Pokémon TCG Pocket is a digital version of the Pokémon trading card game, focused mainly on collecting but there's a light version of the regular TCG in there with a cut-down deck size. It's the hot new fad sweeping the nation.
2025-01-22: I crashed out of Ursiiday's weekly last week after my round 2 opponent clicked that they won game 3 about 30 seconds after game 2 ended. We did not play three games. I didn't record the game so I couldn't prove my allegations to the judges. It bummed me out a fair bit.
I'm having a bit of trouble with the consecutive wins event this time around. I got to three wins with a Mewtwo deck and then lost to a Gyarados deck that flipped three heads with Misty. Maybe I'll try that Pidgeot deck I'm seeing some people talk up, or maybe I'll play Celebi or something. Not sure yet.
2025-01-11: Another week, another weekly. I copied HolonMentor's deck list that beat me last week and rode it pretty far into the bracket, ultimately going 7-3. I think I played pretty well. I had some real killers in my matchups and everyone I lost to ended up in top 32 (at positions 1, 27, and 31 going into day 2, respectively). Aero/Primeape is a really solid deck, though I really wonder if it might be better to swap the apes out for Farfetch'd and make a couple tweaks from there. I think next week I'll try the Eggy/Celebi deck that Bolo played because man that was just crazy to play against. When that does worse I'll probably swap to an Aero/Fetch'd deck or some similar control deck because that feels better to me. Though maybe by that point the new set will be out and everything will get shaken up.
2025-01-07: I signed up for another one of Ursiiday's weekly tournaments. I tried running a Charizard/Arcanine deck this time, and then went 3-3, with my third loss coming from one of the best Primeape/Aerodactyl deck players. I'll probably give that deck a spin next week, even though its winrate is on the worse end. I probably would've kept playing to boost my place in the standings a bit, but I wanted to get back to finishing the piece on Wizardry I was working on. It seems like the decks that are doing the most above average right now are double EX decks that have a stage one or Basic to fall back on. Celebi decks are doing alright, but only if they're also running Exeggutor, and it seems like fire decks focusing more on Arcanine ex than Charizard are doing well. My gut feeling that I should've run Mewtwo seemed pretty correct, since that archetype made up the biggest chunk of what got into top 32. I don't think my last-minute switch to Charizard/Arcanine was a bad move though, since a similar archetype came in second place. I think there's something I'm missing when I play the games, and I can feel it a bit in some places when I really start thinking a few steps ahead in how I should be positioning my cards, but I'm not sure how to articulate it. I think I'm missing a good sense of how to think a few moves ahead in that sort of way you develop when you solve a lot of chess puzzles.
2024-12-28: I decided to sign up for Ursiiday's weekly tournament. I won one game, lost the next three, won the game after that by DQ, lost the game after that, and then won the next four games by DQ because my opponents just didn't show up, giving me a 6-4 record and putting me at 276th place out of 1940 entrants. I think I don't like playing the Gyarados ex deck. I'm going to keep an eye on top 32 tomorrow and see how it all shakes out but it seems like the left field deck this week is Primeape/Aerodactyl ex. It's a deck I thought about when I was looking at options while messing around, but the version they're running with is way more refined than what I tried, and I gave up on it early because I didn't believe enough in it (and didn't understand the basics that make up the core of good fighting decks right now). I'm feeling a bit burned on Misty decks right now, so while that one Lumineon deck seems interesting, I think I might just go back to running some variation of Mewtwo/Gardevoir next week since Primeape/Aero is outperforming against basically everything else except it.
2024-12-26: I bought the other Gyarados ex I needed for the deck out of the shop and I've been playing around with it and the Golem deck in the 45 wins event, and I'm up to 40 or so now. Gyarados is pretty hard to stop once it gets going, though Hitmonlee always threatens a kick against Magikarp early. Greninja's been an MVP for me both in this set and the Starmie ex deck I was running before set A1a came out. Sometimes Greninja just wins me games outright, but more often than not it's just really handy for picking up chip damage. For a while I thought about running mixed fire/water energy in the deck in case I just bricked and had nothing to work with but Druddigons, but that hasn't come up nearly as often as the situation where rolling a few fire energies in a row cost me a lot in positioning.
The Golem deck is pretty good at stalling things out until you can draw the Golem. Hitmonlee threatens the backline and takes the bigger threats down into a more manageable range, and Marshadow can work as a threat if the enemy's down near 110 HP. The Golem deck creates a lot of interesting positioning problems to work with, it's neat.
I've started chasing Wonder Picks a bit to get some full art trainers for my decks, and it's curious watching people react to any kind of friction in the Wonder Pick communities-- as though the people doing the work of rerolling to get a good pack of cards are part of a servant underclass and not worthy of any kind of give-and-take. There's a whole lot of "how dare you"s and the whiniest kind of twitter posting about gatekeeping or ableism and the like because someone asked for like, A drawing or to solve A math problem, or asked people to do the barest minimum of checking some unconfirmed wonder picks once in a while -- do something for the community instead of just being a leech is what most of it boils down to. It's not a lot being asked for, but people start breaking out the language used to analyze institutional racism because they're being asked to do literally anything for another person in return for something that's evidently of at least enough value to go out of their way to look for and they think it's beneath them to put in five minutes of work. It's strange.
Really, watching the way people talk in the public servers is curious because there's a ton of absolute loser talk happening all the time, talking about how 'cheap' some strategy or other is, or how 'it's all just coin tosses'. I've been following competitive Pokemon passively for a couple years now-- I think since around the point I saw Reverend's video on the RBY Ubers metagame-- and the thing that keeps coming up time and again is that if you think some tool is way too good: use it. Watch how people respond to it. Abuse it until you find something better. It's like the people in these servers have never read Sirlin's guide on playing to win. Sure, sometimes there are positions that are just unwinnable but there were a lot more situations where I lost because I'd mismanaged my energy placement twelve turns earlier or didn't set up my mons properly. Mitigating luck is a big part of games like this. But I guess a lot of the people I'm seeing in those servers are all new to this-- they wouldn't be in the most visible public servers if they weren't -- so they've gotta learn the lessons everyone's gotta learn about PVP at some point.
2024-12-23: It seems like that Golem deck won one of the weekly tournaments yesterday. I was watching the stream as it was going into top 4 and I think the game plan makes a bit more sense now. Hitmonlee is there to threaten their back row and bring things down into KO range for Golem, Marshadow's there to pick up KOs if one of the main hitters goes down, and Druddigon is there to be a wall that racks up chip damage. It's a neat deck and it works pretty well.
2024-12-22: A couple more tournament results have started coming in. Gyarados ex decks are doing really well, with 13 placements in top 32. There wasn't a single Celebi deck in top 32. Scolipede also didn't make it into that one and it's started falling off a fair bit, though it's still got a positive winrate. It's really strong against Mewtwo decks but it seems like it struggles against everything else. Water decks are eating really well. Pikachu's coming back into favor because it's got a good matchup into Gyarados. It's looking like a lot of the deck archetypes that worked in Genetic Apex will come back into the meta. The most interesting off-meta deck out there is the one guy running Golem and going on a tear. We love to see it.
2024-12-20: It's been a few days and we've started seeing some more tournament results roll in. It's looking like Celebi/Serperior is the second-most popular deck but it's got a slightly negative winrate (48% or so). It seems like the deck that's outperforming the most right now is Scolipede/Weezing. The one I grabbed off the internet and played a match with seemed pretty decent. It doesn't have any ex cards so it takes a bit more for the enemy to win and Tauros is really strong as an alternative against most of the big threats. I wonder why Celebi's losing out in the way it is. Gyarados ex also seems to be wildly outperforming but I haven't gotten to try it yet. Most of the decks that were good in Genetic Apex continue to be solid. Though, there aren't a lot of results in so a lot of this could just be noise right now.
2024-12-17 (continued) (breaking down how to analyze cards): I don’t know how much of what I’m about to write is deeply obvious and how much is just a result of spending too much time staring at gacha characters’ kits on release and evaluating them from that, but I’d like to break down how we can evaluate whether a card is high value or not in Pokemon TCG Pocket. Maybe this is more for my own understanding than anything useful, who knows. Maybe this will brush right up against something useful and then not get there. who knows.
In Pokemon TCG Pocket there are about six things that can happen on any given turn: draw a card, attach energy, play card, evolve card, switch, and attack. A card that lets you do one of these things beyond what you’d otherwise be able to do is higher value than a card that doesn’t, and the more cards you have that let you get ahead of the turn count will put you into a better position. Obvious stuff.
Even more obvious is that there is a hierarchy of importance to these actions, and the further you get down the chain the less important they are (though they still have some impact worth considering).
Most important are the attacks. If you can take out all of the opponent’s pokemon you win. Following from that, the next most important actions are what you do to enable the attacks: attaching energy and evolving the pokemon. After that are the less important actions of drawing the cards and playing the basic mons, with switching at the bottom of the priority list because that makes neutral progress, generally.
We’ve got a rough hierarchy here. Attack, attach, evolve, draw, set card, switch. This is all pretty straightforward and intuitive. Now I’m going to skip over the most obvious part that we all grasp intuitively, because treating the reader like an invalid makes me want to blow my brains out. I’m going to skip the analysis straight to the cards that involve a coinflip. When we’re evaluating the relative value of a card’s attack here we should think about what the average damage it will do is. Marowak ex has the potential to do 160 damage, for example, but on any turn you attack with it you can only expect to do about 80 damage because of how the coin toss’s distribution will go. I generally try to avoid relying solely on luck for strategy, and if there is random variance involved I think I should err on assuming the average result rather than the theoretical maximum result, even though it is very cool to land a ton of heads in a row. As a non-trivial example, the new Eevee from the Mythical Island expansion (at time of writing the expansion released about 20 hours ago) can flip a coin until it lands on tails, which theoretically has no upper bound, but the average result if I’m remembering my math classes right (which I might not be, I never took Statistics) is going to be the area under the curve of f(x)=(0.5)^x in the range 0 to infinity, which is something to the effect of 1/log(2) or about 1.4427 multiplied by the 20 damage each hit does. So about 28 damage on average. This 1.4427 number is, similarly, what you can expect on average for energy gain out of a use of Misty (I think. If my base assumptions here are wrong this is all wrong, but the number more or less lines up with what I'd expect), but I’m getting ahead of myself.
In the Genetic Apex set the decks at the top of the meta with positive winrates were the ones that enabled people to get their gameplan up and running in fewer turns. The most consistent decks required less setup and had ways of generating energy and get attacking sooner beyond what you could draw by default. Pikachu ex has Magneton to generate energy and Lt. Surge to move it to a couple specific mons (I'm reaching at straws a bit here. I'm not totally sure why Pikachu ex did as well as they did. Perhaps there's some aspect I'm not considering.). Water decks can get up and running more quickly with Misty letting them get ahead by about 1.442 turns on average per use of Misty. Fire decks running Moltres get an average of, if my math’s right, and applying the same integral function to the range {0, 3}, 1.26 turns per turn that Moltres uses its ability. Mewtwo ex decks, when Gardevoir gets up and running, are getting an extra 1 or 2 turns per turn, depending on the number of Gardevoir on the field, though that takes a lot more setup and I don’t want to learn how to calculate how the draw rates affect the calcs. That sounds like a lot more work. I’m a dumbass rando writing shit up on Neocities, not a mathematician. And also it’s my birthday. You wouldn’t hit a little birthday boy, would you? (it's not my birthday)
There’s probably also some factor in here about working out the average damage per turn that a card’s going to do but it’s really late right now (9 PM) and I’d rather get these notes up and stew on what else should go into it and update it more later.
2024-12-17: The new expansion set's out. I haven't seen most of the cards yet, but the initial impressions I'm seeing from people say that Celebi ex/Serperior is the deck to beat. If you scroll down a bit you can see I was thinking that grass decks would be good if they had a good damage dealer, and Celebi seems to be proving that point. I'll wait for the meta to settle in a bit more to see what the rest of the major archetypes look like.
2024-12-15:I finished collecting all the Kanto mons today and I've won about 140 battles or so. Gonna write down some of my thoughts on the various deck archetypes, starting with the ones that have a positive winrate on average.
Starmie EX: crazy good, the most reliable deck I've used by far. There are so many ways to get momentum early and Misty can sometimes just win you matches before turn 2. The main deck I've been using is this Greninja/Starmie set. It's super reliable, everything costs two energy at most, and I went like twelve games with it before dropping a set. It generates energy fast and Farfetch'd works as a threatening lead that's a bit more reliable than Kangaskhan on average if you pull it. I think that's how it works out anyway. Kanghaskhan should be averaging about 30 damage a hit while Farfetch'd hits for 40 consistently. Great deck, insanely mean, sometimes it just resolves itself into a winning situation even if I didn't think it could. Love it.
Moltres EX: Super straightforward, super reliable. It is pretty dependent on fishing for evolutions though, and the backup win condition with Arcanine is pretty risky. Still, it's a good deck.
Pikachu EX: I'm not sure how I feel about this one. I only just got all the pieces for it and it seems like it's not as dependent on fishing for specific evolutions in cards as some of the other decks, but there aren't as many ways to get ahead in energy production and that slows down its momentum a lot, and while Zapdos has a high ceiling and will hit pretty hard on average I really don't like relying on coin flips. Still, its reliance on basics instead of evolutions means you're pretty much always getting something workable in your first draw, and it makes Pokéball a bit higher value, ensuring that a high percentage of your draws will net you something you can work with. It seems like it's got the highest average winrate of all the big deck types, statistically. I'm still figuring out how to pilot it well so I'm not totally sure how I feel about it yet. Theoretically I should like this one a lot because it's not reliant on all the things I hate, but it's doing that at the cost of not having a good way to get ahead in energy production. It'll probably grow on me.
Gardevoir: I ran this deck a bunch early on. It's solid, it works, and once you get Gardevoir up and running to set Mewtwo up it has the momentum of an out-of-control freight train. But you're really fishing for that Gardevoir evolution and if you can't get there you're going to get chipped down a ton. It's a whole lot of gambling on the deck to give you something useful, though not as much as some of the other decks out there. It will win more often than not.
Wigglytuff EX: This is a deck you run to make people mad. It's heavily reliant on coin flips and status effects, and there's no way to get ahead in energy production. I probably wouldn't run it unless I was really messing around, but a couple variations of the deck do have a slightly above-average winrate.
Below this point are a couple of deck archetypes that win less than half the time that I want to write a bit about.
Melmetal: It's an interesting deck that seems pretty decent with its ability to generate energy quickly but it's got the problem the Gardevoir deck does where you're really waiting on evolutions, and every turn you're gambling on the 10% odds of pulling your Melmetal, and there's not really an alternate win condition if the draw doesn't go your way. There's a good deck in here but I don't know that anyone's quite put together all the pieces to really make it shine yet. Maybe Dhelmise or some other Pokémon will pull it together next expansion.
Marowak EX: This one's fun to mess around with but your big ex threat is averaging as much damage as Greninja without the free damage from the bench. I don't like relying on coinflips. This one and the Golurk deck are fun if you feel like going gambling.
Lilligant: It feels like this deck should be alright since it does have some ways to get ahead in energy production but Venusaur ex just takes so much more setup to do as much damage as Starmie is potentially doing by turn 3. Maybe if a better grass type rolls around there'll be more of a use, and I'm seeing a couple cards that could maybe help in the expansion preview, but right now it's just really hard to make grass decks work well. They're built for stall and the meta is built for hyper-offense with higher numbers than grass can heal.
Dragonite: This is a deck where you're making a ton of gambles on every play. Gambling on getting the right energy, gambling on getting the right evolutions, and then once you're set up you're gambling on which of the opponent's Pokémon you're going to hit. If everything goes right this deck is a ton of fun. If your luck at any point is wrong you just lose. I wouldn't run this one.