Pokémon TCG Pocket Has Brought Me Back 25 Years, & I Couldn't Be Happier

screenrant.com:

has recaptured my interest in Pokémon in a way that few games have done since I first played in 1999. This isn’t to say that it’s my first time revisiting the series. Back in 2016, my friends and I would take almost daily trips to our local park. Occasionally, out of a sense of nostalgia, I’ll grab a new mainline game to see what I’ve been missing (and put it down after an hour, never to touch it again). But comes closest to capturing my initial obsession with Pokémon.

Collecting cards and creating decks in feels a lot closer to my earliest experiences opening packs of Pokémon cards than even my more recent engagement with the and. This is partially due to my social experience with, but also thanks to the game’s card pool. The game’s focus on tight and accessible gameplay also deserves some credit for fueling its success.

I never would have imagined that, at age 30, a healthy dose of my daily communications now has to do with Pokémon. Since the release of, I have rarely gone a few hours without at least one message showing off an impressive new card being sent to a group chat. Of course, it helps that is a mobile game, so the process of screenshotting a great pull and sharing it with friends involves only a few clicks.

While the methods may be updated, the act of showing off my coolest Pokémon to friends is still very nostalgic. also has built-in ways for players to show off their favorite cards on their public profile. That means even players who don’t have an enthusiastic group of fans to share their collection with still have a chance to share their pulls with other players. But it isn’t just the collecting aspect of that feels similar to collecting the first edition cards back in the 90s.

To be clear, does have a lot of the same deck-building tendencies that can rob modern TCGs of some magic. There is a pretty well-defined meta, and finding meta builds online (or net decks) is very easy. While this wasn’t necessarily the case back in the days of dial-up, I still