Well something kinda weird happened. The youtube algorithm, for some reason, has been REALLY pushing pokemon card content onto me in the last few months. It’s weird, considering the last time I bought or played with Pokemon cards was literally in 1999, Base Set 2 being the newest set at the time.

Eventually (late Feb/early march) I just figured… Let’s buy a couple Pokemon things, for fun. And now I might be stuck in it.

So what I want to do is talk about my history with the cards and how things look to me, which is kind of being on the outside looking in, in a way.

So let’s go I guess!

Why?

So I used to play this here Pokeymanz card game. Back in 1999. At the time I got a few of the theme decks (I specifically remember the Zap and Overgrow decks), and I’d get boosters from time to time. But I didn’t stay in the hobby super long. Not long after Base Set 2 came out, I just stopped buying Pokemon cards. Some time after I did get into Yu-Gi-Oh, but again I got out of it fairly early,  the last set I got a pack for was Pharaonic Guardian (so I never got to the insanity of Chaos Emperor Dragon). Other games I got into very briefly are Magi-Nation and .hack//ENEMY. Never got into any trading card games after that. My friends got into Magic some years ago, not sure if they’re still into it but they’d talk about it all the time, but I didn’t end up caring.

For some reason Youtube really started blasting me with Pokemon card video recommendations. Mostly pack openings, only a few being about the actual game. But one thing that struck me was how cool the cards were now, compared to the old days. Like, look at how bad the Pikachu card used to be. Meanwhile, modern cards, while a lot of them have the same basic style all TCG games have, go crazy with the art. Not only are genuinely bad cards rare, art-wise, but they go absolutely wild with the alternate art cards. Something like this Great Tusk EX is so far ahead of what we used to see. Other than that, it did seem actually quite exciting when you’d open a pack and find a cool card in it. And the few youtube channels that talked about the actual game… it actually still seemed like a fun game, listening to them.

So I don’t plan on going completely insane with buying Pokemon cards… I hope. I did start with what I think is a pretty cool product, that being the Charizard Ultra Premium Collection, which has 17 booster packs of a large variety of Sword and Shield sets (and some cool Charizard alt arts and metal game pieces). If you can get it on sale, it’s totally worth it. I also grabbed a Pokemon Go Mewtwo ETB, I think a bit of a mistake but it was one of the cheaper ones (Pokemon Go is a pretty meh set, unfortunately… I only really realized it as I opened the somewhat disappointing ETB). While I didn’t get any REALLY awesome hits from either of those there were still a few good things. I have since bought a few other things, like the new Crown Zenith tins, some of the Premium Tournament collections boxes, and a booster box for the new Scarlet and Violet set. My best hit so far has definitely been the Reverse Holo Bidoof from Pokemon Go that is actually a Ditto if you peel it off… or, more seriously, the Galarian Gallery Arceus VStar or both the Full Art and Special Illustration Rare of Miriam.

My plan from now on is to jump on bargains, pretty much. Get cards when I can get them on the cheap and find stores that have good price and maybe free shipping. Get some cool products as they come out, buy a thing here and there otherwise. I basically won’t ever bother with anything older than Sword and Shield, because prices get fucking ridiculous. Over 15$ for a single pack of cards, fuck that, only idiots would do that… And it gets dumber the further back in time you get, basically far beyond money laundering levels of scams (sorry, idiots, but that old Charizard certainly is not worth 100k or whatever it stupidly goes for now, it’s a scam to make the price of all cards go up artificially).

And also I had a bunch of code cards from opening stuff, which I decided to… use myself! So I got into trying  out Pokemon TCG Live… So yeah that’s fun.

The gameplay!

Getting back to storytime, I tried getting back into Yu-Gi-Oh recently, because Master Duel. But then I realized… Yu-Gi-Oh got kinda shit. The game’s rules and such are fine, but holy crap the power creep. I’m from back in the day where playing a Blue Eyes White Dragon could be a game-winning move. Not that there weren’t some really strong strategies or anything (Yatagarasu had recently come out before I stopped playing… Yatagarasu is considered a bad card now, even though it used to be one of the few insta-wins), but the game as a whole was “slow”, as in you’d go through a lot of turns before getting to victory. Nowadays, games are long because turns are ridiculously long for no reason, but they’re fast, as in most matches will last no more than, like, 4 turns, if you’re playing any of the decent decks. Also, card effects are CRAZY now. I see complete braindead idiots complaining about how strong Pot of Greed was… when it’s just a completely normal thing all card games have and don’t ban (it just draws 2 cards, whatever)… Yet the average deck nowadays plays like 10 monsters in a turn, play things from the graveyard constantly, raise damage to insane levels in one turn, and there’s some broken ass shit that can kill on your first turn with no way to counter against it if you don’t happen to have Ash in your hand to counter it. YGO is just kinda dumb now. It’s a shame.

Before I even talk about the game, I will not I’m note very familiar with the evolution of the cards and strategies for Pokemon TCG. But after a few weeks of playing, I do think I have a good idea of how things work in the modern meta. Things are certainly stronger than they used to be, and strategies more interesting.

So I did get into playing the Pokemon TCG online, and what struck me, after how meh Master Duel made modern Yu-Gi-Oh look, is how little Pokemon has changed. Cards ARE stronger, but the core gameplay hasn’t become a mess of stupid pointless combos, and matches aren’t 2-turn piles of nothing, unless one of the players just gets a really bad draw (I have played a few 2-turn matches because I or the opponent couldn’t manage to play more than a bidoof and then got wrecked by a single attack).

One of the big points of focus with the game is the deck-building aspect. Basically you’ll decide on a “core” pokemon or two for your team, and then build a deck around their strengths. There’s some popular, “meta” decks out there. Mew V is a particularly annoying one (its turns are really long). The card you’re building your deck around will generally be a V/VStar/VMax card, or EX in the new set. Some decks are more about a big card-drawing engine, others are about getting a specific pokemon out and then have trainers or other pokemons’ abilities supporting it, and so on.

Turns are still the same they used to be. Place a pokemon in the active slot at first, then on your turn you can play as many pokemon on the bench as you want (until the bench is full at 5 slots), as many Trainer Items or Tools as you want, one Trainer Supporter, one energy, and you can do a retreat action once (move your active pokemon to the bench if you discard the retreat cost for the active pokemon). Some abilities can be activated from active and benched pokemon (they’ll have a listed limit). You can also do one VStar action per game (those will be either attacks or abilities). The turn ends either when you decide to end it, or perform an attack from your active pokemon (or benched pokemon in the case of Alakazam EX in a set that is probably coming out october-ish… that will be a fun deck I think). The goal of the game is to knock out enemy pokemon, which allows you to draw a prize card that you set randomly at the start of the game. There’s 6 prize cards, but some pokemon (V, VStar, EX) let you draw 2 when you defeat them, and VMax let you draw 3 if you defeat one. So VMax are strong, but they’re potentially dangerous for the user if you let them get defeated.

The game has a lot more drawing of cards and moving cards around from hand to deck and stuff, compared to way back when I played it in 1999, but overall, it still feels like basically the same game, and it’s still fun to play.

Quick review of Pokemon TCG Live

There used to be a different thing to play Pokemon TCG on, I think called Pokemon TCG Online. But Nintendo transferred over to a new platform, Pokemon TCG Live. People could transfer their account from one to the other, though I think there was some disappointment because not all your digital cards would transfer over. But I’m new and didn’t play the old one, so for me it doesn’t matter. Pretty unfortunate for the long-time players though.

The app works quite well. It’s easy to move cards to play them, select attacks and such, it all functions solidly. I hear there are some glitches/cards not doing the effect they’re supposed to, but they do seem to be patching them. Generally cards do function as they’re meant, and correctly differentiates terms so rulings here are just like they’d be in a match with the real cards (stuff like placing damage counters and dealing damage are 2 different things, for example, so Lost Mine does correctly bypass Manaphy’s bench protection (as Manaphy protects from damage, rather than damage counters being placed)).

I think the deck-building works pretty well, you can directly search for cards, or filter them (including showing cards you don’t own, since you can “buy” them with in-game resources). I’d like to see more filters, like going deeper with the ability filtering. Like, you can list all pokemon with abilities, but then you have to sort through them to find one that might have an ability you’d like. So a filter that lets you search for keywords or something would be nice.

I do have a problem with the netcode, slightly. Generally it’s fine, but it happens a bit too often that I’ll start a match and the game will get stuck waiting for my opponent to do something. I’m genuinely unsure if it’s because the opponent is actually not doing anything, or if it’s the connection being unstable. I assume the second.

I think there needs to be a shorter timer set for actions. The current timer is like 50 seconds or a minute. If you do nothing for that long, you lose. So a strategy people employ is waiting until the last few seconds of the timer to take an action, basically trying to get you to concede, and then the timer resets. It’s a bullshit strategy that probably works for some. It would certainly help if you shortened that timer from 50 seconds to, say, 15. There’s no book-length card text here, it should be fine. If you want to keep the long timer, keep it… in casual matches. There is a 25 minute per player total time limit (it counts down only on your turn or when you have to take an action), so the people who stall for time do need to keep that in mind (there’s one match where I had 21 minutes left, while the other player was 3 minutes from losing before I finally won). Some people do this shit BEFORE the timer actually starts, to try and get your morale down before even playing a match.

I do like that there’s no way to buy resources in the game, this game has no real money shop to get scammed by stupid microtransactions (sort of). You can very much build decks without paying money. They provide you at the start with a bunch of booster packs, and a pile of staple cards, as there’s a bunch of decks available for you to play. They’re not the best decks, but they’re a good start. You can buy any individual card pretty easily (common cards cost 100 of the points, while some of the rarer ones do cost more), and you can grind up resources to buy more boosters. You can build a deck without having all the cards in it, and buy them over time (or know which packs you’ll need to open for the specific card). You can’t actually buy the points, directly. Getting more than 4 of a card gives you extra resources, so you can keep getting more stuff. I do think they could give out a bit more of the resources, but this is semi functional. The microtransactions here are actually handled by… buying cards, in real life. Buy an Evolving Skies booster pack, get a code for an Evolving Skies booster pack in the game. If you’re buying cards anyways, that’s pretty fine by me. Even the battle pass must be paid for only with in-game currency, and it’s pretty worthwhile because it does give a bunch of extra packs and cards (and eventually pretty much pays for itself since you get the resources back as you level it up). It is probably pretty shitty if you don’t buy cards though, so it has some pay-to-win aspects that could absolutely be adjusted, but I’ve seen so much worse. Even the battle pass I feel is pretty acceptable overall compared to every other battle pass, since it doesn’t cost real money. You can absolutely grind it if you want (a win gets you around 160 battle pass points, you still get points even if you lose, and you get a level every 1000 points), but you get 2 challenges a day so it pushes you to play a couple matches to get nearly a whole level of the battle pass every day (800 points, so one win, one loss and the 2 challenges gives you a level).

The character models for the avatars look fucking horrendous. It’s a Pokemon game, give us something you might see in a regular Pokemon game (that isn’t Scarlet/Violet, because oof).

I think there’s a way to play with friends but I have no idea how it works, the friendlist is really hidden in the profile. They need to make a system with custom rooms or something, to make things simpler.

What’s cool about the cards

The art is absolutely amazing nowadays. When I see a lot of older cards, you have a lot of pretty boring “official art in front of pretty empty/nondescript backgrounds”, or kinda boring/weird drawings of the pokemon, or really awful 3D models. Not that there weren’t good-looking cards, but so many of them sucked in the first few sets, and a lot of the ones I see from semi-older sets are also a bit… eh. Nowadays even the shittiest common still looks awesome. But it’s when you go into some of the other cards where things really get good. Most V cards (lol, V card) look fucking awesome with larger space for the art. Then you have full art versions of those which have a different pose and holographic pattern, and you have all sorts of alternate arts. Alt arts, trainer galleries, galarian galleries, these are cards with just mindblowing art. Even something shitty like Wigglet has an awesome alt art. The only cards that continue being pretty bad are trainer cards, specifically items and tools, while stadiums generally look nice and supporters are some of the best cards in any set, especially the full art and alt art versions of them (the Miriam I showed earlier is the biggest card of the newest set, and for SURE Iono is gonna be the biggest card of the next set… waifus ftw). There’s even some cool ones that use real objects, like crocheted versions of  pokemon and such, which are pretty cool.

I think there’s a good variety of possible decks. I found a few I prefered in the last standard, and in the new post-rotation standard. In the current standard, Miraidon EX is obviously one of the big ones, but also lost zone decks using Giratina VStar and Sableye are solid, Mew VMax is still heavily used, and on my side I’ve been playing around with an Oinkologne EX deck and a Spidops EX/Leafeon VMax deck and that’s been pretty solid. You can probably experiment a bunch, there’s some other viable decks I know about (I’ve seen Origin Palkia, Origin Dialga, Hisuian Zoroark and several others that seem pretty interesting), and I’m probably missing some… maybe there IS a fire deck that’s actually useable. This is a luck-based game, since you can absolutely lose completely based on getting bad draws, but most decks I’ve played with or against could totally win matches against any other deck if played well enough. There doesn’t seem to be any insta-win strategy (though some decks are a bit faster than others, which may fuck with the slightly slower decks).

I will note that, while so many cards suck, there’s still some basic common cards that are extremely useful. A lot of decks run a bidoof and bibarel or two, because Bibarel is a card drawing engine (might get slowly replaced by Revavroom depending on decks). Skwovet, especially combined with Bibarel or Revavroom, makes card drawing effects even more effective because it can clear your hand of cards you don’t currently need. There’s SOME good cards that aren’t the big crazy EX or V shit, and they’re never gonna go in your active spot unless you need to sacrifice a pokemon while setting up a good one on the bench. Otherwise they’ll be on the bench, providing the effect of their ability. If they’re in the active spot, it can be to stall slightly (since normal cards allow to only draw 1 prize, or because some other pokemon’s ability is powering them up. So a lot of cards CAN be useful that might not seem like it at first glance.

What sucks about the cards

One problem I have is that there’s just too many cards that are total garbage, gameplay-wise. Like… Why would you ever run Koraidon, when you could run Koraidon EX which has 110 more HP, an attack that hits for 30 more without having to discard energies (it has the drawback of making it unable to attack next turn, but you can play around that, such as switching out to another Koraidon EX) and an ability that helps with recycling discarded energy cards? Yeah. The newest set has a Kirlia that’s pretty useless other than being the Stage 1 evolution of Ralts, and you kinda need Kirlia to get to Gardevoir or Gardevoir EX… But a previous set has a better Kirlia that has an ability to draw some cards out and discard energies (useful for Gardevoir EX’s ability). Why is this new Kirlia around? Fidough is only useful to evolve into Dachsbun. The current Dachsbun? Useless. It’s immune to damage from fire pokemon… which is not something that will happen much at the moment, with Arcanine EX decks not being particularly common at the moment (and fire otherwise not being that great right now). There’s 2 different Cyclizar cards right now in the newest sets. They’re both just unplayable. There’s a Cyclizar EX coming as a promo in a collection box, that one’s not amazing but certainly better. I could keep going, there’s a lot of common/uncommon cards that are pretty much useless (except the trainer cards, I think most of those are good, or have at least a use in some types of decks). Yeah EX/V cards have a weakness, that if they get killed, the opponent draws an extra prize or two, but considering how much stronger than even fully evolved “normal” pokemon they are, that drawback is obviously worthwhile.

Most decks will be built, at the moment, around EX/V/VStar/VMax pokemon, which are so statistically stronger than almost any normal pokemon, it’s pretty much not worth running decks that focus on pokemon that need to evolve twice. So… why are those cards RARE? Like, REALLY rare. You’ll need 4 of each of several EX/V/VStar/VMax pokemon for your physical deck, so why aren’t I getting at least one card of at least that rarity in each pack? People need those way more than a millionth Wugtrio or the actually weirdly awful dondozo (actually dondozo has a pretty cool attack that requires putting tatsugiris in the discard to be any good, but his HP is too low to be really all that worth using). Really I think they do need to get more of the really good cards in those packs. They’re the core of the actual game, but they flood the packs with largely-shit commons that no one will ever put in their decks unless they’re trainer cards (those are always gonna be useful). All the really amazing alt art stuff, yes, that should totally be rarer. But everything else? Hell naw. Print less common shit, print more of the stuff people want. Right now Scarlet and Violet packs have: 3 uncommons, 5 commons (or is it 4?), 2 reverse holographics (which can be “rare”, uncommon or common), and the last spot is at minimum a rare. One of the reverse holo spots has a chance of getting one of the crazy rare alt arts (so it’s possible to get 2 hits in one pack). And the rare spot can get: rare holo (all rares are at least holo now), double rare holo, double rare (ex), ultra rare (2 silver starts, those are full art pokemon and trainers) and hyper rares (gold cards). I think this should change to an ex being the guaranteed minimum. Something like… 4 common, 3 uncommon, 1 holo rare, 2 reverse holo spots (one with a chance of having the crazy rare shit), and finally at minimum an EX, but this is where you have a bigger chance for the rarer shit too. Make those boosters ACTUALLY be worth the price they cost. We need to stop pretending the game part of Pokemon TCG is some kind of afterthought.

Other things that suck… Price. If you want to collect anything older than the current Sword and Shield sets, or the new Scarlet and Violet sets, you’re looking at 15-30$ per booster, and that’s just for recent sets from the sun and moon era (and it gets worse if you step into the XY era and further). Scammers got the price of much older cards to such ridiculous levels, it’s just not ever gonna be worth looking for those. Heck, even modern sets have some ridiculousness going on. Evolving Skies, for example, here in Canadia, is hard to find at anything below 15$ for a single pack, which is obviously too much for 11 cards that will almost definitely be worth WAY less than 15$. If you want Evolving Skies, you NEED to find box sets and tins and such that have it in it, if you want something that resembles a decent price per-pack… And then Evolving Skies’ pull rate isn’t very good, as far as I can find. I haven’t opened that many packs yet since I just got back into it, but the best hit I got from ~10 Evolving Skies packs so far is a holographic Marshadow… and it does pretty quickly get to a point where a simple holo rare isn’t particularly interesting when you have things like alt arts and such that are so much cooler. But what really bothers me, whether it be new or old packs, is that you pay a certain amount, and like 90% of the time you’re getting cards that are worth a couple cents, with the card in the rare slot being worth somewhere around 40 cents. Most packs will just have a non-holo rare (or, in the newest set, a holo rare at minimum), which aren’t worth shit (and the holo rares in scarlet and violet base are also not worth shit). The next step, EX and V, are in the 1 to 4$ value range most of the time, but you get those WAY less often then regular rares (may it be holo or non-holo). It takes full arts or VMax/VStar to get something that might cover for the cost of the booster. So the high cost of the packs is based on “sure, you will probably getting 1$ worth of cards in there at most, but MAAAAAAAAAAAAYBE you’ll get something worth 10-600$”, which is kinda bullshit. I get why some older packs are worth more, just because they’re not actively being printed anymore, but holy shit this gets beyond dumb. And of course retailers are totally fine with selling products way above MSRP if they become considered valuable… it’s a scam, pretty much. There’s a Marnie Tournament Collection box, it’s like 89$ CAD… Meanwhile, similar boxes featuring Cyrus, Klara and Juniper are in the 33-40$ CAD range.

Like, I got a Scarlet Elite Trainer Box, and that I actually made up my value on it with just one card (and made up even more because I got a few really good cards), but that’s not the rule. You’re spending 50$ on an ETB, you’re likely getting a good 10$ of value total from the cards if you get “good” draws (there’s a bit more value in ETBs, such as the sleeves and dice and tokens and coins, and promos in the newer ones, but the actual cards is what you’re most likely there for).

The oversized cards that come in so many of the collection box sets are lame… They’re just big cards you can’t even play with… I’d rather they not include them and put in either an extra promo or an extra booster or some cool accessories like that small binder in the Dragapult Celebrations box.

The youtubers

Well I did say I started looking into the TCG more because of youtube recommendations… so who am I watching? Really, I think, despite the fact that there’s literal hundreds, if not thousands, of youtubers doing videos on this, there’s not that many that are specifically worth watching if you’re not already into the game or the collecting aspect of the cards. It’s just a lot of people doing the exact same thing. Streaming opening packs, videos opening packs, videos opening packs, and videos opening packs. And sometimes streams opening packs. Or videos opening packs. This is not a varied genre of youtube. I’m sure there’s some videos of people playing the online game, but I’ve not seen much of that, the big focus on youtube is the collecting aspect.

One thing I will note is that a lot of the people I see… don’t seem to actually care that much about the game. And you can see that when you’re watching a pack opening video and the focus is on a “cha-ching” sound and dollar numbers when some of the bigger cards are found in a pack. There’s some youtubers you’ll never see even mention the game at all, it’s all “oh shit this card is rare and is worth 1000$!” but no commentary about usability or maybe tournament history when it’s older cards that obviously aren’t in the standard format anymore. It’s the kinda shit that also ruined retro game collecting, people that get games because they’re “expensive” (and see the Karl Jobst video about the scamming going on in regards to that right now… for sure the same thing is happening in all collecting circles)… Well Pokemon TCG is no different. There’s no way a holo Charizard from 1999 is worth 100000$ (or whatever stupid scam price it’s up to now). I like when people are collectors in a less shitty sense, collecting cards because they enjoy it, rather than because they’re worth money.

Also, there’s a weird thing going on where basically no one that claims to care about Pokemon actually know how to pronounce basically any of the pokemons’ names. It’s kinda fucking weird… The letters are there, just read them.

Ptcgradio happens to be one I do actually like. His content is mostly news-focused, when new cards are revealed, or new sets are revealed, or new products are revealed. He does seem to do occasional pack opening stuff, but his focus is news, or reporting on events he went to and stuff. What I like about him is that he actually talks about the gameplay aspects, so when he talks about a new card that was revealed in a japanese set, he talks about whether it’s gonna be useful in popular decks, or if it might be possible to build a deck around it and stuff. Really like this guy. One of the best in the business, from what I’ve seen so far.

I also like SneakerTalk TCG. His focus seems to be opening new products, so when something comes out, he’ll generally have it right as it comes out, sometimes before, so you can get a good idea of what new products will be like, if they’re good or worth buying and such. But he’s also someone that plays the game, talks about the cool decks and stuff, actually makes videos about going to local tournaments, stuff like that. I’ve seen him stream once, playing Live, so yeah (maybe he does that more often, that’s just during the time I’ve been following him). Seems like a cool guy, also a fellow canadian.

The one that I watched most at first when I started getting those recommendations is Deep Pocket Monster, who I do actually quite enjoy. And that’s because he’s one of the few Pokemon TCG youtubers to actually make some more “produced” content. It’s not just “buying cards, opening packs, screaming when he gets hits”, but instead he makes, like, more classic kinds of youtube content. Going to conventions, giving cards to people, doing collection challenges, videos where he buys weird shit off etsy/wish/whatever, and once a week he does a stream where he gives away cards to viewers which is pretty fun (though at this point he has so many viewers the likelyhood to win are not very high… but it’s fun anyways, might as well participate). He makes content that has some form of actual, talent-requiring editing and stuff, it’s all really well made. This is extremely rare in this genre, most of these channels require either no editing, or very minimal “let’s cut out the pauses” shit. So because of that, I like this guy.

OmniPoke is a cool one for actual gameplay strategy shit, like commenting on the big decks used at tournaments and testing out decks and matchups and stuff. Seems pretty solid to me. I just got into his channel, but I think he’s worth looking at.

Then there’s a lot of people who just open cards. And yeah it’s fun to see people opening packs and maybe even getting big hits, but eventually it loses its luster. So for this kind of repetitive content, PokeRev seems to be one of the bigger ones. Dude has empty, emotionless, dead eyes, and he’s on the GRIND, doing the exact same video every single day, and sometimes streaming opening cards. His videos are technically fine, except the audio balancing which is sometimes an issue, but literally every video is “today, I’m opening X sort of packs”, and freaking out when there’s a hit… And he happens to be seemingly rich and he just has some of the rarest, stupidest old pokemon shit at hand to make the same video but about different sets. “Oh today I’m opening EX Deoxys cards”, or “Today I’m opening a Fossil booster box”, or “Today I’m opening super old cards from 2015”, or “Today I’m opening 100 Scarlet and Violet packs”. Sometimes he tries to be “original” with his content, like using tricks to know which packs will have a hit (in many sets, you can tell from the color of the code card, and some older sets can be weighed) and then making a custom booster box with only hits… And then he’ll open every pack in the custom box he made and get hits every time and he’ll scream “What is happening this is insane!” even though he literally explained that he set it up to only have hits… so that’s what’s happening… Yesterday (as of posting this) he made one of his attempts at more “original” content, that probably required a bare minimum of editing; he was buying cards and opening them… IN HIS CAR. So that’s totally different from opening cards at his usual setup I swear. It kinda seems like I’m hating on the dude… but I do watch his videos, and I don’t think they’re bad. They just happen to be the same video, every single time. He does have some overlap with SneakerTalk TCG, as he also opens many of the new products when he’s not just opening random packs he has hanging around the house. Or buying scam mystery boxes (he buys a lot of those scam mystery boxes, keeping the scammers in business pretty much single-handedly). In a way, if you watch a PokeRev video a day, you can pretty much ignore everyone else doing pack openings, he opens enough packs for everyone else. PokeRev is kinda the example of what I don’t like about the money-focused collecting, but also I like seeing the cards and he seems less scummy than some of the others (there was a guy recently who faked a “test” to see which side of a booster box got hits, PokeRev seems at least honest)… so eh. Also the engagement on his videos look fake… like, the comments are all the same shit “Man dude I’m so happy you’re making these videos for us” and “Thanks for making video every day” and weird shit like that… This FEELS manufactured, but it actually isn’t, as he does do giveaways in most videos, and the way to participate is to like the video and post a comment… it’s just a way to farm engagement, so he’s not getting the comments he’d naturally get, so he’s pumping himself up in the algorithm. Also I think he has no idea how the game is played, I’ve watched a lot of his videos at this point and not once has he even stopped to read the effects of a card.

There’s not many others that I’m actually following since these kinda cover all my needs. Like, whenever I’m looking at what’s in a collection box or something and I decide to just search on youtube, it frequently ends up being PrimetimePokemon that pops up and he’s pretty useful, but it could be literally any of the 100 other videos of people opening the same box. There’s so many people doing this shit they’re pretty much indistinguishable from each other, so I kinda don’t think you need to follow all that many of them… unless you’re REALLY into watching pack opening and PokeRev is just not enough for you.

Overall

Pokemon TCG has really cool cards, a community that’s very welcoming overall, lots of public events, a few decent content creators, and a game that is fun to play unlike Yu-Gi-Oh. And the online game version of it, actually not too predatory, if you’re already buying cards.

It has issues, such as scammers raising the prices, scalpers raising the prices, overall kinda shit packs of cards that gives very few of the cards you actually need to build a good deck. It has packs with way too many really bad cards that no one would ever put into a deck.