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Pokémon TCG's Latest Set Feels Like It's Designed For Deliberate Disappointment
Journey Together is so bland it could be a concerted effort to convince fewer people to care
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As we have reported many times already, the Pokémon Trading Card Game is in an awful lot of trouble. Since the launch of November 2024's set, Surging Sparks, the popularity of the 30-year-old collectible card game exploded, which in turn drew the attention of scalpers, which has rendered the products almost impossible to buy ever since. Journey Together, officially releasing Friday 28 March, is such an anticlimactic set that it almost feels designed to try to calm the waters.
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It hasn’t, and it won’t, because May 29’s freshly announced set, Destined Rivals, is reintroducing the beloved baddies Team Rocket to the TCG for the first time since the year 2000. With fan favorites like the pairing of Giovanni and Mewtwo, it’s going to make the already impossible situation so much worse, and the release of pre-orders for the set this week saw the Pokémon Center websites inaccessible for a day, and scalpers yet again scooping up everything before real customers could.
But perhaps Journey Together could offer at least a moment of respite over the next two months? Because, despite featuring its own significant return of a long-lost aspect to the TCG, it’s such a bland, anticlimactic collection of cards that it should at least temper the feverish demand.
Image: The Pokémon Company / Kotaku
Journey Together brings back the concept of “Trainer’s Pokémon,” something first introduced in 2000's Gym Heroes expansion and not seen since 2004's EX Team Magma vs Team Aqua. These are cards on which Pokémon are identified as belonging to a specific named trainer, and which have specific abilities and interact in unique ways with various Tool, Trainer and Stadium cards. Bringing them back to the TCG 21 years later is an interesting mechanical shift, and one that makes sense given the Scarlet & Violet era of the card game is running a year longer than is normal.
The four trainers in Journey Together are favorites N (Black & White), Lillie (Sun & Moon), and Hop (Sword & Shield), joined by the most popular trainer from Scarlet & Violet, online influencer Iono. So everything’s in place for a very appealing set of cards, and very importantly, with big changes for the table-top game. It’s just...where are the special art cards?!
Image: The Pokémon Company / Kotaku
So, I recognize the inherent contradiction here. I both want the game to be available for players to buy, while also lamenting the lack of collectible cards in the set. I want to believe the latter could improve the former, but caught as this set is between the impossibly popular (and still unavailable despite promises from The Pokémon Company International) Prismatic Evolutions and the forthcoming Destined Rivals, it’s hard to be optimistic. And given people will be paying ludicrous prices if they want to be able to get hold of any (I’m not just talking about paying resellers, which you shouldn’t—independent and online stores will also have to mark up prices to cover their own increased costs), it’d be nice if they at least had a chance of picking up something pretty.
But, having opened 50 packs (very kindly provided to us by Pokémon), I have very little positive to report.
Pull rates are, in my admittedly too-small sample, horrible. The worst I’ve experienced in the already extremely ungenerous Scarlet & Violet era. From 50 packs I managed seven basic ex cards (now so commonplace that they’re essentially considered bulk), and only five rare cards. That’s dismal. But it’s also not especially surprising, given just how few there were to pull. Journey Together has only 31 “secret cards” in the set, compared to the 61 in Surging Sparks and 59 in Twilight Masquerade, and it’s even lower than the previously disappointing 33 in Stellar Crown. Plus, despite there being some absolutely beautiful artworks in there (Lycanroc, N’s Reshiram, Noibat and Wailord really stand out), most are bizarrely dull. Obviously Iono’s Bellibolt ex Special Illustration Rare is going to fetch a hefty price, but it’s not a particularly attractive card. Compared to the extraordinary wealth of intricate art included in Prismatic Evolution, it feels weirdly despondent.
Image: The Pokémon Company / Kotaku
In terms of the TCG itself, the Trainer’s Pokémon also feel lacklustre. That’s perhaps because this is just the beginning of the mechanic, a toe dip, before May’s Destined Rivals really gets into it.
For some reason, of the 20 different evolutionary lines of Trainer’s Pokémon, seven belong to N, seven to Hop, and only two each for Iono and Lillie. None is especially outstanding, although the ex versions are obviously the most powerful. N’s Zoroark ex is possibly the most interesting, letting you ditch one card from your hand each turn to pick up two more, and has two-energy attack that lets you use the attack of any other N’s Pokémon from your bench.
There’s a Tool called Lillie’s Pearl, which can be attached to either Lillie’s Cutiefly/Ribombee or Comfey, and prevents the opponent from getting a Prize Card when its defeated, which is neat! (There’s also a brand new Trainer called Ruffian, who can discard both Tools and Special Energy from opponent’s cards to counter this.) Meanwhile, Hop has a Choice Band Tool that reduces energy costs by one, and does 30 more damage, when applied to Hop’s Pokémon.
There are two new Stadia, too. N’s Castle removes retreat costs for all N’s Pokémon for both players, while Postwick adds yet another 30 damage to both players’ Hop’s Pokémon. It’s all enough that players will want to experiment with it, but it does seem like the big guns are being held back for now.
Image: The Pokémon Company / Kotaku
This is all academic, of course, since it’s near impossible to buy anything. Quick anecdote: my wife recently sold a massive sack of empty Pokémon card tins on Facebook Marketplace (don’t blame me) for a few bucks, and the lovely lady who bought them for her kids to store cards in explained how she was going to be lining up outside a local toy store on Friday morning, in desperate hope to be able to get a Journey Together ETB for her daughter, while knowing how incredibly unlikely it was to be successful. She looked so sad, knowing how likely her daughter was to be disappointed in the face of incorrigible excitement. (I obviously gave her a wad of the Journey Together cards I’d opened, because I’m not a total monster.) But this is ridiculous! It shouldn’t be like trying to buy a launch day console when looking to pick up a few packs of Pokémon cards! (Never mind that someone working in the same store told me that somehow scalpers are queuing up before they open on the days they receive stock, despite no one knowing how they know when that’s happening.)
Journey Together, while obviously not really an effort to be deliberately disappointing, is at least a set you shouldn’t be too fussed about not being able to buy. It’s so dull, and offers so few interesting cards, that it’ll likely end up sitting on shelves next to Stellar Crown in a few months anyway.
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