The Future of Pokémon Cards

[Music] this is Mr ishihara the president of the Pokemon company in August 2022 he shared groundbreaking news about the future of the Pokemon Trading Card Game and my friends the future is now the Pokémon TCG like most games is subject to power creep power creep refers to the gradual unbalancing of a game typically due to new installments and updates bringing more powerful options rendering the old pieces underpowered and sometimes completely obsolete the Pokémon TCG especially when compared to another card game like Yu-Gi-Oh has historically not had many major issues with game balance fixing their largest mistakes with much needed bands or even an early format rotation what is a format rotation I'm glad you asked only cards from the past few years are legal for the standard format which is the tournament format for all official events every year or so Pokemon will rotate about four older sets out making room for the new sets in the next year of course this means players will need to eventually buy new cards but I don't really look at it as an evil part of the Pokemon money machine as much as it is a balance precaution in the design of Pokémon cards so that a card from 10 years ago doesn't threaten a broken interaction with a new card it was never meant to be paired with this rotation of cards also avoids the need for power creep since the new cards will have to be played as a product of eliminating the older cards via rotation in my opinion there have only been two major bumps in the road which Pokemon didn't issue a timely fix for not including the mountain of balance problems with the original base set through neogenesis formats which I give the designers a pass on since the game was brand new the first of these major balance issues was meww ex and double colorless energy in 2012 the Pokemon TCG went through a game design shift around this time to make the game play faster and easier and the nail in the coffin was meww ex meww ex became the best attacking Pokemon in the format and it was also the best counter to itself this was a problem due to Mewtwo being a basic Pokemon with more HP than most evolution Pokemon at the time and only needing to attach a single energy card to use its main attack xball thanks to double color energy this caused a noticeable shift from World's 2011 where the top 32 decks all utilized Evolution Pokémon and a variety of different strategies to worlds 2012 in which meww ex was included in 75% of the top 32 decks and only 25% of the top 32 used any evolution Pokemon at all the power creep and game imbalance between Basic Pokemon EX and evolution Pokemon took years for the game designers to identify as a problem and eventually correct with the early Sun and Moon sets which ushered in a new golden age of the Pokemon TCG if you're enjoying this video don't forget to subscribe to the channel for more Pokemon TCG content and check out my wonderful sponsors and Affiliates linked down below use my coupon codes at poac collect.com for a wide selection of sealed products pre-orders for new releases and unique Mystery Box items at potown store.com When shopping for Pokémon TCG Live code cards at Dragon shield sleeves my favorite card sleeves to use and inam apparel for comfortable and passionate clothing if you have Pokémon TCG bulk lying around start selling it with ease at tcg bulk.com that modern golden age of the Pokémon TCG didn't last long because the second of the two major blemishes on the otherwise fairly pristine track record of Pokemon TCG game balance was the combination of tag team Pokémon in the later sun and moon sets immediately followed by V and Vmax Pokemon in the sword and shield era tag team Pokémon GX mimicked the effect which meww ex had on the 2012 format these Pokémon were all Basics had monstrous HP and many had the most broken effects we'd ever seen from attacks like Gengar and mimik use horror house GX which literally said the opponent couldn't play the game next turn and archus Di and Pia's altered creation GX which cut the win condition of the game in half by making all Pokemon worth one extra prize card one of the biggest issues here is that compared to tag team GX Pokémon regular evolution Pokemon would take up more deck space and also take more time to evolve into their strongest forms and even then would still be weaker than most of the tag teams if you thought that it couldn't be worse than tag teams I'd argue that you're wrong because the the mechanic that directly followed tag team GX was V and V Max Pokémon which were overly sted and simplified Pokemon cards that blew most regular Pokemon out of the water at least tag team Pokemon had several usable attacks each and admittedly had some very interesting and unique effects the same could not be said for the majority of v and Vmax Pokémon which made the Pokemon TCG unrecognizable and exceedingly Bland to someone who had played the game in the two decades preceding Vmax and tag teams so the Sun and Moon era of the TCG was great until tag teams flooded the game and the sword and shield sets were pretty miserable for anyone who remembered the good old days luckily with scarlet and violet we can hop into the professor's area zero time machine and travel to the Future that Mr ishihara promised us back in August 2022 in that announcement at World's 2022 we were shown a presentation for from Mr nagashima the lead designer at creatures Inc the company that designs the Pokémon Trading Card Game nagashima told us that stage 2 EX Pokemon would rival the V-Max Pokemon from sword and shield sets and that comebacks would be an important theme within scarlet and violet nagashima also specified that Evolution and diversity would be important aspects of the new Scarlet and violet TCG sets hearing these promises from creatures Inc seemed too good to be true the game designers were actually identifying the themes and card mechanics that players had been begging for the past few years and Mr nagashima himself even specified that these new ex cards would rival that of the Pokemon Vmax having this information come directly from the source was quite promising but we'd have to wait and see if they could deliver on these significant claims between March and November 2023 we would receive five scarlet and violet TCG expansions in the west four of them being full sets and the fifth being the generation one tribute set scarlet and violet1 creatures Inc has a history of gradually implementing new mechanics and not going all out on the first couple sets of a new block we've seen this as far back as Ruby and Sapphire EX in 2003 which was the original premiere of the lowercase ex mechanic in this base set of the original ex block the EX Pokémon were incredible underwhelming but in the next year of sets we would receive four mat defining EX Pokémon like blazak ex from Team Magma versus Team Aqua and Blastoise EX from fire red and leaf green with that in mind the scarlet and violet base set actually got off to a pretty explosive start introducing both maridon ex and gavar ex which are still incredibly impressive cards even after four more scarlet and violet sets have been released however scarlet and Violet based set didn't really offer much in the form of these comeback mechanics which we were promised other than Defiance band which allows your Pokemon to deal 30 more damage if you're behind in prize cards the second scarlet and violet expansion set Pala evolved delivered on the promise of comeback mechanics with not one but two new impactful cards the first of these was iono a supporter card that is almost an exact copy of beloved comeback cards from the past Rockets ad from 2004 and N from 2011 but with the small Twist of putting each player's hand on the bottom of their deck opposed to shuffling the hand into the deck iono immediately became a staple of the standard format upon release and likely will stay that way until it rotates the second card cashing in on the promise of comeback mechanics and Pala evolved was reversal energy also a near reprint of an older card scramble energy in addition to these two cards we've seen plenty of evidence that the designers are putting more value into evolving Pokemon turning the game around from a losing position and encouraging diversity of strategies and deck archetypes in the competitive metag game remember that time machine I mentioned from area zero well it was only a matter of time until the Paradox Pokémon made their way into the trading card game with the release of paradox Rift on November 3rd the ancient and future Pokémon made their debut with Pokémon like roaring moon and scream tail from the past and iron hands and iron Valiant from the future the excitement of paradox Rift didn't stop there as this set would also reprint counter catcher an incredible item card that only benefits the player who is losing the game luxurious Cape is another card from this set with depth and decisionmaking built into its core since it gives one of your Pokemon 100 more HP at the cost of making that Pokemon worth an additional prize card even more from Paradox Rift this set introduced four new technical machines which are tool cards that give the attached Pokémon a new attack to use all four of them are worth considering for your decks but the Technical Machine evolution is the most notable of them since it accelerates the evolution process for any type of deck this might all sound amazing but there was plenty of distaste in the competitive Community about the future Pokemon cards iron Valiant ex and iron hands ex iron Valiant ex has the ability tachon bits which can place two damage counters on one of your opponent's Pokémon this isn't gamebreaking by any means at face value but when you consider that it's feasible to use up to four of these abilities a turn players began fearing that turn one wins could occur because of this card and that would dismantle all of the work creatures Inc has put in to encourage Evolution comeback mechanics and overall more thoughtful games at the competitive level the doomsayers would digress on this topic of iron Valiant e ex as the true detriment of paradox Rift was claimed to be Iron hands ex you see Iron hands ex has an attack that allows it to take an extra prize card if specifically this attack knocks out a Pokemon thus began the proclamation of the death of single prize Pokémon whether it was Tunnel Vision on an effect that triggered the PTSD of ADP or simply The Human Condition of craving negativity and exaggeration many engaged in this group think that creature Inc had made a horrible miscalculation and was essentially erasing all of the excellent steps they had made in the right direction with the scarlet and violet sets the first major event with Paradox Rift legal for play was the Latin American International championships on November 17th 2023 using the official Pokemon deck usage analysis from day one of the event we can see that gavar ex and Charizard EX decks took up over a third of the entire field together together with both of these decks heavily relying on Evolution Pokémon and specifically gavar using many single prize Pokemon as its main attackers this surprised the people who stuck to their claims of paradox Rift destroying the progress that had been made in favor of the Pokémon tcg's balance if we turn our attention to the third and sixth most played decks these are the archetypes which would include iron hand DX seamlessly so this new threat was definitely present in the field moving on to day two of the event over 20% of the players who made it into day two were piloting gavar ex decks meaning Not only was this archetype still popular but it was also doing really well lost Zone box another deck archetype which was on the top prior to Paradox Rift and was rumored to be completely dead with the release of iron hands and iron Valiant not only had 10 spots in day two but would ultimately be piloted to fifth place by Brennan camer while I would love to tell you that this completely disproved the reign of terror that iron Valiant and iron handz X would have on the game that would only be partially true although lawone box made it all the way to fifth place and gavar ex decks were massively successful the second place deck was an iron Valiant ex archetype and the champion of the whole event used a maridon ex deck which included one copy of iron hands ex although a deck using iron hands ex did win the entire event worldclass players battling for tens of thousands of dollars in prize money chose to play decks like gavar lost Zone and Charizard and to not much fault as these decks were all successful in fact this massive tournament had incredibly diverse results with 10 different archetypes just in the top 16 of this prestigious Championship which leads me to say that the Pokemon TCG is currently in a fantastic fantastic competitive State the scarlet and violet sets so far have left me confident in the creatures Inc designers and I am not meeting every new card reveal with intense scrutiny because for the first time since the early Sun and Moon sets I'm having a wonderful time building decks exploring strategies and playing the Pokemon Trading Card Game please feel free to leave your thoughts and feelings in the comments down below and thanks for watching I'll see you next time here on celio's network [Music]

Channel: Celio's Network

Views: 161,085

Keywords: Pokemon TCG Power Creep, History of Power Creep in Pokemon TCG, Pokemon TCG News 2023, Pokemon TCG news 2024

Id: 4LgiyHmYWyQ

Length: 14min 34sec (874 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 24 2023