Pokémon Cards On My Phone Are Messing With My Brain
Pikachu is petting my brain
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Three little words have taken up the lives of children and adults across the world since the mid-90’s and lasting all the way to now.
“Catch em’ all” is a phrase known to most of the world because Pokémon is the highest-grossing franchise of all time. There’s nothing that beats it - everyone and their mother knows who Pikachu is, and I was no different from the day I was born.
Pokémon and I are the same age (launched into the world a few months apart in 1996) and I’m making it my own head-canon about my life that on the day I was born, someone said something around me about Pokémon and my baby brain took that in.
So maybe it’s the fact that I’ve barely known a moment without Pokémon that the franchises latest release is messing with my head on a deep, deep level.
And when I say deep, I mean it’s actually making me play a mobile card game.
Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket has me in such a strangle hold, I think my brain is actually smoothing out. The crazy part is that so far, I’m having so much fun I don’t even care.
Pokémon Cards On My Phone Are Messing With My Brain
Shiny
A bit of context - I haven’t been hooked on a mobile game in years, and pretty much stopped playing them after high school. In those years, I had to make a choice. Fail all my classes and play games all the time, or pretty much pause my gaming for the school year, and go all-out once summer and holiday breaks hit.
With my Dad being a teacher, I couldn’t exactly take the former route, so the latter was how I got through until my brain developed enough that I was able to balance my gaming throughout university. But I still got my gaming fix while in high school through mobile games.
Nothing was going to replace console experiences for me, so these felt safer. I commuted to school, so there was a clear window where I could enjoy them. I remember playing Flappy Bird when it first launched and watching Angry Birds before it take over the world, but they were always just these quick-bursts of fun. In heinsight there were some games that kept me coming back every day, but they never really had the mind-share of the experiences I had on consoles, portable consoles included.
But none of them were Pokémon TCG Pocket. The only mobile game in years that has me checking it every day like it’s my email. Those games also didn’t have extremely well designed, drawn, and damn shiny cards with Pokémon on them.
I want to emphasize the card design here because it’s such a key element to a card game. When playing with physical cards, you have to do so much imagination work yourself about the scenarios you’re experiencing in the game. Now granted, with Pokémon a lot of that work is done for you. The TV show has been around long enough, along with the video games, and everything else Pokémon that’s existed visually to help you imagine a well-timed water gun attack from your Blastoise when it happens.
Even still, the cards are expressive enough in how they’re drawn that I absolutely love looking at them. Especially the rarer ones, which all have an extra special sheen to them.
It’s not just that they’re shiny and nice - they’re also nostalgic too. I was never into the card game, but I’ve played nearly every Pokémon game that’s been made available on various handheld Nintendo consoles throughout the years. Playing those games were a huge part of my childhood and why I grew up loving games. Playing the games also got me to watch the animated show, which added a whole new layer to why I loved the those Pokémon. Though the Pokémon seen in the modern games don’t all look like they did in the 90’s and early 00’s, the majority of the Pokémon available in Pokémon TCG Pocket do.
The Pokémon I grew up with, the ones that helped me fall in love with the whole franchise are on display here, in a charming light that I never fully saw because my entry points never really included the card game. Now, in a totally new way, the card game is a part of that, and I’m obsessed all over again.
Let It Rip
The sheen of the cards and the nostalgia of it all was enough to get me to download this game in the first place. It might’ve even been enough to keep me around, but I’m almost ashamed to admit the reason that is at the core of why this game has me in a hold.
Opening card packs.
I know I haven’t missed a day since I downloaded it back towards the beginning of November, because my wife knows I check in as part of my daily routine. It’s because of the packs. The implementation of the haptics as you crawl your finger horizontally across your screen to emphasize the anticipation.
The sounds along the way (not exactly the music, but you can turn that off) and then of course, the art of the cards. Most importantly though, the absolute joy and triumphant feeling you get when you’ve pulled a rare card you didn’t already have and/or a card that you need. Even better when it’s both. But the absolute best when it’s also one of your personal favourite Pokémon.
It just hits me in all these ways, and it’s so conveniently delivered to me on my six year old phone that I will hold onto until it dies, because in a mobile hardware market full of marginal jumps, I’d much rather wait until I’m leaping generations at a time.
And I’m very clearly not the only one since the game crossed $120 million in earnings in its first month. On that note, I have paid for one month of the premium pass, merely because…they got me. I signed up for the free two-week trial, and I forgot to cancel in time. I have since cancelled though, so I’m currently riding out the rest of my time until Boxing Day, when it ends. I’ll be sad to go down from three packs to two, but I also think it’ll be better for my health.
Because as high as the high is when it comes, it doesn’t come every day. In fact it doesn’t come most days, because now that I’ve not missed a day of opening packs and I used my early influx of in-game currency to open 10 packs at a time on multiple occasions, I’ve collected the majority of the basic and stage one cards. So I’m getting duplicates, nearly every pack I open now.
At time of writing my gross collection of cards stands at 1,128, which is everything including duplicates, minus the few duplicates I’ve dispatched through obtaining flairs.
I have 214/226 cards registered though, meaning I’m 12 away from completing the Genetic Apex run of cards. I’m missing one Grass type, one Fire type, one Water type, two Psychic types, three fighting types, one Darkness type, and three Normal type Pokémon.
I’m honestly more annoyed that I’ve yet to fill those 12 slots than I am that I don’t have any of the super-special gold cards for Pikachu, Charizard or Mewtew. I’m so close to catching them all, and completing the deck, but those 12 slots remain.
This is why I know it’ll be good for me to go down to opening just two packs a day instead of three. I don’t need this stress. I don’t need a gatcha-game weighing in on how good my day goes.
I also definitely don’t need the Wonder Pick’s doing my head in because I didn’t get the card I wanted. And I don’t need to lose rows of PvP battles because I can’t get a good starting five that lets me get my strategy set up. What mitigates this at least is the fact that unless there are event-based missions around them, I can just ignore the PvP mode, especially since you get barely anything for participating. A win grants you a small amount of XP, and that’s it. Sure there’s a thrill to pulling off a riskier strategy, like relying on abilities that don’t work unless you flip a coin on heads, or even riskier, ones where your opponent has to miss their own coin flip.
But there’s not really a need for me to put myself through that roller coaster if I don’t want to, so I’m glad it’s mostly avoidable. The solo challenges are all much more fun anyways if I really want to try out a new deck, at least the computer-controlled opponents don’t just concede when they find out they’ve been beat, instead of letting the match end naturally.
I should also say I do like this watered-down version of the physical card game - matches can be quick, and I’m enjoying trying to put together different decks to catch-players by surprise with cards they might not be as aware of.
For example, sure it’s a risk to try and run a Psychic deck where Mewtew is your lead offense and your defense is Hypno putting your opponent’s active Pokémon to sleep every turn with a coin flip - but it’s fun as hell to pull off. Or running a Dragonite deck that also side-loads Jolteon and Vaporeon to pull off some quick offense and at times, be the stars of the match, particularly since Jolteon’s attack can wind up doing crazy damage.
What’s also helpful in easing my frusturation with battling is that I have more than enough cards that there are realistically a limited number of strategies I’m locked out of due to not having the cards for them. So I can mix-and-match how I like whenever I am getting bored or if something just isn’t working.
Using Surf (Riding The Wave)
As it stands, and at the time of writing this, I’m still very much ingrained in Pokémon TCG Pocket.
For all the reasons I’ve discussed, despite the frustration I feel when I go weeks without getting any new cards, I don’t think I’ll stop playing any time soon. I also have the benefit of having caught the bug (or the wave) right as the game came out and took over the world. I have all 23 of the first batch of Promo cards, I nearly have the starting deck completed - I’m locked in, as the kids might say.
However, as is the case with live service games that have daily log-in rewards, challenges, and events that change multiple times over the course of a month, there’s a fleetingness to it all that makes me feel like I won’t be here forever. Barely anything about this game is forever, it’s nearly all about looking towards what’s next.
To date, there’s not been a live service game I’ve played that I’ve not put down at some point. It’s the only live service game I’m playing right now, after having dropped Apex Legends earlier this year (though not after a solid 1,200 hours were spent playing it).
Of course that’s a very different kind of game, one that I couldn’t take with me everywhere, and one that scratched a very different part of my brain, with so many more variables regarding what could make one session of Apex feel like a reminder of why I play it at all, and another feeling like I should just never play it again.
And it’s not Pokémon. It’s not the most successful franchise in the world that I, and generations of kids since have all grown up with at different points, with as much if not more nostalgia attached to it than Disney. I fear the same live service pains that wear me down every time won’t be effective this time. That I’ll just keep playing this game everyday for as long as it exists. Which wouldn’t be the worst thing of course, it’s just not how I’ve ever interacted with a game.
Sure I’ve played certain types of games or even individual games for years, either through repeating the entire campaign or over the course of multiple sessions - but they always have an end point. I also don’t play any annualized shooters or franchises that just feel like a model swap with the kind of consistency that could compare to this.
I have Pokémon TCG Pocket. That’s it. A mobile game that from my perspective (based on how much I knew about this game before I was hearing about it left and right), came out of nowhere and took over my life in such a way that it’s still got me in a (Ma)choke-hold.
For the first time, maybe ever, I’ve found a singular game that I might be okay with playing every single day for the rest of my life. And I don’t know if that’s actually a beautiful thing, or if my brain has finally rotted beyond saving, and smoothed-out like a pancake while Pikachu takes another bite.