A long long time ago, in a country far far away (if you aren’t local to Japan at least!) a new first-party Nintendo video game franchise was born; this was of course Pokemon. The Pokemon Red, Yellow and Blue games released for the Game Boy and were a huge success across the globe, but it wasn’t enough for Nintendo, they didn’t want to stop there, and soon followed the Pokemon Trading Card Game.
It’s now over two decades later and the Pokemon Trading Card Game has gone from strength to strength and boasts over 80 expansions spread across several series’ including the Original Series such as Base Set 1, Base Set 2 and the Fossil set right the way up to the Neo Series, Gym Series sets and on to more modern sets such as Black & White, XY and of course the current series; Sun & Moon. Further to the full Pokemon TCG Expansion sets, there has also been countless Pokemon Collection Boxes, Promo Cards and such released.
An example of a Pokemon Collection box featuring Charizard. These collection boxes generally feature promo cards (and sometimes jumbo promo cards) of the namesake Pokemon, along with multiple booster packs and sometimes a Pin Badge.
Many people across the globe, adult and child alike instantly loved these Pokemon Cards depicting their favourite Pokemon, this led to a huge surge of collectors – and there will be few who are surprised at that fact given just how impressive some of the shiny and holographic cards are, especially with today’s full art, secret rare and GX card thrown into the mix!
But aside from collecting, the Pokemon TCG is also played by many avid fans as an actual card game across the globe, in fact, the Pokemon Company also host world championships over in the states every year, and of course there are many smaller tournaments run locally by video game stores etc. Toys R Us even ran their own league once (RIP).
To play the game each player must build a 60 card deck to battle with, the deck should consist of 20 trainer cards, 20 energy cards and of course 20 actual Pokemon cards. Two players can then go head to head and ‘battle’ against each other in a turn-based match. New sets of cards are being released all the time with new abilities and attacks, as such a player can buy a “Booster Pack” (a sealed pack of cards that contains ten additional game cards) and can add them to their existing deck if they choose.
Stats state that over 23.6 billion Pokemon Cards have been produced globally to date (and counting) spanning 12 languages and more than 70 countries and the franchise appears to be riding a serious wave of popularity in recent years – long may it continue! 😀
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This post was written by PikaPower2k – A player and collector of the Pokemon TCG / Pokemon Cards since 1996. Hitting the PTCGO really hard right now, still rockin’ the Ninetales decks and I’m from the UK.