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queenluaso, i played a couple rounds of the Pokémon TCG with the boy a while back.
in particular, the 2018 World Championship decks were on sale right next to the cash register at Kinokuniya, and in general i'd rather dive straight into the deep end of "intense competitive play" rather than fuck around with "starter decks", so i bought a couple and we both plunged in without any previous knowledge of the game.
and from a game design point of view, the contrast with Magic the Gathering is fascinating.
(i'll attempt to write about this in a way that makes sense even if you're not familiar with Magic, but uh, no promises.)
so, if you're coming to the Pokémon TCG from Magic, you look at a card like Cynthia, which basically says “ditch your hand, draw a new hand,” and you automatically think, “that is the most broken shit ever.” see: Memory Jar, the only card to ever get an emergency banning in Magic history, which has essentially the same text. how the hell, we thought, could they have cards like this flying around without completely breaking the game?
there's two reasons Cynthia seems broken, coming from a Magic point of view:
(1) there’s a concept in Magic called “card advantage”—he who has more cards in hand, has more options available, and thus has the advantage in any encounter. in Magic, a card that lets you draw three cards for cheap is considered utterly broken. a card that lets you draw a new hand would just straight-up win you games.
(2) the combo potential for something like that is unbelievable. the reason Memory Jar got banned wasn’t just “drawing cards”—it was because you could combine that with Megrim to just kill your opponent via the act of discarding cards. in general, there's lots of disparate elements in Magic that can interact with each other—card draw can affect life totals, creatures dying can cause more creates to be created, spells can "buff" certain creatures, and so on.
after playing a game of Pokémon, however, i began to understand that, while Cynthia is very good, she’s not broken, for two reasons:
(1) everyone has access to trainer cards. there are no restrictions based on which Pokémon you’re using, what type of Pokémon you’re using, or even what turn it is—you can play as many trainer cards as you want during your turn, of any kind, and they all cost you nothing. compare to Magic: a complaint for years was that blue/black had all the good card draw and counter spells, and since you really needed those sorts of things to be competitive in tournaments, this meant everyone played blue/black. magic responded to these complaints by making the average blue/black card weaker over time, and other cards stronger, so that (hopefully!) any given color you play will be tournament-viable, even if you don’t have access to every good card.
pokémon responded by just saying: sure, whatever, everyone can play all the good cards. which is certainly a very tidy solution.
(2) the lack of instant-speed effects or alternate methods of dealing damage really dilutes the usefulness of card draw. even if you draw the perfect hand, you have to put a pokémon on the playing field, and that pokémon can only attack once per turn, and that is all the damage that will happen. they will (almost always) have to attack six times total to win the game. compare to Magic, where damage can come from creatures, but also from “burn” spells, discard effects, and so on…. the game can end on any turn, for the most part, limited only by the powerfulness of the cards available.
the implications of these design choices, gameplay wise, are fascinating:
(1) the competitive scene seems fixated around consistency—you can easily draw/filter through most of your deck in a game, so you're mostly using trainer cards to get your best Pokémon in hand, then using your best Pokémon in every encounter. Magic also focuses on consistency, but since there's less card draw / filtering, there's a certain amount of randomness that's unavoidable and must be accounted for.
(2) there aren't really combos in Pokémon. each "trainer" card is more-or-less a singleton action; you don't "chain" them together or do anything super-wacky with them. so really you're just putting together the most optimal hand and playing with it.
thus, in terms of gamefeel, Pokémon ends up being a really soothing game, in a certain sense. i'm the kind of person who likes shuffling cards just to relax, so, i like the amount of drawing/shuffling/filtering. it's also a little solitaire-esque, though, which can be good or bad—the ways your opponent can interact with your Pokémon, outside of attacks with their own Pokémon, are rather limited.
but i do miss the combos, the unexpected ways different cards could affect each other, and the overall feeling of interactivity. i understand why they don't have those things—the complexity of your game ramps up enormously as soon as you let people "respond" to things with instant-speed spells, or when things start interacting in surprising ways. it's what makes Magic so famously difficult for new players to learn (and, less famously, so difficult to write a computer program to play). but that dynamism is also what makes Magic so fun and memorable.
anyway, tl;dr "card advantage" is not a concept that applies equally to all trading card games! which is obvious in hindsight, but was really fun to experience in such a direct way.
in particular, the 2018 World Championship decks were on sale right next to the cash register at Kinokuniya, and in general i'd rather dive straight into the deep end of "intense competitive play" rather than fuck around with "starter decks", so i bought a couple and we both plunged in without any previous knowledge of the game.
and from a game design point of view, the contrast with Magic the Gathering is fascinating.
(i'll attempt to write about this in a way that makes sense even if you're not familiar with Magic, but uh, no promises.)
so, if you're coming to the Pokémon TCG from Magic, you look at a card like Cynthia, which basically says “ditch your hand, draw a new hand,” and you automatically think, “that is the most broken shit ever.” see: Memory Jar, the only card to ever get an emergency banning in Magic history, which has essentially the same text. how the hell, we thought, could they have cards like this flying around without completely breaking the game?
there's two reasons Cynthia seems broken, coming from a Magic point of view:
(1) there’s a concept in Magic called “card advantage”—he who has more cards in hand, has more options available, and thus has the advantage in any encounter. in Magic, a card that lets you draw three cards for cheap is considered utterly broken. a card that lets you draw a new hand would just straight-up win you games.
(2) the combo potential for something like that is unbelievable. the reason Memory Jar got banned wasn’t just “drawing cards”—it was because you could combine that with Megrim to just kill your opponent via the act of discarding cards. in general, there's lots of disparate elements in Magic that can interact with each other—card draw can affect life totals, creatures dying can cause more creates to be created, spells can "buff" certain creatures, and so on.
after playing a game of Pokémon, however, i began to understand that, while Cynthia is very good, she’s not broken, for two reasons:
(1) everyone has access to trainer cards. there are no restrictions based on which Pokémon you’re using, what type of Pokémon you’re using, or even what turn it is—you can play as many trainer cards as you want during your turn, of any kind, and they all cost you nothing. compare to Magic: a complaint for years was that blue/black had all the good card draw and counter spells, and since you really needed those sorts of things to be competitive in tournaments, this meant everyone played blue/black. magic responded to these complaints by making the average blue/black card weaker over time, and other cards stronger, so that (hopefully!) any given color you play will be tournament-viable, even if you don’t have access to every good card.
pokémon responded by just saying: sure, whatever, everyone can play all the good cards. which is certainly a very tidy solution.
(2) the lack of instant-speed effects or alternate methods of dealing damage really dilutes the usefulness of card draw. even if you draw the perfect hand, you have to put a pokémon on the playing field, and that pokémon can only attack once per turn, and that is all the damage that will happen. they will (almost always) have to attack six times total to win the game. compare to Magic, where damage can come from creatures, but also from “burn” spells, discard effects, and so on…. the game can end on any turn, for the most part, limited only by the powerfulness of the cards available.
the implications of these design choices, gameplay wise, are fascinating:
(1) the competitive scene seems fixated around consistency—you can easily draw/filter through most of your deck in a game, so you're mostly using trainer cards to get your best Pokémon in hand, then using your best Pokémon in every encounter. Magic also focuses on consistency, but since there's less card draw / filtering, there's a certain amount of randomness that's unavoidable and must be accounted for.
(2) there aren't really combos in Pokémon. each "trainer" card is more-or-less a singleton action; you don't "chain" them together or do anything super-wacky with them. so really you're just putting together the most optimal hand and playing with it.
thus, in terms of gamefeel, Pokémon ends up being a really soothing game, in a certain sense. i'm the kind of person who likes shuffling cards just to relax, so, i like the amount of drawing/shuffling/filtering. it's also a little solitaire-esque, though, which can be good or bad—the ways your opponent can interact with your Pokémon, outside of attacks with their own Pokémon, are rather limited.
but i do miss the combos, the unexpected ways different cards could affect each other, and the overall feeling of interactivity. i understand why they don't have those things—the complexity of your game ramps up enormously as soon as you let people "respond" to things with instant-speed spells, or when things start interacting in surprising ways. it's what makes Magic so famously difficult for new players to learn (and, less famously, so difficult to write a computer program to play). but that dynamism is also what makes Magic so fun and memorable.
anyway, tl;dr "card advantage" is not a concept that applies equally to all trading card games! which is obvious in hindsight, but was really fun to experience in such a direct way.
