{"id":86562,"date":"2024-10-31T21:54:07","date_gmt":"2024-10-31T21:54:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/2024\/10\/31\/pokemon-tcg-pocket-needs-these-three-things-from-marvel-snap\/"},"modified":"2024-10-31T21:54:07","modified_gmt":"2024-10-31T21:54:07","slug":"pokemon-tcg-pocket-needs-these-three-things-from-marvel-snap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/2024\/10\/31\/pokemon-tcg-pocket-needs-these-three-things-from-marvel-snap\/","title":{"rendered":"Pok\u00e9mon TCG Pocket Needs These Three Things From Marvel Snap"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Pok\u00e9mon TCG Pocket<\/em> arrived this week on iPhone and Android, and it\u2019s a surprisingly crisp and streamlined version of the card game after years of really bad alternatives. Pok\u00e9mon<\/em> is pretty much a license to print money, but TCG Pocket<\/em> does a great job of spotlighting what people love about about the game\u2014the cards themselves\u2014and 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\u2019s 2022 comic book phenomenon. <\/p>\n

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The Week In Games: Pocket Monsters And Simulated Goats<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

I\u2019ve been spending most of my idle smartphone moments the past two days playing Pok\u00e9mon TCG Pocket<\/em> instead of doom scrolling Twitter or ingesting AI-slop on Instagram<\/a><\/span>, 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. <\/p>\n

I\u2019m not yet as obsessed with Pok\u00e9mon TCG Pocket<\/em> 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\u2019s going on around you. TCG Pocket<\/em> is a bit more involved. Players have a cumulative timer of 20 minutes, with countdowns starting at over 60 seconds for individual turns. The clock rarely gets milked, but matches can still feel a little drawn out as players stack their benches and build up their Pok\u00e9mon\u2019s power. More than once I\u2019ve finished a match and thought, \u201cThat was neat but do I really have time for another.\u201d <\/p>\n

The second thing holding Pok\u00e9mon TCG Pocket <\/em>back a little for me are the match rewards. In addition to bite-sized matches, Marvel Snap<\/em> has an ingenious progression built around acquiring extra cards to level them up and earn points that can be spent on acquiring new ones. It\u2019s a clever twist on the traditional booster pack RNG formula. TCG Pocket<\/em>, as an adaptation of an existing card game, doesn\u2019t have that same luxury. Unfortunately, as things stand, the only rewards for winning matches are miniscule amounts of XP that contribute to an overall level. Raising it nets additional rewards but none of them feel very distinct. The result is that finishing matches feels a bit anti-climactic, rather than giving out that dopamine hit that makes you immediately want to play another match.<\/p>\n

Finally, there\u2019s the cards themselves. Outside of building your collection, Marvel Snap has the secondary goal of acquiring, sometimes by outright purchasing, cool alternate card art for your favorite decks. It provides something else to strive for as well as a way to express your particular flavor of popular deck type. Again, TCG Pocket<\/em> runs into trouble here because its working off of existing card art, and while there are multiple versions of certain cards to unlock, there aren\u2019t many, and there\u2019s no real way to chase them directly. If you open a pack and get a full art variant, great! If not, well, wait for the next random pull. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s still early and TCG Pocket<\/em> is otherwise doing a lot right, certainly more than probably every other digital version of the Pok\u00e9mon <\/em>card game I\u2019ve played in the past. There\u2019s only one set of cards to collect at the moment and not much eye candy to salivate over in the paid in-game store. I\u2019m sure that will all change soon enough but for now the game hasn\u2019t quite conjured the full magic of my early days with Marvel Snap<\/em>. Maybe that\u2019s for the best. I eventually had to delete that game from my phone because it was consuming way too much of my free time.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pok\u00e9mon TCG Pocket arrived this week on iPhone and Android, and it\u2019s a surprisingly crisp and streamlined version of the card game after years of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":86563,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[159],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gaming"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86562\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/86563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}