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Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Pokémon TCG's Return Of Team Rocket Is A Triumph
Oh it's fun to have good news! The latest set from the Pokémon TCG, Scarlet & Violet Destined Rivals, is a top-notch collection of cards bursting with Team Rocket antics, which sports (in my limited experience, at least) pull rates I don't believe we've seen in this era. Having torn open 55 packs, I have a generous spread of rares and ex cards the likes of which I've not seen since S&V began. Also, unlike the awful previous set Journey Together, it's an excellent collection of Trainer Pokémon to really charge up the live game. You know, if you can buy it. While it's delightful to report that The Pokémon Company has really knocked it out of the park with Destined Rivals, unfortunately this hasn't coincided with addressing the wild shortages of cards for regular customers. It's a problem that only just repeated itself with last week's website-crashing launch of the next sets, White Fire and Black Bolt—the first ever split-set English-language collection—that looks likely to be as impossible to buy as just about everything else this year. Or, if you do, you'll be paying way over MSRP to scalpers, and please don't do that. However, smart players will know that the best way to get cards for any set is to attend a pre-release event at their local store or club, where everyone receives seven or more packs, generally for less than $30. Those are taking place Saturday and Sunday, May 17 and 18, although I hear that even these were booking up fast weeks ago. If you can, I really recommend making the effort for Destined Rivals. It's a bunch of fun, and if the 55 packs I opened are an accurate sample (thanks to The Pokémon Company for sending them over), you're likely to pick up a good handful of super-pretty full-art cards. So why am I so excited for this set? It's a combination of things. It'd be silly to pretend that the first appearance of Team Rocket in the game in 25 years isn't a big part of the thrill, and the set is rammed full of the nefarious group and their signature monsters. Among the Pokémon boosted by Team Rocket are Moltres, Zapdos and Articuno, along with newcomer Spidops, classics like Meowth and Mewtwo, and that most evil of Pokémon, Flaaffy. Meanwhile, for the forces of good, Cynthia, Misty, Ethan and Arven all join, again bringing back some favorites like Milotic, Gyarados, Psyduck and Ho-oh. It's a real crowd-pleaser. Secondly, those pull-rates. When I get these boxes of cards from TPCi, I sit down and open them with my 10-year-old. It's a really solid way of gauging the levels of satisfaction, his spirit draining out of him when we're tearing through a set like Journey Together and just getting endless bulk. But with Destined Rivals, even my Pokémon-uninterested wife wanted in, so fun was it to have a strong chance of finding an exciting card. Where Journey Together only had 31 full-art cards, Destined Rivals has an amazing 62! Double! Admittedly, that's on top of a wild 182 regular cards (included ex), making this the biggest set since Surging Sparks, but with—in my admittedly unscientific sample—a seemingly much better chance of finding the special stuff. We were especially lucky to pull the Team Rocket's Ariana Special Illustration Rare, along with one of my chase cards, the Illustration Rare of Misty's Psyduck. No Mewtwo, sadly, but we also got 12 regular ex cards (only two duplicates), and 11 full-arts! If you include ex in the figures, that's a pull-rate of almost one in two! Remove the regular ex cards and you've still got one in five for something Ultra Rare or better. Those included the wildly gorgeous Rapidash by Rond, Mori Yuu's extraordinarily detailed Clamperl, the delightful Team Rocket's Murkrow (with Ariana and the Pokémon staring at one another in front of a skyline of skyscrapers) by Akira Komayama, and the splendidly silly Team Rocket's Raticate by Mekayu (the artist who gave us the glorious Drampa from Temporal Forces). And thirdly, the game itself! Journey Together was supposed to be the reintroduction of Trainer Pokémon to the live game, but it was such a damp squib. This time, things are really going to get mixed up! Team Rocket arrive with an array of brand new tricks and cheats, and while people are obviously going to build decks around Misty and Ethan, it'll be the baddies that once more prove the most fun. There's the addition of Team Rocket's Energy, which provides two energy to any Team Rocket Pokémon, and can be either Dark or Psychic or both! Meanwhile, Team Rocket's Venture Bomb lets you flip a coin to find out if it's going to do 20 damage to any of your opponent's Pokémon, or 20 specifically to your own Active Pokémon—but being an Item card, you can do this silliness as many times as you have cards in a single turn. Giovanni, meanwhile, offers a classic evil move: you can play him to swap out your current Active Pokémon, but also do the same to your opponent, and choose which of their benched Pokémon goes in. Team Rocket's Great Ball lets you flip a coin and then pull either an Evolution or Basic Pokémon from your deck depending on the result. And then Stadium card Team Rocket's Watchtower renders all Pokémon without abilities! That's going to destroy so many players' tactics! Oh, and there's a card called Team Rocket's Bother Bot, and while its ability is fascinating—you can flip one of your opponent's prize cards, then pick a random card from their hand, and then choose if you want them to swap them over—I'm mostly mentioning it because I find its name very funny. Then the Team Rocket Pokémon themselves do some real mischief. Arbok, for instance, stops your opponent playing any card with an ability (unless it's a Team Rocket), and also does 30 damage to every single Pokémon your opponent has on the board. Articuno can prevent all attack effects just by being on the bench. Dottler lets you look at the top five cards on your opponent's deck, and then put them back in your preferred order! Ha! Nidoran ♀ and ♂ offer their usual teamwork options, but super-powerfully. Once you've evolved to Nidorina, you can do an attack that lets you search your deck to evolve any two of your benched monsters, and then Stage 2's Nidoqueen will do 180 damage for one energy if you have a Nidoking in play. Oh, and Ampharos, Flaaffy's ultimate form, has an ability that means any time your opponent evolves a Pokémon, they automatically put 40 damage on it! That's monstrous. It's going to be so interesting to see how people manipulate these new additions into the meta, not least when yet more cards are deliberately designed to mess up current favorite decks—Mimikyu lets you steal Tera Pokémon attacks, for instance. I think this should finally offer the shake-up the game needs in its third year of this era, before (and this is still just a rumor, but quite a likely one) next year's switch to Mega Pokémon instead of a fourth year of S&V. Now, as I've said, my sample of 55 packs isn't big enough to be indicative, and perhaps we just got weirdly lucky. But I have high hopes here. We'll get a proper idea when the likes of Danny Phantump have put together their pull-rate data. Either way, there's such a wealth of beautiful cards in the set, so much incredible art to collect, and a bunch that'll make the live game so very interesting. Which is pretty much all I can ask for from a Pokémon TCG set. Other than, you know, being able to buy it. Which is going to be very, very hard to do. Destined Rivals officially releases on May 30, with pre-release events taking place this weekend, May 17-18. . For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Yahoo
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Pokémon Company Yet Again Promises It Will Print More TCG Cards, But...
If you've tried to buy a pack of Pokémon TCG cards in recent times, you'll already know what a shitshow it's all become. As we've been reporting, the last six months has seen the trading card game's explosion in popularity lead to an epidemic of scalping, leaving new cards all but unavailable to the regular players and collectors. Now, but not for the first time, The Pokémon Company has promised it will be addressing these shortages. It's just that their words don't really match reality. In a new statement issued on the eve of the release of the next set Journey Together, and posted to socials by Serebii's Joe Merrick, The Pokémon Company International (TPCi) explains that it's aware of the difficulty people are having buying the cards, but promises that it is 'actively working to print more of the impacted Pokémon TCG products as quickly as possible.' The thing is, that's exactly the same thing they said when we contacted them back in January about the same issue. Here's a quote from the new statement: We're aware that some fans are experiencing difficulties purchasing certain Pokémon Trading Card Game (TCG) products due to very high demand impacting availability. We understand this inconvenience can be disappointing for fans, and we are actively working to print more of the impacted Pokémon TCG products as quickly as possible and at maximum capacity to acknowledge this. And here's a quote from the statement in January: We're aware that some fans may experience difficulties purchasing certain Pokémon Trading Card Game: Scarlet & Violet—Prismatic Evolutions products at launch due to high demand impacting availability. We understand this inconvenience can be disappointing for fans, and we are actively working to print more of the impacted Pokémon TCG products as quickly as possible and at maximum capacity to acknowledge this. Which, given there has been no noticeable increase in availability of any affected sets in the two months since, makes this repeated promise a little harder to take seriously. It's almost word-for-word the same! Those who've been able to buy a pack of Prismatic Evolutions without paying scalped prices are the very lucky few. The new statement goes on to say that, 'For Pokémon TCG product releases at Pokémon Center, we are committed to providing a smooth purchasing experience and employ technology that helps get products into the hands of fans first and foremost.' As anyone who's tried to use the Pokémon Center on days when new cards are made available for pre-order will tell you, this simply isn't true. The statement continues, 'Currently, Pokémon Center implements a virtual queue for certain products to help provide a more seamless purchasing process during periods of increased site traffic.' But TPCi has to know this isn't working. When pre-orders for May's set, Destined Rivals, went live this week, the site was just broken for hours. Sometimes, if you were lucky, you'd see the 'queue' screen, but in my experience it never resolved to the site, and more often there was simply a message saying the site was down for repairs. To describe this as 'seamless' is quite something. By the time I was able to access the site, everything was of course sold out. In the past, even when the site hasn't gone down, product has been marked as sold out within moments of being added. And limiting purchase numbers does almost nothing against an army of bots that can make multiple purchases to multiple accounts. It just all sucks. Tomorrow, people will line up outside stores in desperate hope of being able to find some Journey Together product, and many will miss out. Scalpers will do all they can to scoop the majority of the cards, and kids and collectors will be disappointed. What we need at this point is not a copypasta of a statement issued two-and-a-half months ago, re-promising the same things that clearly haven't happened. We need The Pokémon Company to get on top of this, to actually start printing and delivering product to retailers (I've spoken to specialist shop owners who say they cannot get answers, let alone cards to sell), and more than anything else, to drop the disingenuous statements and offer a bit more honesty and clarity. We've reached out to TPCi to ask for that, to get some specifics on how much more product it intends to print and how, and what practical plans it has for its websites given things clearly aren't 'seamless.' . For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
