Going first usually has its advantages. Not in Pokémon TCG Pocket. The mobile card game flips the traditional calculus on its head. Going first doesn’t just lose its edge, it feels downright bad.
Here’s how every Pokémon TCG Pocket battle begins: First, the game matches you with an opponent. Then, it flips a coin to see who goes first. Players place their Pokémon on the board and whoever won the coin toss gets to pick a card and then…nothing. Pokémon card battles revolve around energy, and you get one energy at the start of each turn, unless you’re going first when you skip it entirely. And without it, the the adorable little creatures are useless unless they happen to have a special ability attached to them. Most do not, however, leaving whoever goes first immediately hamstrung.
Instead, it’s the person who goes second who gets draw their first energy and get the attack rolling. A Farfetch’d with one energy can immediately start hitting for 40 damage. If you’re opponent plays an EX card on their first turn—special, more powerful variants of existing rare Pokémon cards, they get a head start on racking up the energy needed to use gaming winning attacks. From that point on, whoever went first is just playing catch-up.
It’s already become an established meme within the TCG Pocket community that this sucks. It’s not just that going first in the game doesn’t convey the usual card game advantages; it’s that going first is basically a fake turn that doesn’t actually let the player engage with the most important mechanic in the game. TCG Pocket’s first PvP event going live earlier this week made made the pain point even more pronounced as top-tier decks steamrolled everyone.
“If this event has shown me anything,” one player writes on Reddit, “if you go first against any of the top 3 decks right now you will more then likely loose unless they draw like shit.”
“While it’s hard to achieve a true 50/50 between going first and going second, if not impossible,” argued another, “this game’s balance between the two is atrocious, surely you could get closer than this, it feels like a good 70-30 split, if not worse.”
Card games have tried to balance the first-mover advantage in different ways. Magic: The Gathering doesn’t let whoever goes first draw a card in the first round, a consequential move given the big deck sizes and the importance keeping up momentum with new resources to deploy. Hearthstone deals with the issue by letting the second player mulligan an extra card and get a one-time extra mana boost. Marvel Snap side-steps the issue entirely by having both players play their turns simultaneously. And while the table-top version of Pokémon TCG still stops the first turn from attacking, it at least lets you attach an energy and get your hand rolling.
Someone will always have a slight advantage in TCG Pocket depending on the turn order. That’s why there’s a coin flip to help make that as random as possible. But it would still feel way better if the player who goes second got to do something extra, rather than just penalizing whoever goes first. It’s possible as new cards are added to the game, the turn one advantage of playing extra cards will be more valuable—that’s even more likely given another of Pocket’s big changes from the full TCG: letting Trainer cards be played on that first turn.
But for now it’s only easily exploited by water decks running Misty trainers and Articuno EX, and all of those players are scumbags anyway.
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