Pokémon TCG Pocket arrived this week on iPhone and Android, and it’s a surprisingly crisp and streamlined version of the card game after years of really bad alternatives. Pokémon is pretty much a license to print money, but TCG Pocket does a great job of spotlighting what people love about about the game—the cards themselves—and getting most of the other stuff out of the way. Still, as a big fan of Marvel Snap, there are a few things I wish the mobile game would steal from Second Dinner’s 2022 comic book phenomenon.
I’ve been spending most of my idle smartphone moments the past two days playing Pokémon TCG Pocket instead of doom scrolling Twitter or ingesting AI-slop on Instagram , which is exactly what I want from a good, daily grind mobile game. All of the currencies and sub-economies aimed at getting you to spend money on the otherwise free-to-play game are a bit convoluted and hard to parse, but the battles are fun and opening virtual booster packs by slicing wrappers with a finger swipe is a surprisingly effective simulacrum of the pure joys of doing so in real life. I’m not yet as obsessed with Pokémon TCG Pocket as I was with Marvel Snap, however, and I think there are three reasons for that.
The first is match length. Marvel Snap battles breeze by, making it feel relatively low-stakes to start up another no matter what’s going on around you. TCG Pocket is a bit more involved.
Players have a cumulative timer of 20 minutes, with countdowns starting.
