Pokémon Trading Card Game/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • And the Fandom Rejoiced: The Psycho Drive/Hail Blizzard expansion (to be translated as Next Destinies), which brought many old fan-favorite Mons into the Black & White format and helped bring Mewtwo back into the spotlight.
  • Anticlimax Boss: Everyone of the not-Elite Four final bosses of the GBC game are obsessed with playing their signature legendary cards who are clearly in the Awesome but Impractical zone. The issue is that the energy cost for these cards are so crippling (6 energy cards attached to a single card, plus requiring a coin flip to do only decent damage?) and the AI prioritizes giving them energy over anything else, to the detriment of any useful cards in their deck.
  • Awesome Music: The games.
  • Game Breaker: Trainer cards often had game-changing effects, leading to the eventual "Prop-15" that limited the number of trainers one could use in their deck. With the Diamond and Pearl expansion, a handful of the old Trainer cards have been remade as "Supporter" cards, a class of trainer card that you can only use one of per turn. Pokemon Breeder (skip an evolution stage) and most card-drawing or deck-searching cards especially.** In addition, many players considered the Darkness and Metal types as this when they were first introduced in Neo Genesis. One such Dark type card, Sneasel, was actually banned for a brief period due to being obscenely overpowered, capable of doing a maximum of 140 damage in as little as two turns if you were really lucky. Also, prior to the release of the Diamond and Pearl expansion, Darkness and Metal Energy were both Special Energy cards, making the Pokémon they were attached to even more powerful.
    • The new Pokemon Tool Cards are also incredibly overpowered. One such card, the Expert Belt, gives plus 20 attack and plus 20 health to anything it is attached to. There is no penalty for using it and you can have up to four in a deck. Oh and did I mention that the plus 20 damage is applied before weakness?
      • The Expert Belt allows the opponent to take 2 Prize cards instead of 1 for knocking out that Pokémon. That's the penalty. It's arguably a small one considering an Expert Belt can cause a snowballing advantage in your favor, however.
    • Energy. Gain. And any SP cards for that matter. I will be so glad once the Platinum sets get rotated out.
  • It's Easy, So It Sucks: Some of the criticism stems from this, while others consider it a viable strength.
    • Even more people would gladly point out that it's actually very challenging to play the Pokémon card game well - not just to simply play it. So YMMV, indeed.
  • Tastes Like Diabetes: The pictures on some [dead link] of [dead link] the cards. Especially artist Keiko Fukuyama loves this.
  • Woolseyism: Occasionally attack name translations differ from the video games' to better fit the context of the card game move's effects; for example, "Nenriki" (literally "willpower") is "Confusion" in the video games (it has a chance of confusing the opponent) and "Psyshock" in the card game (it can cause paralysis).
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