Summary
Even though a huge part of the appeal ofPokemon TCG Pocketis to let fans collect cards entirely for free, with paid in-app purchases that make the process smoother and faster, the game has rapidly found its audience in terms of competitive battles. This is something that has grown rather quickly over time, thanks to the recent addition ofRanked Mode inPokemon TCG Pocket, which allows fans to queue against other players and possibly climb the ladder for extra rewards at the end of a season. As such, deckbuilding became ever more relevant, and while there have been improvements in the past months, some features are sorely lacking.
For example, players were vocal about the game needing more deck slots to verify that one could build and save different types of decks, instead of having to delete older ones to make room for those enabled by new sets.Pokemon TCG Pocketdoes have more deck slots now, but they are still arguably not enough for all the needs one might have. More importantly, the process of building a deck in the game is far from optimized, and it lacks a specific quality-of-life feature when it comes to Energy types.
Why Pokemon TCG Pocket’s Deckbuilding is Problematic
Energy inPokemon TCG Pocketdoesn’t work like in the game’s physical counterpart, where players have Energy cards to draw and put in a deck based on their needs. Instead,Pokemon TCG Pockethas a reduced deck size thatdoesn’t include any Energy cardsat all, and Energy is entirely generated at random in the so-called Energy Zone based on one of two factors. The first is the type or types of Energy that players set when building a deck, the second is the type or types of the Pokemon cards in the deck, which then automatically generates Energy based on this.
Decks automatically generating Energy for players is not something one can opt out of, and the game will always do it whenever players build a deck or even change an existing one. Setting the correct type of Energy one needs for their strategy is, unfortunately, not something the game will remember. For example, if players are usingPokemon TCG Pocket’s Oricorioand Greinja in the same deck, the game will always set that deck’s Energy types as Water and Electric - even if players only need one of them for their strategy to work.
This can become exponentially more problematic the more multi-type decks one has or wants to build, as this happens every single time a change is made to an existing deck (even if it’s swapping a single card out), as well as every time a deck is built. What follows is that this becomes extremely hard to micromanage, and with 20 deck slots, it’s quite likely that players will have at least a handful of multi-type decks.Pokemon TCG Pocket’s meta decksoften use multi-type decks, such as the Arceus Ex/Crobat/Carnivine deck that has been rising in usage recently, or the fact that cards like Greninja and Giratina Ex are almost always splashed in any deck that fits them, regardless of type.
Making the Energy of a given deck auto-assigned every single time a change happens means that players not only have to be careful when creating a deck, but also every time they modify one. Not doing this can easily mean a given strategy is completely bricked upon queuing for a match, which can equally easily lead to an automatic loss. If one is playing theArceus Ex/Crobat/Carnivine deck, which mostly uses Grass Energy, and is suddenly stuck with Dark Energy only, Carnivine cannot attack and is entirely useless.
What Pokemon TCG Pocket Can Do About Energy Types in Decks
As it stands, the game desperately needs a feature that either saves the settings chosen by players when building a deck or allows them to turn off automatic generation of Energy types. Considering how inconsistent using multipletypes of Energy is inPokemon TCG Pocket, going into a match with an extra Energy type or two is very likely to make the game near-impossible to play correctly, frustrating players who are then forced to concede. This is something that should change as soon as possible, but no official statement has been made so far.
