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.
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.