It’s funny to look back at Stellar Crown and see how concerned I was about the Pokemon TCG in 2025. With the card game catching up to the final Scarlet & Violet DLC and Pokemon Legends: Z-A nowhere in sight, it seemed like the TCG was going to have to spin its wheels for a while. Fortunately, TPC has succeeded in filling that gap in the most exciting way possible.
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Pokemon TCG: The Best N’s Cards In Journey Together
These cards are the best N can offer you in Pokemon TCG: Journey Together.
The year kicked off with the highly-anticipated release of Prismatic Evolutions, an Eeveelution-focused special collection that was so hyped it had people fighting over it in Costco aisles. This week, we finally got the official announcement of May’s Destined Rivals set, which features the return of Team Rocket and may turn out to be even more popular than Prismatic Evolutions (hopefully with better stock and less hands thrown).
Nestled between those two gargantuan releases is March’s Journey Together – a set that’s positioned to be forgotten, but that, thanks to its fan-favorite theme, may end up making this one of the best three-set runs in Pokemon TCG history.
Trainer’s Pokemon Are Back
Gym Heroes, Pokemon TCG’s sixth expansion, launched two weeks before my tenth birthday, so you can imagine the size of my gym leader collection. I have a ton of nostalgia for the likes of Sabrina’s Gengar and Blaine’s Moltres, so seeing this card type return in Journey Together filled my millennial heart with delight.
Things are a little different this time around, though. You won’t find packs completely filled with Trainer’s Pokemon here. Instead, Journey Together is focused on just four trainers: Iono, Hop, Lillie, and N, with some important restrictions and synergies that give each of them their own unique deck archetypes.
Trainer’s Pokemon ex can only evolve from like-named Trainer’s Pokemon, so while you’re allowed to run four each of Zorua and N’s Zorua in your deck, your Ns’ Zoroark ex can only be played on top of N’s Zorua. This restriction, along with some new trainer cards that interact with specific Trainer’s Pokemon (N’s Castle removes the retreat cost from all of N’s Pokemon in play, for example) gives these Pokemon a build-around quality, similar to Battle Styles.
As cool as it sounds to run ‘N’s deck’, it’s tough to say if any of these four archetypes are going to be competitively viable, and the evolution restriction is going to make the ex Pokemon in this set even more niche. I don’t see this one making a particularly big splash in the competitive scene, so what about the collectors?
A Small Re-Introduction To Trainer’s Pokemon
It’s hard not to feel like Pokemon is holding back on Journey Together. While the original Gym Leader set featured teams for Misty, Brock, Blaine, Lt. Surge, Sabrina, Erika, and Team Rocket – with every Pokemon in the set belonging to a trainer – Journey Together features just four trainers, with only a small handful of Pokemon for each. Most packs I opened didn’t even feel like packs from a trainer set, and the ones that did didn’t necessarily excite me; it’s not like we’re dealing with A-listers here.
On the one hand I get why these trainers were chosen. Each one represents one of the last four generations, and they’re all characters (with the exception of Iono, who is more of a fan favorite pick) who have important roles in both the games and anime. They’re not bad representatives for the modern era of Pokemon, they’re just not very exciting characters.
With fewer than 200 cards, including secret rares, this is also the smallest mainline set in years.
When the return of Trainer’s Pokemon was announced at last year’s World Championship, my mind immediately went to the heavy hitters. Cynthia’s Garchomp, Lance’s Dragonite, and Steven’s Metagross are the ones most fans will want, which means we’ll likely get them eventually, just not in this set.
If we don’t get Giovanni’s Persian in the next set, we’ll know there’s something wrong.
There are some breathtaking chase cards in Journey Together, as always. I expect the Illustration Rare Articuno and N’s Reshiram will be hot ticket items, at the very least. But there’s just not a lot of Trainer’s Pokemon cards in this Trainer’s Pokemon set, and having it sandwiched between two of the most-hyped sets of all time is going to make it difficult for Journey Together to stay relevant. This is an overly conservative set that may be designed that way to prevent burnout from sequential must-haves, but I think I’ll be saving my Pokemon Dollars for next month’s Destined Rivals.
- Original Release Date
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October 20, 1996
- Player Count
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2
- Age Recommendation
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6+
- Length per Game
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Variable
- Franchise Name
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Pokemon