trading, I felt was really difficult to do. Yeah.

[00:33:20] As of right now. So, you know, as of we're recording this early February of 2025. No, it's, there's no good way to trade that I've seen. Like you just offer up a random card to another player. Who knows if they need it? Cause you can't see what they have. And then they can either be like, oh yeah, that's interesting. Let me offer you this card. Maybe you need it. Who trades like that?

[00:33:47] We've, so we've been trading Pokemon cards for almost 30 years at this point. You guys should have figured out how to do it digitally with relative. So the way to do it, cause my, my daughter was, is she's into the trading and she was, look, she was more excited for the trading than I was. And she really wanted two muse because there's a special badge you get if you have three muse for whatever reason. So I have a bunch of them. So I'm like, all right, I'll trade them with you.

[00:34:15] And so we're sitting on the couch and I was like, all right, well, I want to get something worth it too. Like equal value. So I'm like, okay, pull up your collection. Let me see what you have. And then I pulling up my collection to see what I'm missing and just trying to filter it, trying to scroll down, trying to find the ones that I want that she has and vice versa. It was really a pain in the butt. And then when it comes to the actual trading, I send them you to her. She picks one of the cards, hopefully that I want and sends it to me. Then we both have to verify it. Then we had both have to click it.

[00:34:45] And then the transfer goes through and it's a long animation. It took, I swear, I swear it took 30 minutes to trade two damn cards. Never again. And on top of it, after when you do the trade, it costs currency to do. And when you run out of the currency, you have to destroy cards to get more currency. And the more valuable the card, the more currency you get. It's ass. And like they've already acknowledged that's not great. And that the main reason they did this way was to avoid bot accounts, right? People scamming the system, I guess.

[00:35:14] And they said they're going to change it in some way in the future. I don't know what the Pokemon company has in mind, but as it stands now, trading sucks. It's just not worth it. Yeah. And it's not even all cards, right? A lot of the cards you can't trade, right? They said they're going to release what cards you can trade over time, which is bullshit, right? At what point did you buy Pokemon cards and you can't trade the good ones right away? Like nobody. It's crazy. Yeah. Like when I opened that Charizard, people were like, dude, I want that Charizard.

[00:35:43] And I was like, no, this is my crown jewel right now. This is what I'm going to build my deck on. And that's what I did for a while. I had a deck that was based around Charizard and stomped people with it because it was, you know, it was brand new. So the people that were playing, I had this card that was just a monster. It's crazy. The trading is going to be changed, I guess. I don't know. It seems to be very active in terms of like a game.

[00:36:13] It is definitely a gotcha game, right? Where you get two packs a day. You can buy more if you're really into it. If you're hooked. They're constantly adding new stuff, right? There's new events every single week. And the events are usually along the lines of like you get free cards and a wonder pick, right? Or they have promo cards that you can't get anywhere else that are part of the Chansey's bonus, I think it is. So you have to use your wonder picks for that. But it's unique cards. That's interesting.

[00:36:39] I mean, there's different computer battles that are really cool with the Chivos, right? Those are neat. And you get items for everything, right? And there's a lot of the items you get. These tickets you can spend on again on cosmetics. Like you can get card backs and themes for the layout of the board on your side. A lot of neat stuff is there. So it's definitely actively being done. They know what they're doing with it. But I don't know. Like my experience with the meta and playing online against other folks. Like it was all Celebre for until this new expansion.

[00:37:08] I haven't even tried what the new expansion is. So I don't know what the new meta is recently. But the Celebre decks were just draining. The Celebre decks. And as of right now, again, they do still turn up. But not like every second or third game anymore. Now they're a lot less common. You do see a greater variety of decks being put out there. Okay. Really big one is using... I want to say it's Palkia.

[00:37:37] Because Palkia is metal type. And then Palkia with like some dragons to just eat up damage and do damage back while they get that thing beefed up. I've also been seeing more water decks because of Dialga. So Dialga, Gyarados, Manaphy. What's the Eevee water evolution? Aquarion. Which, you know, I had a deck that was all that except for Dialga before they released Space Time. So I was having fun with that deck. Right.

[00:38:07] There's also the Mewtwo Cresselia, I think is what it's called. Cresselia EX, Mewtwo EX. Okay. And Gardevoir. Because Gardevoir can just pull an energy out of the bank and throw an extra energy on every turn. Which, that's the deck I like to play with. Because if I manage to get two Gardevoirs out, everybody's toast. Right.

[00:38:34] Half the time, once I get my Mewtwo and Gardevoir out, people concede. Yeah, because Mewtwo is the one where it takes four energy to do the attack. It's bonkers damage, but then it loses two energy, I think, right? Right. But if every turn you can do 150 damage, which kills 99% of the cards in one go. Yeah. And then just next turn, throw two energy on them and do it again. Like, you're unstoppable.

[00:39:01] So, and that's the thing that kind of weirded me out with this game is that's not like, it's not like Snap where it's about territory control. It's not like Magic where things will live more than a round or two. Things die really quickly in this game. Yeah. Was the coin flip for 50 damage a thing in the original game? Or is that just a digital thing? No, that was in the original game. I'm looking for the Zapdos card from the base set. Because I think the Zapdos card is very similar.

[00:39:32] So, yeah, there was a lot of stuff like this in the original. So, the base set Zapdos had two moves. One, three lightning energy and a colorless or four lightning energy. Weird choice, but okay. So, that was... The first one was flip a coin. If tails, Zapdos does 30 damage to itself. And that did 60 damage to the opposing Pokemon.

[00:40:00] The other move was Thunderbolt, which does 100 damage to discard all energy cards attached to Zapdos in order to use this attack. So, there was a lot of that discard energy, flip a coin. We were flipping coins all the time. It was frustrating. We stopped using the stupid little cardboard ones. Because they'd get janked out and start flipping. And you could like kind of cheat it a little bit. And so, we were like, alright, we're not using those. Bring a quarter, man. Yeah, use a real... Really. Well, in Canada, we have loonies. So, it'd be a lot better up here.

[00:40:30] But, yeah. Yeah, like, it was like that. I think some of us started bringing slammers. Yep. Pogs, yeah. Yeah, I don't know about how I feel about this card flip thing. It's just too random, I guess. I mean, maybe that's the point. But it just doesn't feel like you have much control over the flow of combat. And I don't like it. I mean, there's a difference between a coin flip and dice. I might have felt better if it was dice rolling. Which is weird. There's not much difference there. But, that's bizarre. That's a weird mechanic.

[00:41:00] You know what it is? I'm just too used to Magic the Gathering. There was almost no coin flipping in Magic. There was a few special cases of coin flips. Yeah. But it was not a regular thing. No. Coin flips were all over this game. It was... Okay. And it was just as cumbersome in that as it feels in this digital game. Like, I kind of wish the coin flips were just all randomized. Because me having to do eh to start every one.

[00:41:29] And it's stupid that you have to do that. Because if you've got the Celebi doing 10 coin flips, you got to do that first one. And then the other nine are all done automatically. It's like, well, then why do I even have to participate? Just do it. Why can't I just tap a button and it does it automatically? Yeah, I know. That's weird. I don't... It's... It's fine. But it's definitely a game. I guess if you're a fan of the original game, then this would be unfamiliar. But I guess I'm not a really big fan of the game. I'd rather...

[00:41:58] I'd rather the video game. The video game, there's no coin flips. Right? There's... You had multiple attacks for every Pokemon. Every single Pokemon had multiple attacks. In the card game, only a handful had multiple attacks. There's a few exceptions, right? But I will say, I like the concept of rental decks and deck plans. So they kind of know what the meta is going to be when they release a new set. And they have built into the game deck plans you can look at.

[00:42:27] And if you have the cards, you click one button and it'll build that deck. They also have rental decks where you can use a deck type for a certain number of times for free. Just for the hell of it. And it gives you a taste of what other cards could be. You can't always do that. But there's enough rental tokens in the game that I never felt like I was wanting more. But that's neat. So I mean, I got to try a Celebrity deck before I had all the cards. And that's fine. So definitely... And even the deck builder, there's also an auto deck builder in the game.

[00:42:57] It's not bad. It's not amazing. No, it's not. But it's definitely not bad. It's... Honestly, the first probably six decks I built of the various types, I would say, okay, auto build this type of deck. That way, at the very least, I had a jumping off point. And I'd be like, well, I'm not going to use that. I'm not going to use that. Let's remove those. Let's put these in because I want to use these. You know, but it... You know, it removed a lot of the hassle of like trying to decide, okay, what do I want to do with this deck?

[00:43:27] I don't even know what Pokemon I have yet because I just started playing. I don't know what's happening. Yeah. So do this for me and see what happens. And, you know, early on, it was throwing a lot of colorless into my deck, which I didn't really care for, but that's all I had. So it's what I could do. It fills it up. Yeah. Now, I build my own decks because I've played enough and I have enough cards to where I kind of know what I've got and what I'm going to use.

[00:43:52] And honestly, I'm kind of surprised because with the new expansion, there's a lot of cards that are, you know, repeat Pokemon from the previous sets, but slightly weaker. They must be different in some way then? No, they'll have like 10 HP less or they'll do 10 HP less damage. Or something like that. It's really bizarre. There's a lot of that.

[00:44:20] Whereas there was overlap from genetic apex and mythical island, but they would be vastly different. One would be like way overpowered in one way, but kind of self-defeating in another way compared to its previous version or something like that. And this one, they're like, nah, they all just tiny bit suck here. And so I was like, what is the video game to a degree? Right. Because in the video game, different levels of Pokemon do different things. That made more sense, I guess. Yeah.

[00:44:49] But I'd understand it if they just tried to like balance it out a tiny bit or something. You know, maybe make it do 10 less damage or have 10 less hit points, but its attack does a little something that it didn't before. I don't know. Right. But no, it's literally just like it has 10 fewer hit points. It does 10 fewer damage. And it's move costs the same. So I'm looking at it like, well, that's just not going to happen for me. I don't care about that.

[00:45:18] So I was kind of like going, eh, I don't care about this at first. And then I started seeing people using some of the other cards that are really cool from it. And I was like, okay, I see where you're going. So yeah, like Dialga is really good. Palkia is really good. When you first look at them and you're thinking of the original metas from like a month ago, a month ago, they don't sound great. But with the new metas that are out now, they're really powerful and kind of scary.

[00:45:46] And, you know, it's they've I feel like more deck types have become feasible with this new expansion. Okay. Yeah, I heard that like it was hard to build a metal deck in the first like last year. But now with the new expansion, they've added a whole bunch more metal type cards. Dragon decks. I've heard they've added more dragon type cards to the expansion now. So it's a lot easier to do a dragon deck. There was one you could do, but it was the same cards everybody used. Now it's a bit of a different. Yeah.

[00:46:14] There's also some scarier dark type because the dark was generally not super OP in health pool or damage output. And now they've got a couple that are kind of even it out. They're still not super OP in either of those regards. But like the dark right EX, every time you put an energy on him, it does 20 damage to the opponent's active Pokemon. So they've figured it out a little bit. And the balance seems a little better.

[00:46:42] And so I'm my win ratio at this point is probably just above 50%. Right. Which is typical for a game. I'm running into all sorts of various decks instead of all celebre. Oops. You know? Yeah. It was demoralizing. I'm not going to lie. There's a point where I'm just like, you know what? I'm done. And I have a celebre deck. It just, I don't like using it all the time.

[00:47:09] The deck I like the most is it's a fighting type deck and it uses Marshadows. Marshadows when the Pokemon that is active dies, it does a shit ton damage for the first attack. So I would have two Marshadows on my deck and I would just have it come in, brutalize who killed my Pokemon and then I'd retreat him. Or I would just, he would die and I'd get another one in. And I won more often than not because he was enough with that ability to take down an EX Pokemon and that got me two points. And Marshadows himself is only one point worth.

[00:47:39] So it was, it was neat to kind of gain the system for those who have used EX Pokemon. That was the way to do it. And that was kind of interesting. And I liked that. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we're seeing now like with the Alga and Polk and Palkia, like their damage output is like 150, 160 damage. And, you know, then they don't have just 150 hit points anymore. They've got 160. So you can't one shot them regardless.

[00:48:05] And then they put on the Cape that gives them an extra 20 HP because there's tools in this new expansion. So you can put berries on them or clothing on them or something like that. And which I like the idea. I'm not upset about that. I think it makes decks a little bit more interesting and customizable. But now my Mewtwo EX doesn't just pulverize everything in one go. So I have to be a little bit more like, I actually have to retreat him now.

[00:48:34] I can't just let him sit out there and soak up damage while he's kicking ass. So I have to, you got to pick and choose what you're doing. And I do appreciate that. I do like that. It's more varied decks. You're coming across people playing as all types instead of just leaf type now, which is cool. Yeah. Because like the issues I had, whereas like you said, it's you couldn't attach items before this new expansion.

[00:49:00] So, but there were items like there's potions, but potions only gave you gave one Pokemon 20 health back and you only could ever have two of those in your deck. There is Giovanni, which is a great card. A lot of people use and that gives you plus 10 damage. But again, that's only one attack. And there's blue. I think that gives minus 10 damage, but it was, it was not a lot of, of variation in what you could do to a Pokemon's attacks. And it was only a one time use. So that kind of wasn't great.

[00:49:27] I really do feel like the game still feels like, well, either I obliterate him or he obliterates me. And there wasn't a whole lot of in between, right? Sometimes you'd have somebody drop like a really high health Pokemon, but, but, but they have no energy on it. So they can't attack with it. They only do it because it's, it's a damaged sponge while they build their bench. And that's okay. I see that. But then those matches kind of drawn out and they can last upwards of 10 minutes and that becomes frustrating. So, and the funny thing is that's how my friend played.

[00:49:56] He had a deck that was like, uh, I think in the original base set, Alakazam could move energy, like could move damage around from different Pokemon to different Pokemon. All you want. You can just shuffle it around all you want. And then I think he had a Chansey in there and Chansey could heal. Okay. So he'd like move just enough energy or damage to the Chansey out front to heal itself.

[00:50:23] And so it was so frustrating. This is why he was the only one who really beat me with my deck, but. Yeah. But you know, that's the kind of stuff that makes the game. Like, I like that kind of variety of, of things you can do. So it's not just bashing the active Pokemon. There was a, there's a water Pokemon that will damage the back row of bench, bench Pokemon. I love that kind of stuff. I think right. You actually damages. Right. You does. Yeah. Yeah. So I would like to see more stuff like that. So it becomes more interesting.

[00:50:52] So it's not just, well, my, my bench Pokemon are safe. I can just build them up. And then I like the variety and they, it does seem like they're writing a bunch of cards. Those new expansions are pretty large. There's a lot of cards in those ones. They're not 68 like mythical Island. There's, there's quite a bit in there. So, I mean, and they got, I mean, how many hundreds of Pokemon are there that they can pull from? And it's all ideas from the original card game, right? Like that they can do. So that's, it's pretty, pretty crazy. Yeah.

[00:51:20] The most recent expansion has 155 cards. Right. Whereas the first set had a hundred, no, 226. The original. Yeah. Yeah. But then the second was only 68 and now 155. So there's a lot of cards in the game, not even counting the promos that are in this, which I have my issues with the promo cards.

[00:51:48] They don't qualify as one, two, three diamonds. They're specifically promo. No. Oh, okay. All right. Yeah. Cause like they have a one, two, three diamond challenge. You can't use your potions to heal your Pokemon cause they're promo cards, which is so stupid to me. You get, cause you get free promos when you do the tutorial in the game, you get a promo of all the basic cards, a potion, pokeball, professor Oak. You get those shiny ones. Yeah.

[00:52:15] So you don't want to use those for the challenges, but I mean, how often are you doing, are you doing those challenges though? I find I do it once to get the free items and then I'm kind of done with it, I guess. Cause I don't do much of the CPU battles. Once I do the diamond challenge, that's fine. But like, I have to build a stupid deck to make it work. Right. That's the first, like I spend more time building those decks than I do building my decks that are actually good at pummeling people. Right. I know it's, it's neat. I don't know.

[00:52:45] I don't know how long I'll keep playing this. Like I've been, I haven't played an online match since the new expansion came out. I should give that a go. I still kind of log in for 10, 15 minutes to. So it's the same thing. I, I do my two packs. I do my wonder pick or two. Cause my, my three-year-old is like, I pick a card, I pick a card and she'll run over and smack my phone to pick a wonder pick card. So she's into that. And then, um, I'll do the free item in the store and then doing all those activities. There's a, there's daily missions. Cause of course there is.

[00:53:15] And you get items from that. So I'll do the daily mission. So like that, that whole like routine takes 10 to 15 minutes. So that's, they've already got their hooks in, but I mean, I don't know if I want to do that every day without playing the game. So, and if I play the game, I only ever do one or two matches. I never do. I never do a series of matches. It's not like Marvel snap, Marvel snap. The matches are really fun. They're longer to be fair, but I felt like I would sit and do Marvel snap for an hour when I was into that a day, right? Or a half an hour at the very least.

[00:53:43] This game is much more brief of my time. So I don't know. Well, I'm there's, they, they have events. Uh, so right now they have, they, they have various emblem events that come, come around where they're like, they encourage you to battle other players. And I have played enough now to where I have 25 wins out of the 45 needed to get the top emblem from it. So I sit and sometimes I'll play, you know, two, three battles in a row. And then I'm like, all right, I've had my fill.

[00:54:13] Cause you know, some of them, people just run away real quick and I'm like, all right, I'll just do more. And then some were like, it takes 10, 12 minutes for me to lose. And so I, at first I was getting frustrated with people conceding and me having to concede early on. But now I'm like, uh, I don't care so much cause it means the battle is over with sooner. If I'm looking at something and there's no way for me to win, there's no point in me dragging it out. I don't know this person. I don't want to waste their time or mine.

[00:54:43] I'm not that vindictive. So I'll just concede, move on to the next one. Like this, this round ain't going to happen. That's the thing. Cause like, if they concede, you get a point instantly. Right. Um, I've had a couple of times, not very often, but a couple of times where people obviously are not going to win. So they just let the timer run out and they say, they must put their phone down. That sucks because that takes what it could have been a five minute match and draws it out to 15. That's an ass move. And there's really no reason for it. Yeah. A minute and a half to do what they're going to do.

[00:55:12] So you have to sit there for a minute and a half while they don't do anything. Like, yeah, that, that part kind of sucks. I don't know. And maybe if they make trading better and they, they do a few things like to solve the griefing, but it's, but it's pretty rare that it happens. Yeah. The trading definitely needs to be improved. You need to be able to see what the other person has, or at least let, like let the player flag what they're willing to trade so that other people can see, oh, you have this. And it's picked from a list, right? Yeah.

[00:55:41] Here's my list of traders. Pick one. These are the things I'm willing to trade. And if you're not marking things, then just show everything the player has like, yeah. Or like, let the player be like, I'm not trading. I turn off trade. I don't want trades. Like simple as that. This is like, as much as I usually don't like the idea of, uh, having an account for an app and then, you know, it's a part of a larger ecosystem, but this is, this is one where I wish the Pokemon game had a unified app so I can go online to a web browser and just punch

[00:56:09] in my, my login to see what I have in a browser. I would love to look at my collection on a bigger screen because trying to just scroll through the small cards on my, on my phone. And if you want to look at what a card does, you have to click it twice and scroll down. It's just the interface sucks for looking at cards. I wish that. Yeah. And it's, it's only going to get worse because right now, like they're really going to have to figure out how to reign this in because I'll show you guys right now on the screen.

[00:56:36] Um, if I can, we'll see if this, maybe I just need to turn down the brightness on my phone. Let's try that. Does it show? Oh, that's pretty good. Okay. We can see it. Yeah. Oh, damn it. I clicked on something. I'll turn up the brightness a tiny bit. All right. Let's see here. That's good. All right. Yep. So you can see you just scroll down. That's the first expansion.

[00:57:00] And then you're in the second expansion and then you're in the third expansion and then you're in the promos at 12 expansions. That is going to be so unwieldy. So they're going to have to figure that out quick. Like you can filter by type and shit like that. And that's fine. But to use the filters is like extra clicks and it just, it is not intuitively designed at all. And it's no better on a tablet. My daughter has a tablet she plays on and it's just as clunky in a tablet as it is on a phone.

[00:57:29] So that needs to be improved huge. Yeah. Especially with so many cards at play. It's wild. Like it's crazy how much there's going to be here. I'm amazed that there's a hundred expansions in the, in the tabletop game. That is mind blowing to me. Like magic, the gathering is just as old, if not older. And I don't think that even had a hundred expansions. Is it old? Yeah. Oh, that's right. Cause it would have been 90, 91, I think for magic. Pokemon was a little bit later, but yeah, it's crazy. It's still, it's a decent game and it's free.

[00:57:59] There's a reason 60 million people have tried it. I mean, free doesn't, it's hard to go wrong with free. And I don't feel, I don't feel like I could tell anybody with a straight face. Oh yeah. You need Pokemon gold. You should pay for that. There's no reason to. It's if you're, if you're really an addict, maybe, but I don't see a reason to pay money for this game. So it is free and, and that, and for free, it's entertaining. I just don't know if it's a game I want to play daily, longterm, or if it just like, maybe I'll check it out every six months and just spend a couple of weeks with it. I don't know.

[00:58:28] Yeah, there was, it was definitely, uh, I was going to say something. I forgot. Shit. What was it? What was it? You were just saying, fuck, this is stupid. Uh, gotta catch them all. When you gotta catch them all, we lose our brain cells over this type of type of game. Yeah, I guess.

[00:58:55] Um, but yeah, it's, I don't know, but yeah, there's a game you play regularly. Do you think? Uh, I mean, I've been playing it for over a month now, pretty regularly. Um, right. Oh, what I was going to say is at first it was kind of easy to spot. Not people who were what you'd probably consider a whale, especially with like, you know, really hard.

[00:59:20] You'd see people come out with like this really bad-ass fire deck with Moultres, like a fancy Moultres and fancy Charizard and all that. Or you'd see them come out with like the fancy Mew twos and you know, whatever that deck might have been, or, you know, the fancy Celebys and fancy superiors, which I talk shit about, but I honestly have two of each of those with the way I pulled, but you could see who was a whale initially. Yeah. Now I feel like that's less obvious.

[00:59:51] And as the expansions just grow in number, it's going to be less obvious overall because people are going to find decks that they get attached to where they only need to change like one or two cards in it as they go forward. And it's going to be a powerhouse in future expansions. Like, yeah. And I don't know how they're going to manage that. Are they going to start nerfing old cards? Cause that's going to piss people off. Are they going to make cards unable to be used in battles? That's going to piss people off too.

[01:00:19] Like there's, there's some weird lines here that they used to use with physical card games that if they do it in this with cards, people are spending money on for a digital app. They're going to get mad. Like that's, that's the issue with the tabletop game, right? And magic had this issue too, right? Where you had the idea of legal, legal blocks, what cards were legal in tournaments, or you just play with all cards with your friends. Um, and if you're going to do like official events, you have, you only play for certain

[01:00:46] cards and some cards were banned or had major errata. And it was like, but it was pretty rare cause you can't reprint a card like that, right? And people can't get a replacement card when, when the information's wrong or changed. That's different in the digital world. Uh, that's why I appreciate games like Marvel snap and, um, Gwent, Gwent was another one, uh, Witcher, the CD project had a standalone Gwent game and it was almost a feature that they would change the cards every, every few months to keep things fresh. In fact, Gwent is no longer in development.

[01:01:15] The, uh, they had to cut it back, cancel it, but the game is still live, but they tied it in the last update for Gwent. They made it so that players can initiate a card change and the community can vote on what cards get a bump and you can determine like, okay, well this card we want as a community to be this more costly, or this has this much more power, this less power. So the community can themselves can now shape what the cards do over time because it's a digital card game, right?

[01:01:42] And because cards are so easy to get anyway, like it doesn't really hurt if it gets nerfed or changed. Like I, I don't think I would care if my Pikachu gets nerfed. I don't think it would bother me that much because I, it's so, it's so easy to get other cards. And like, you're right. When more expansions, the pool will be larger and it may be a little more difficult to get what I want. But if, if I know the set of my card is going to be in two packs a day and the wonder picks, especially, I feel it's not so bad to get the cards that I want when I want them.

[01:02:11] It may take a few days, but I don't, I don't feel like I'm missing out by not my, uh, my nerfs or, you know. But there's also, um, is this, is, are we going to see nerfing? Are we going to see power creep? Cause power creep is another problem. Yeah. You know, in, in a year's time are the three diamond cards going to be like 25, 30% more

[01:02:38] powerful than they are now making the ones from now obsolete. Like this is right now we're seeing it, not a power creep, but a power drop because these same cards are weaker, but what's it going to look like in a year? That's true. Like when cards do 400 damage for the celebrity deck, that's overpowered now, but two years from now, other Pokemon as a, just a matter of fact, have hundreds of life now. Yeah.

[01:03:07] I don't, I don't know. I thought they were pulling ideas from the physical game and I thought a lot of these cards are one-to-one with the physical game. Not realizing that they aren't is kind of interesting. Like the Mewtwo in this game is different than the Mewtwo in the card game. They're, they're different cards. Yeah. Like a good example of that is I, I can never remember the name of the card. The one that lets you draw to, it's got a picture of professor Oak. I don't remember what it's called. It's a support card. I think it is professor Oak. I think that's just what it's called. I don't think that's what it's called.

[01:03:38] No, let me check. It's down in the promos. Um, cause it is a trainer card. It's called, uh, it's a supporter card. It's called professor's research. Oh, is it? Okay. Back in the day, this, it, it messes with my brain. I either, I tend to call it bill because I don't know if you remember bill from the original Pokemon game. He was the one who had the, the Pokemon computers where you could store your Pokemon.

[01:04:08] Right. The card game bill was the draw two cards card and professor Oak was shuffle your hand away and draw seven new cards. And so I call him bill like in my brain, I'm like, I fucking need bill. And then I'm like, Oh, it's not bill. But yeah. Cause the, um, there's a card that makes your opponent shuffle their hand and pull new cards. I think it's the red card or something.

[01:04:37] I'm probably getting this all wrong, but the, the, uh, the picture is a red card. Okay. So it's not one to one. That's different. There's similar stuff. Like the base set had gust of wind. Choose one of your opponents bench Pokemon and switch it with his or her active Pokemon, which is not that different from Sabrina, but Sabrina lets your opponent pick their Pokemon instead of you picking. Right.

[01:05:02] So there's, there's a lot of overlap and it's only a matter of time before we're seeing cards like this coughing from the base set, you know, coughing is already frustrating because you pull him out and do something while not coughing. I think it's wheezing is the annoying one. Cause it like poisons you if it hits or it confuses you or something. Well, I think poison coughing from the base set was flip a coin. If heads, the defending Pokemon is now poison. If tails, it is confused.

[01:05:32] So it's only a matter of time until we see, Oh, what effect am I going to have to deal with when this coin flips? Not, is it going to affect me? It's which one am I getting? So yeah, it comes out. I hate those coin flips. I really don't like that mechanic. The idea of flipping a coin for an effect is it's just too random to me. I kind of wish that was a different way of doing it. I'd almost rather be like flip a card or something. Flip a card. If it's a Pokemon card, do this. If it's a training card, do this.

[01:06:01] Like then I can tweak my deck or something. But I mean, there were also a lot of cards that were like flip a coin. If tails, you take 10, this card takes 10 damage. So there was a lot of that in the original set. Yeah. Which I don't think we see a whole lot of that in this one. I do think there are damage itself, but it's implied in the move itself instead of like,

[01:06:26] like I think one of the, what there's Geodude leads all the way up to Gollum, right? Gollum is the third tier. Yeah. There's one Gollum. I think it's the mid one. Yeah. Graveler is the mid one. So there's one version of Gollum that's like, it does 150 damage, but it also does 50 damage to itself. The other version of Gollum does 120 damage, but then it takes 30 less damage from the opposing

[01:06:55] attack that's about to go. So it's, it's pretty wildly different, but they're both like either it takes damage or it prevents damage. That simple. Right. And you know, you've got, you've also got the weird cards like, uh, Doug trio, you know, it's one, one energy to do that thing. And it's just like 50, 50 chance. It will take zero damage at all. Next turn. Yeah. And that's the one that I think you retreated for like one energy, which is bullshit.

[01:07:25] Like, cause when stuff is so easy to retreat it, then you can just like troll with it, bring it back and forth. Especially if you have another card, a Pokemon on the bench that can manage energy in any way. Like anything that manages your energy is OP in this game. Hands down. Oh yeah. Whether it's doubling your energy or shuffling things around or pulling energy, it's broken almost. And this is how easily the metas change because with this new set, we've got Lucario. If Lucario is on the, is, is out at all, all your, all your fighting Pokemon do 20 more damage than they would.

[01:07:55] So he's automatically buffing all of them. That's bonkers. Yeah. And so you've got a Doug trio out there every, uh, like if I had a great run the other day where I was like just heads after heads after heads on his move. And I think his ability does like 70 damage. So it was doing 90 damage instead. And I wasn't able to be attacked. It was just against a computer. It wasn't another player. So nobody was getting pissed, but I was like, man, this is really OP right now.

[01:08:24] This, this against another player would get somebody rage quitting. Well, I did a match against my wife a few weeks back and it's, I can't remember the name of the Pokemon, but it's the one that basically puts you flip a coin and it puts the, uh, the act of the opponent's Pokemon to sleep. So I was just, it was just doing that. It was just heads. Was it the Frostbock? Heads. Might've been, but it's just like every, every turn it was coming up heads and I was building up my bench. So I didn't care, but she was getting so upset because she couldn't, you can't retreat when your Pokemon's asleep.

[01:08:53] Not unless it's something else at play. That kind of thing is, is kind of annoying. But you know what? That's the kind of thing that more variety, like I, I liked the idea of poison decks, but there wasn't enough in the previous expansions to make one. There's a handful of cards that do poison, but together they weren't meshing. So I would like to see poison as an option in the future as they add more cards, more metas, more potential deck types. But yeah, cause I, I have a celebrity deck, but I hate it's boring to play and boring to

[01:09:23] play is boring to fight against. And it just, that kind of put me off of this game. But I, I think I might go back and check out some of the cards in the expansion. I definitely opened the packs. I just haven't made a deck yet with them. I'll have to screenshot my Mewtwo deck for you and let you see that. So you can be like, Oh, interesting. It's, it's pretty wild. I can't get cards. Yeah. Very likely. Uh, the only one you might not have is the most recent Cresselia EX. If you've not been doing that event, but. Oh no, probably. I haven't.

[01:09:52] I started the event. I think I did a couple of them, but I haven't really done much. Yeah. I should, I should go. Yeah. Oh, you're getting hooks in again. See, this is Marvel Snap all over again. But it's free to play. You don't have to pay for any of this if you don't want to, which is like. Yeah. I. Snap is free too. It's fine. Although I will say there's a few times where I put money into Snap. They, they had just a few small things where I'm like, all right, take your goddamn $10 of blood money. You son of a bitches. I want, I want X, Y, Z or whatever they did.

[01:10:22] What it was for Snap was the artwork, right? They had cosmetics and I'm like, okay, I really want that Jubilee card. That's what got me. Pokemon. I'm not attached to like I am comic book characters. Yeah. I guess that's just a thing. I did put some, like I, I do the Google opinions, rewards thing. So I have a ton of Google credit. So I think I spent like $17 of my credit, which I still have like another 17 that I don't use for anything. So I was like, I'll do it, whatever.

[01:10:50] And I only bought like the, the discounted intro to playing gold picks and that was it. Like, I was just like, I want to draw a bunch of cards right now. Get my deck going. That's where I was at that point. Take my money. Yeah. Yeah. Take my fake money. Yeah. I know. Honestly, that $17 of credit got me a good load of shit to where, you know, all of a sudden I was able to play against other players winning maybe a quarter of the time to a third of the time, somewhere in there.

[01:11:18] Like, so I felt like, okay, I got something here. Yeah. Some games when they do the monetization, it's, it's asked. There was definitely a few for Marvel snap where it's like a, it's like $30 for a cosmetic. And I'm like, are you out of your fucking mind? No, but I don't, I don't see Pokemon doing anything like that. Cause I think the target market is definitely younger players. And I think they, they, they're skirting a gray area of gambling as it is with, with Pokemon packs and stuff.

[01:11:46] I've seen a lot of people last year during game of the year time. Um, a lot of media outlets, a lot of people were considering this as a, one of their best of the year games, right? Top 10 games, not, not game of the year, but definitely top five, top 10 for a lot of folks, but there's a few people that brought up the sobering point of this also encourages gambling and kids. And that's the thing people don't like, right? The concept of opening packs. And like, I see that with my daughter who's three, she loves picking the cards. She doesn't know what the cards do, but she, she knows that I only get one a day and she

[01:12:16] wants to pick it. So I gotta be careful of that kind of thing. So it's, that's just one of those things. Yeah. That's one of the reasons I stay away from TCGs or CCGs anymore. Like back when I was a teenager, I was super into that idea. And I almost played, I think Shonen Jump had one as well. That was like a combination of a bunch of anime properties. And I had a couple of friends I knew who were into that.

[01:12:43] And I very nearly started buying those. And I was like, I only have so much money though. Yeah. Hobbies can, especially if you have more than one hobby, they can definitely hit you in the pocketbook, right? Like, yeah, be very selective with what we put our money towards. I spend enough on video games as it is. I don't really want to spend money on cards, right? Like even, even collecting like retro stuff. I know a lot of folks like listen to this podcast, probably collect games and consoles and more power to you.

[01:13:10] I can't afford to, I don't have the space and I don't want to spend the money on it. So I stick controllers. I'm reducing my collection and that's going to continue to happen at this point. Just because one, like somebody else will play these more than I will or put it in a nice case or, you know, I'm not saying I'm a monster to my games, but I have so many games sitting on my shelves behind me that I've maybe never even put in a console myself. Yeah.

[01:13:39] Which, thinking of it that way, it's like, oh, that sucks. This ones only have so many X number of years in them before they degrade, right? So, yeah, we're hitting the point where Saturn and PS one games gotta be careful. So honestly, if it was me, I'd offload those first, right? Get rid of the CDs. Yeah. Which is part of what I've been doing. I've been getting rid of some of my PlayStation collections, some of my Saturn collection. It's, it's just time for it to go.

[01:14:04] Uh, just I, I can play them other ways, but it's, it's too much. And I've, I've got a bunch of Pokemon cards. You still got them? I wish I still had my magic cards. I had three binders of all my cards. I had, I had sold the really expensive ones. I had a, a jester's mask, jester's cap, I think it was from Ice Age. And I had sold it for, I think 50 bucks at the time.

[01:14:33] So I got rid of all the ones that were worth money, but I still had like three binders of magic cards. And I was moving after I got married and I'm like, you know what? Nobody's going to buy these, these cards. Nobody's going to care anymore. And I threw them in the garbage. I remember throwing three binders of magic cards into the trash bin and walking away. And I regret doing that because that's cards I could have played with my kids. Yeah. I've, I have a whole pile of them right here.

[01:14:58] They're not very well, uh, organized at the moment, but cause I just kind of dropped them. But I have a ton of like promos or just old school foils or whatever have you. I had them organized somehow, but I haven't gone through them in a while. So I don't remember what they were anymore, but, uh, I've sold a few of these for some decent cash. And like, I've got old ones. Like this is from the first movie. Right. Yeah. The Electabuzz from the first movie. I got Mewtwo from the first movie.

[01:15:27] I got Entei from like the third movie. I, I did this stuff back then. Yeah. I don't, I just, I hear people like, uh, Costco has a problem whenever they have new Pokemon pack, uh, uh, boxes in. It's the adults that go to, uh, go to Costco, Crocodone to try and get packs or whatever. McDonald's had a Pokemon card offer. It's the adults that are kind of ruining it for the kids. Right. It's, it's a weird thing, right? It's definitely a thing. Like, does your kid play Pokemon at all or no?

[01:15:57] Not really. No. Um, he has a couple of Pokemon games for the switch. He's got, let's go Pikachu and he's got Arceus. Right. He's not played through either one. I played through Arceus. Arceus was good. Yeah. Um, I considered. I considered getting violet and scarlet for the both of us, but honestly, the issues I

[01:16:26] was reading about with it, I was like, he's not going to enjoy this. I'm going to be frustrated with those issues. There's no point. Like I would have had it been like stellar. I absolutely would have because one that would have been a cool experience for him and I to share, you know, something kind of from my childhood, but modernized. Like he doesn't have to play a four color black and white game. Right. Well, for, for me, it was, um, so Arceus was great. I liked Arceus.

[01:16:54] The gameplay style is different though, but I dug that, um, sword and shield though. I picked up sword and the story was, I mean, it's Pokemon. It's not Shakespeare. I'm not there for a reading story, but it was so drawn out and so much dialogue, so much. And I wasn't interested in it at all. I eventually beat it, but the performance in the open area, the open area is bad-ass is great. And the gig of the giant Pokemon was cool. And it had a, what's his face? Is it Toby Fox who did the, the stadium battle music?

[01:17:24] I think for that one, that was awesome. That was when you have the giant Pokemon, the stadium and it's, it's epic soundtrack, but the performance drops in the open world was ass. And then when I saw Scarlet and Violet had the same problem with, with frame drops is at the point now where, um, they Nintendo announced that, uh, the new Pokemon coming out ZA, whatever the hell that's going to be, uh, is a switch one game. I have zero interest because unless, unless the Pokemon company can say, Hey, we've gotten the feedback from the last three games.

[01:17:53] Cause even Arceus had frame drops and we retooled her engine. I don't, I don't see it being a technical achiever here on the switch one. I was really hoping that would be a switch to a game to see what they do there. But if it's, if it, if the Nintendo can't, if Pokemon can't make a game that is a rock solid, at least 30, then I don't know what the hell they're doing. Cause it's, it's, it's, it's kind of stupid. Anyway, that's off. Yeah. But yeah, this is, it's, this is a kind of a cool throwback to when I was a teenager. I'm enjoying it.

[01:18:21] Like, and I don't play it a ton. Like I said, I probably, I, I opened my two packs a day. I, during the events, I go check the wonder pick every hour or so. Uh, cause you get free wonder picks that are just like, you know, either get currency or get a card. Yeah. And then there's also just like the event. And like I said, I'll play like two, three battles some days or none other days, or, you know, maybe I've got a bunch of free time right now and nothing else to do.

[01:18:50] I'll play four battles, whatever. But it's, it's nice that it's not required any monetary investment. I put less into this than I put into Pokemon go and I've probably played it for about as much so far. Really? Yeah. My wife's been playing Pokemon go since release and she has spent more in that game that I want to admit when they, when they, when they reduced how Pogo worked with you being able to see nearby Pokemon, we dropped it.

[01:19:21] We were like, no, we're out. They reduced the functionality of the game. I understand they had to do it for technical reasons, but once they did it, I was like, no, we'd already put money into it. And now we're pissed. We were like, no, that's not happening. So we were done. No. Sorry for the better. Anyway, all they've been doing is stealing your data to use it to train up whatever models and selling it to the garments. That's what they're doing now. Thanks. Niantic. We should wrap it up. Remember when we said, oh, we don't need to go the full hour for Pokemon. Yeah. We've got an hour and money.

[01:19:51] We're not going to talk for an hour. Jeez. We have to stop doing episodes. Just the two of us. It never shorted. I know. It never shorted. Didn't think Pokemon in the card game would go this long. Right. Is there anything you want to shout out? At the moment? No. Well, I guess Sonic 3. I told you before we recorded this that my family watched it today, but I really liked it. My kid enjoyed it. He sat and didn't complain about any of it. He was just having fun the whole time.

[01:20:20] And it had some great references to various things. Some more subtle than others, but it was good. Yeah. I have to watch that one. The first two were pretty decent. Like there was definitely. The folks who are making that movie are definitely fans of the video games and they're pulling just the right amount of lore from the games to make it work. Like there's things that are from the RG comics that I've saw as Easter eggs in the movie. And I thought that was pretty interesting. So they definitely give it the respect it deserves. It's the same with the Mario movie, right?

[01:20:50] The Mario movie had a lot of Easter eggs and references to the games in just the right amounts. So that if you're not a video game fan or gamer, you would still like the movie. But if you were, then you got those things. So I see what they're doing in Sonic movies. It's. I never thought we'd see three of them though. I never thought we'd see Jim Carrey. I think we're going to see a fourth. I think it's a, it's. They're going to drive into the ground because that's what Hollywood does, but it's pretty wild. That's interesting.

[01:21:18] I guess for myself, I am planning to do my Sisyphean game. I'm trying to debate whether I should play Half-Life 2 on stream or just record it. But I'm going to do something probably, probably around the time this comes out because it's a, I think we're dropping this on Valentine's day. That's why we're pre-recording. Yeah. Maybe because it's a long weekend up here. So maybe on the long weekend, I might, I might drop a video on the Presby channel for Half-Life 2. At least to get started to commit myself to starting that game besides reinstalling and installing a damn thing.

[01:21:48] Cause that's getting stupid. So I have to. I had thought about, I had thought about recording my Sisyphean this year and I'm glad I didn't cause I'm at 64 hours so far. That's too much. Like I, I can't do the whole let's play thing. Cause if it's going to be like anything more than 20 hours, I think it's too long for me to sit down and do. I'd never finished these games and that's defeating the point, right? It's all right. Um, we are pressed for you to cancel. You can find us a course on YouTube. We have an episode on YouTube every Friday evening at eight 30 Eastern, or you can listen to our audio episodes.

[01:22:18] They come out on the Mondays, uh, crack of dawn. Uh, you can find our audio episodes on pocket cast Spotify. I hurt radio, Amazon music, Apple podcasts, of course not Google cause Google killed it. So yeah, but you can find this over on YouTube. Um, we are part of the super pod network. Oh, sorry. You can also find us on press B to cancel.com or press B.org. Uh, you can also find a few of us over on blue sky. Uh, just search press B.org on blue sky and you'll, you'll find a few of us there.

[01:22:47] Um, check us out on discord. Link to our discord is on press B to cancel.com and, uh, tell us, uh, are you playing Pokemon? I think a few folks on our discord might be, and they're just ashamed to admit it, but you know, it's two pack, it's a two pack, uh, two packs a day. You can quit anytime. It's okay. We don't judge. Um, we are part of the super pod network, a super pod network.com. See, I can get it every time. Uh, there's lots of great podcasts there. More of them are, most of them are more gaming oriented than we are lately.

[01:23:17] So check out them. There's a, there's a bunch of great shows there. I've been listening to a lot of bar silence lately. Cause he does a lot of, he does soundtracks, uh, on his podcast. I dig that a lot. So check them out there and those good fine folks there. Uh, otherwise I think that's an episode Wolf. Yeah. Everybody listening. Have a great week. Bye. Bye.