The Pokemon TCG Pocket meta is broken. It’s horrible. Battling is a chore. Mewtwo ex. Mewtwo ex. Pikachu ex. Mewtwo ex. The best decks in the game are seen in nearly every battle, and you can’t even escape to the casual PvP mode because people bring their strongest decks there to farm experience.
Fans have taken things into their own hands with the no ex queue, but it’s an imperfect solution to a real problem. Instead of relying on fans to sort things out, the game’s developers need to act, and act fast.
How Can The Pokemon TCG Pocket Devs Improve The Game?
My first thought is that this game needs balance changes. Marvel Snap, a game with a similar system of card collecting and simple battling, tweaks its card effects often. I’d immediately take a look at Mewtwo ex and Pikachu ex, before turning my attention towards Misty. No card should have that high a win rate.
However, there are other options if the devs don’t want to touch existing cards. They could ensure that the next expansion includes counters to popular decks, or at least offers alternative metas. They could rotate cards out like the IRL Pokemon card game does, but that’s a long-term solution to a problem that needs immediate rectification.
Instead of changing the cards themselves, be that tweaking existing abilities or ensuring new additions act as counters, Pokemon TCG Pocket should change its daily challenges.
Pokemon TCG Pocket’s Daily Challenges Need An Overhaul
The developers should look to other digital card games. Take Hearthstone, for example. Its daily quests include playing as certain characters, using certain spells, or playing certain game modes. The effect this has is diversifying what players are playing. If you have a daily quest to play 12 Dragons, you’re probably going to play your Dragon deck.
On the other hand, Pokemon TCG Pocket’s daily challenges only encourage you to open packs. Obviously this is the game’s money maker – an incredibly effective one, at that – but it keeps things stale.
Imagine if your daily quest, instead of telling you to open two packs and do a Wonder Pick, encouraged you to use a Grass-type deck, or win using a Stage 2 Pokemon. You’d approach the day’s battling a little differently, wouldn’t you?
Of course, this only works until you complete the challenge. Then you’d go back to using your Mewtwo ex or other horribly meta options. However, this game has global appeal and players will be logging on at all times of day in myriad time zones. You would always have a stream of players attempting to complete their dailies, diversifying the pool of decks being used at any one time.
Who knows, players might even have fun with their challenge decks. They might continue to use them rather than going back to their meta creations. A couple of wins with my Team Rocket deck encouraged me to use it for days, and being forced to diversify your playstyle would only encourage this further.
If you just want to log in and collect your packs, there’s nothing stopping you. You don’t have to engage with the daily challenges. After all, they get you approximately two extra packs a week, taking you from 70 to 80 new cards. It’s not a lot. If players don’t like more interesting challenges that actually encourage you to engage with the game on a deeper level, they don’t have to complete them.
At its heart (and on its surface), Pokemon TCG Pocket is about money. It’s about extracting cash from your pocket and pouring it into pretty pictures of Pokemon. That’s why the challenges are currently set up as they are, to encourage players to engage with the money-earning mechanics rather than the more interesting but less profitable ones. But the executives behind these decisions need to ask themselves one question: if all your players get bored, who’s going to spend money on packs?
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Pokemon Pocket Is Filling The Sticker-Album Shaped Hole In My Life
I know they’re cards, but they feel more like stickers to me.