Pokemon Gets a New App: Hands-On with Pocket, a Digital Twist on the Trading Card Game
For Pokemon fans who don’t know how to play the collectible card game, you’ll soon be able to learn for free by playing it on your phone. I got to play an early preview of Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket, a digital app version of the card game that lets you swipe open foil-wrapped booster packs, flip coins, and launch into online battles with friends while providing rule tutorials (and perhaps a mild urge to keep growing a digital collection) along the way.
Players are given two decks of cards to open each day and can choose which one to open with a swipe of their finger.
There are many types of Pokemon fans, with a media franchise that spans decades of cartoons, video games, movies, and a trading card game that started in the ‘90s. But with this new app, the company is hoping to recruit more card collectors with a casual phone game – and with the hopes that it can become as popular as the Pokemon Go app, which launched eight years ago.
I’m by no means a Pokemon expert, but I am familiar with the world of Pokemon from playing video games and watching episodes of Pokemon the Series in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. I couldn’t help but feel like this app was aimed at me, a millennial who used to save a few of the “pretty” cards I found in packs but now just uses them as bookmarks. These days, I have my own kids who are totally into the franchise, collecting their own cards at school — and on Halloween.
For the past few years, my kids have come home from trick-or-treating with packs of Pokémon cards in their candy buckets. (You can find them large bags of pokemon cards (Sold in the Halloween candy aisle.)
Enter the new app, Pocket, launching on October 30 —just in time for all the families who may be sorting through a stack of cards after a candy binge and are looking for an easy way to learn how to play.
When you launch the app, you’re given two small booster packs of cards to open per day. If you don’t want to wait, you can pay real money to open more right away, but you don’t have to. Collect enough cards and you can go through a tutorial to learn a simplified version of the card game to battle a random account online — or take on a friend.
The app takes you on a very guided path to learning the ropes. For example, it can build a deck with characters that use only the same energy type — and energy generates automatically, so you don’t have to worry about whether you have enough energy cards. More experienced card players can kick it up a notch and customize packs for battles, or mix characters that use different energy types.
The app also helps to point out when you might not be playing at your best. I forgot to deal an energy card and before I ended my turn the app acted as a coach, urging me not to attack until I had made every possible move to level up my character first.
Instead of you having to worry about energy cards, the app automatically generates energy to give to your character cards.
What I found odd is how Pocket tries to make something addictive out of the elusive, integrating various reward elements and vibrant card animations to keep users wanting to open it every day and come back. New card booster packs and rewards are generated the more you use the app, and you can also pick up extras with friends – including the chance to score some of the same cards a friend randomly opened in their daily pack.
If you want to battle someone you know, the game generates a code you can share to enter a private match. I found this to be a lot more fun than playing matches against a computer — but I was playing with someone sitting next to me as we laughed about our battle strategies. Winning gives you some in-game advantages, but there’s no real reward for spending time (or money) in this app. And there’s no special bonus if you happen to own physical cards. This digital game is a different beast.
There are many ways to organize your card collection. But rest assured, if you lose a battle, you don’t lose a digital card.
Being digital allows for unique character card art, including immersive art variations. It’s a glimpse into what could be happening beyond the edge of the typical card art box. In the Pikachu version of the immersive card, you’ll see a mini-movie of what’s happening around him in the forest with other creatures hanging out nearby.
For those who want to get a taste of the gameplay in the digital version and learn more about the physical card game, I would recommend Pokémon Battle Academy. It’s a kid-friendly battleboard with a variety of lesson cards, and I’ve been using it to teach my kids how to play with them this summer. Playing the Pocket app has been a great addition to learning the art of card battling, and I can see myself letting my kids play on my phone to get them more comfortable with the flow and rules — so I can later crush them with the physical cards I saved all those years ago.
