What makes a Pokemon prerelease different from other TCGs?

I went to a Pokemon Perfect Order prerelease this weekend. Could I have spent that time doing a Pokopia or Slay the Spire 2 writeup? Yes. Did I? No. Still, Pokemon is a bit weird as far as prereleases go, so I figured it would be interesting to go over what makes it different from so many other card games that have sealed events.

Almost all sealed events for TCGs are pretty much the same. You get a bunch of booster packs, you crack em open, and you build a deck with what you get. Then you play a bunch of games. Based on the game, some rules are probably adjusted or tweaked, but the general idea remains the same across Magic, Lorcana, and One Piece.

Today I’m mostly looking at those specific tweaks.

Magic sets are designed around these limited formats to a large extent, so all Magic needs to do is drop minimum deck size from 60 to 40, and the format works. Lorcana, on the other hand, normally has additional deck building restrictions based on the color of cards. It just removes those color restrictions, and drops max deck size. One Piece pulls a similar trick, dropping deck size down, and giving all players a special leader that counts as all colors and all leader types/names.

Pokemon though… well, Pokemon is in a bit of a tricky spot here for multiple reasons, so Pokemon has to make a lot of changes. Some of these changes are similar to the ones above, such as dropping the deck size from 60 to 40. Some are made to speed the game up, like dropping the number prize cards required to win from 6 prize cards to 4 cards.

And then there’s the big one. Yesterday’s prerelease came with what was effectively a 40 card full precon deck.

Image stolen from a web 3.0 crypto site who stole it from this video by YouTuber Thero Dactilo

Something like this has always been the case for Pokemon prereleases, as long as I’ve been playing as an adult1. The exact form factor has changed over the years,2 but the general idea has remained the same: give players something resembling a starting a deck, instead of requiring that they build something out of their booster packs.

The question I think a lot of people have here is “Why do this?” and that’s what I’m going to answer.

The Reasons

There are two sets of reasons that Pokemon does this. The first is mechanical, and the second is for their playerbase. Mechanical reasons are to make the Pokemon TCG actually work for limited environment. Playerbase reasons are to make the prerelease product appealing to their players3.

Let’s start with the mechanical reasons. First up, typing. Pokemon’s primary resource system is an inverted version of Magic: The Gathering’s land system: putting cards into play is free, but using their attacks and abilities requires placing energy onto them. Except where Magic has 5 basic land types, Pokemon has 9. This means you’re going to have a very hard time building a basic deck out of a set of boosters, perhaps even more so than any other TCG.

Next up is evolution. Evolution is another core game mechanic where strong cards require that they be placed on top of weaker cards into order to put them into play4. If you are opening random booster packs, there is a no guarantee that you will get a complete line, and there is no easy way to cheat the system.

As a result while you can make a deck that can be “played” from cracking a few boosters, and grabbing some energy, it is not going to be a fun deck. It’s going to be a grindy slogfest where whoever can set up something even moderately powerful is going to win.

So mechanically, it makes a lot of sense to give players something to build around, as it puts everyone on a somewhat even power level, means that no one has to go and make a 4 color deck, and allows people to splash things up a little.

Except while that’s what Pokemon used to do, these days they straight up give everyone a 40 card deck. So why do they do that as opposed to giving them only a few cards to build around?

I think it’s because Pokemon understands its actual player base, and a very important part of that playerbase is children5. And while I’ve seen children playing almost every card game, they’re almost always the children of adults who are also attending the event, or at least play with their kids at home.

This is not the case for Pokemon. Many Pokemon events will have parents who attend to watch their kids, but don’t know how to play the game themselves, and don’t intend to learn.

Children are still learning, and asking a 6 to 12 year old to read 60+ cards, understand them, come up with a strategy, and build a deck with them in 30 minutes is a lot. Even giving them part of a deck can still be asking a lot of them.

Giving them a prebuilt deck that they can upgrade? Now that’s a lot more reasonable.

The end result of all of this is that Pokemon prereleases are a bit more of a precon tournament then a sealed event these days. This does not bother me much, if for no other reason than that prerelease events are my only opportunity to play much Pokemon these days6.

Anyway, that’s why Pokemon is different. Hopefully you learned something. I’m now going back to looking at job boards, and repeatedly rewriting my resume for each one until it makes the AI happy.

See y’all at PAX East.

  1. 2020 or so. ↩︎
  2. Previously, prerelease kits had a foil stamped card, maybe 2-3 copies of a specific evolution line, and a few trainers, but not energy cards or anything that was ready to be a full deck. At least some deckbuilding was required to turn this small package into something you could play. Magic players might be familiar with the special themed sixth pack that came with Avatar: The Last Airbender sets. Pokemon used to be a bit like that. ↩︎
  3. I think whoever designs the Pokemon TCG play experience actually knows its playerbase MUCH better than games like Lorcana, and seems to care about them more than Magic. ↩︎
  4. If you have ever wondered where I stole Card City Critters’ evolution mechanic from: this. This is where. ↩︎
  5. The primary requirement for being a Level 1 judge in Pokemon is not being knowledgeable about the TCG. It’s passing a background check to make sure you can safely be around children. In addition, Pokemon is the only card game that separates players based on age. This is a good thing. I don’t feel good beating 12 year olds at card games and I feel even worse losing to them. ↩︎
  6. Yesterday’s prerelease kit was $30, and everyone got 3 booster packs at the end for completing all three rounds. Buying the content of that off eBay right now would run me something like $80-90 USD. ↩︎

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – Pre-release and Thoughts

Ed Note: I wrote most of this back on Feb 27th, then got busy with a few things, and didn’t finish it until today.

Another Magic set, another prerelease. There seem to be a lot of those these days, don’t they? And apparently we have Secrets of Strixhaven in like 6 weeks? Jesus Christ.

Anyway, Teengage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I’ll be doing a little bit of UB ranting as I do this, but I mostly write these after-action reports for myself, and so other folks can take a look at my pool and prepare themselves for limited events, so let’s pull that pool up.

Apologies for the slightly scuffed image; the missing cards are two copies of Anchovy and Banana Pizza (sorcery speed artifact that kills) and Krang and Shredder (late game bomb).

As a side note: only 5 people showed up for this release. This meant that each round, someone got a bye, which was a bit disappointing. At the same store, Lorwyn sold out.

Deckbuilding

I am deeply ambivalent about this deck. On the one hand, all of my strong bombs were black, I had 4 pieces of removal in black, and I had a reasonable amount of decent white stuff. Plus I had Quintessential Katana, which did a ridiculous amount of work.

On the other hand, post release I sat down and realized I had some pretty good red stuff. And as we’ll see, it’s not like the deck I made performed great, so it’s hard to feel like I really made the best choices here.

In any case, this was a set where I didn’t get a chance to test dummy pools, and I did less prep than I probably needed to. It will be borne out in the results.

So lets talk about the matches!

Matches

Match 1 was against Red/Blue artifacts. This got off to a good start, when I manged to take a fairly decisive game 1. Perhaps a bit too decisive, as I was confident going into game 2, and not as worried as I should have been when I lost.

And then there was game 3. Oh, game 3. Game three was a mess. I made several critical misplays, most notably where I whiffed a Make Your Move on a Ray Fillet, Man Ray that my opponent removed a +1/+1 from, causing both the spell to fizzle, and them to grab an extra card. This was compounded when they dropped a Donatello Mutant Mechanic that was I completely unable to remove.

End result was a board state where I was chunked down by artifact creatures until I died.

Game 2 was another match against… Red/Blue artifacts! This time I managed to win, but I’ll be honest, I don’t remember exactly what happened, and I didn’t keep great notes for this one. I do remember that I managed to play Armaggon, Future Shark to wipe their board.

Game 3 was… a bye. Yeah, remember when I said that we had a total of 5 people show up for this prerelease? This was the result. A 2-1 record, that really was more of a 1-1.

Overall Thoughts

I’m obviously unhappy with my performance in this pre-release. A 2-1 record isn’t great, I made a bunch of avoidable misplays that potentially cost me games, and then I got a bye so I didn’t even play a third match. I usually like byes, but only when I’m already winning and I get a break.

I’m also really unhappy with how TMNT plays in Sealed. I’m pretty sure I used the set mechanics less than I played games. Disappear and Sneak are cool in theory, but I had none of the core support cards like Dream Beavers to enable them. The end result was a very bland experience, one where I spent most of my time just playing a very dull game of Magic.

There’s a temptation to paint all of Universes Beyond with a broad brush, and while the product as a whole likely comes from a CFO’s desire to Scooge McDuck into a vault of money, the individual sets have been varied in quality. I’ve really enjoyed Avatar, Lord of the Rings, and Final Fantasy.

TMNT was not like those sets for me. It was a fairly mediocre experience.

Post Script: This is going up a bit later than I had intended, but since release I’ve done a few drafts, and… yeah, draft is better, but I still can’t say I love the set.

This set has convinced me that I’m probably good to skip most of the Universes Beyond sets for the rest of the year. There’s too many of them, and I’m just not interested in playing them in paper. If they’re actually good, I’ll just draft them. But I’m tired of pre-releases every 5 minutes for sub-par turnout.

My LGS cancelled weekly Lorcana, and now the game is dead.

Non-Clickbait Title: Ravensburger has shot itself in the foot repeatedly, and it killed my local Lorcana scene.

Okay, so that’s a little bit of a lie. My local game store (LGS) did cancel their weekly Lorcana events, but as far as I’m aware, the game isn’t dead. Yet. But the local population of players has cratered.

I like looking at weird things that happen in TCG’s, and Lorcana has recently given me an interesting little case study in players at my LGS, and how/when the drop-off happened.

I also think that for the specific population of players I played with, I can trace back the decline to two or three fairly specific events, and that interests me! So let’s talk about it.

But first…

Why does it matter that weeklies are cancelled?

The store I went to for Lorcana ran casual weekly events. These were non-prized, non-competitive freeplay events. You bought in for $7, got a booster pack of your choice, and were entered in a raffle to win some other organized play prizes.

These events were the lowest possible entry point to get into Lorcana and connect with the local community. If you are brand new to the game, if you’ve never played a card game before, if you didn’t go out to card game events… this was the easiest way to try out the game in the lowest stakes, most chill energy environment available.

Without these events, the first rung on a ladder of getting into the game has been removed. It won’t stop weirdos like me who show up to sealed events for games they can’t play, but I do think it makes it much more daunting (and expensive!) for almost everyone else.

I think this is bad, but I think its especially bad for Lorcana. A lot of Lorcana players in our local were Disney fans first, and Lorcana players second. The traditional label for this would probably be “casual” players, but I don’t think that fits here. These were folks who came to every pre-release and bought cards by the booster box. They might have played the game casually, but they didn’t engage with it casually. They were more interested in making decks around their favorite characters than trying to break the meta.

Anyway, that’s a lot text to say:

  1. Loss of weeklies was bad because it removed the first step in on-boarding for new players or players who wanted to get more involved.
  2. It’s especially bad for Lorcana because it removed the environment where a lot of players could play the sorts of decks they liked to make.
Cause #1 – Weekly Challenges

Prior to Lorcana’s set 9 (Fabled) release, Lorcana weeklies had a point a system. Each week, you could show up, earn points for doing a variety of different things, and at the end of the season, the folks with the most points got some special prizes.

I don’t want to focus on the prizes here, but I do want to look at the challenges. Some of them notably rewarded playing weird decks. So instead of everyone just showing up with their best deck each week, there was an incentive to build out a deck to try to meet that weeks challenges, or to play a multiplayer game.

In short: there was a reason to keep things fresh.

(And as a side effect, probably lower the power level of the decks of the players who really wanted to earn points.)

When Ravensburger got rid of this, it removed both the incentive to show up every week, since prizes were now just raffles at the end, and it also meant that there was no reason to even try to make a new deck every week. Meaning that on a week to week basis, every week started to feel the same.

Cause #1.5 – Prize Adjustments

I debated giving this a full sub-section, but I think its comparatively minor. A bit after the weekly scoresheet changes, Ravensburger swapped out their prizes. Previously, I think there had been things like playmats, pins, and cards. Right now, there are only cards and these really underwhelming card boxes.

How underwhelming? Underwhelming enough that I, the king of taking free stuff, the supreme sovereign of snatching up game-adjacent garbage, paused before accepting one of these things. I mean, I still took it. But I was unenthused.

I don’t think that this on its own really did too much damage to Lorcana, but I do know that for specific players, this was highly demotivating. It wasn’t a bomb, but it was a surgical removal of another incentive for that set of player to show up and play.

Cause #2 – Set Rotation

Different games have different terms for the idea of set rotation, but all of them loosely follow the same idea: at some point in the lifespan of a TCG, older sets of cards removed from the standard play pool in order to make room for new sets of cards. It can be viewed as a necessity in order to prevent the game from becoming stale, or a way to get people to buy new cards.

Regardless, virtually every card game does it, and Lorcana was no exception; they called it Core Constructed. And after their rotation, Lorcana required that decks at these weekly casual events be in the Core Constructed format.

I think this was a terrible idea.

I do think that Lorcana needed rotation from a mechanical standpoint. Set 1, while not committing any of the flaws of say, Alpha Magic, or base set Pokemon, has some flawed designs.

Honestly, on the grand scale of “Well that was a mistake,” a free Wheel of Fortune still ranks lower than “What if land destruction was free?” or “What if you could take turn 5 on turn 1?”

So yeah. Rotation made sense from a competitive standpoint, and a design standpoint.

But I don’t think it made sense for the large subset of the player base who were Disney fans first, and Lorcana fans second. There were a fair number of adults and kids who could no longer play their favorite deck because those cards weren’t reprinted in Fabled, and so… they stopped showing up for weekly casuals.

Synthesis

So when my LGS held their final casual Lorcana event, I was the only person who showed up. I sat around for a bit, did some drawing, then went food shopping while the rest of the store was full of folks playing Riftbound.

The removal of weekly challenges and prizes disincentivized entrenched players from showing up to play, while also making the ones who did show up bring the same deck week after week. Set rotation killed off a lot of casual decks that didn’t need to be killed off, while making folks who’d never played a card game before feel a bit cheated, and question their investment of time, money, and energy in the game.

So here’s my guess as to what happens next:

The lack of casual play will remove a critical part of the playerbase pipeline. The events that are still supported will have lower and lower turnout, as it becomes less and less interesting to play with smaller numbers of people.

End result? No more Lorcana at the local game store.

Conclusion

Okay, so I know I called that part above this synthesis, but I think there’s a much more interesting takeaway here: Ravensburger doesn’t understand their playerbase, and treated them like they would Magic: The Gathering players.

To be fair, I would have made the exact same mistake if I was in their position. No one has to put me in charge of a possible multi-million dollar TCG yet, based off a brand worth billions of dollars, but still.

There’s an assumption that the final form of the “hardcore” player of a CCG/TCG is out grinding tournaments, tracking their full collection, building copies of and iterating on meta decks, and just generally fully engaging with the game portion of the collectible card experience. I think in the case of Lorcana, some of the meat and potato grinders weren’t doing that. They were collecting, they were buying tons of cards, and they were making fun weekly decks for character they liked.

These were the ‘hardcore’ players. They attended every prerelease, they had built decks for store championships, they tracked every set. But the game was only a portion of the experience, not the end state. Lorcana had core players, but they looked and behaved differently than they might in another game.

Or at least, that’s my crackpot theory.

Granite Game Summit 2026

Granite Game Summit was this past weekend, so I took some time out of my busy schedule of being unemployed and playing Switch 2 to spend 6-8 hours per day playing board games. I’ve written about Granite Game Summit before, but it’s been a bit, so here’s the quick refresher.

Granite Game Summit is a local board game convention down in Nashua, New Hampshire. The focus is almost entirely on playing board games. There’s a 800+ game library, and attendees also bring their own games to loan out for the weekend in a public game library. It’s a great time, and an excellent chance to try out stuff you might be on the fence about buying, or require a real life side-quest to get a copy of.

While there is some other stuff like a flea market, raffles, and side events and trivia, I’m there to play board games! So that’s what I’m gonna be talking about. Even if I do want to offer a small shoutout to their really cool achievement system they had this year. I thought that was neat.

Anyway, I showed up late Friday, and sat down to play a few quick games while waiting for a friend to finish some playtests. This included playing a bit of Super Battle Mon, and also some Push. I’m quietly ambivalent on Push, and I suspect that I’m unlike to ever give it a full review, if only because I don’t think I’ll play much more of it.

Next up was Hot Streak. Now before I talk about Hot Streak, I do want to quickly attach a photo of myself after I played Hot Streak.

This is the face of a man who has been let down by Dangle too many times.

As you might guess, I did not win at Hot Streak, and perhaps that influences my thoughts here, but I’m actually fairly lukewarm on the game. I’ve seen a lot of people talk about how they love Hot Streak. That seemed to be the experience for everyone else who played it but me. I’m not hugely compelled by the game. I think it’s fine, and I’d play again if other people wanted to? But I don’t know that I’d suggest it to anyone again.

Also we played Flip 7, a game where you try to flip up seven cards, and also do other things. But I played a lot of other, better, push your luck games this weekend, so I’m not going to bother talking about Flip 7.

Anyway, having lost my life savings in Hot Streak, I went out to get some burgers at a Five Guys, went back to my hotel, played some Pride of Ninja, and I lost again. I’m going to blame the fact that we played the advanced set of cards instead of my lack of skill at drafting.

Saturday opened with game playtesting! Specifically Card City Critters playtesting!

Max and I brought our newest puzzle for the game, and some of our starter decks to show and test in the designer ally. We got a lot of great feedback, and also our newest puzzle was received much better than some of our previous puzzles have been.

As a side note, if you want to stay up to date on the status of Card City Critters, join us over the Card City Critters Discord, where we’ll be recruiting players for playtests, and posting updates on the game. Or join the game’s mailing list here, which we’ll start mailing to when the game is in a more final state.

Self promotion and playtesting aside, this was followed up by playing a few other designers’ games, but nothing I asked folks for permission to talk about on the blog, so nothing to say here about that.

I don’t remember the exact series of events that occurred next, but I do remember playing the following, in some order: Quacks of Quedlinburg (Loss), Terraforming Mars (Loss), Megaland (Win), Deep Vents (Win), River Valley Glassworks (Loss), and Moon Colony Bloodbath (Yet Another Loss).

For Quacks, Mars, and Bloodbath, I don’t have anything of much note to say right now. That said, I do want to quickly direct folks to the Dan Thurot review of River Valley Glassworks because it’s both better than anything I could ever write, and I generally agree with it. Megaland and Deep Vents though. These two I have some thoughts on.

First up, Megaland. I liked Megaland, and I really like how its push your luck element is all players pushing against the same “luck.” I wish the buildings were a little more exciting, but that might have just been the nature of the pool we pulled. Still, favorite push your luck game of the weekend.

Deep Vents though. Oh Deep Vents.

Deep Vents has a very solid core idea. It has also has a graphic design that renders most the game’s tiles virtually unreadable unless you already know what they do, and a theming that just feels awful. Sorry. But the game’s deep ocean theming and mechanics make absolutely zero sense, and actually made the game harder to play. This might be the only time I suggest that a game should be turned into a war game. Because Deep Vents is not about building a carefully configured ecosystem. It is about using Giant Squid to wreck peoples’ shit.

There’s a interesting game here, as long as you can put up with incoherent theming, questionable to bad iconography, and some painful decisions around what the game’s resources are named.

Sunday was a bit of a nice slow day. I lost at Race for the Galaxy. This was the first time I played since 2023, and brings my total losses up to 15 in a row! Hooray!

Fortunately, I then got to teach some folks games, and we ran through a quick game of Brightcast, which I won, and a game of Dustbiters, an 18 card Mad Max themed car(d) game, which I lost. I need to do a Dustbiters writeup at some point, but I like it, and I’ve already talked about how much I love Brightcast at length in the Brightcast writeup.

Then I got a chance to play some Compile. I like Compile, and I think a lot of its systems are really clever. But there are also some weird edges, and I haven’t played enough to decide if I think they’re brilliant or frustrating.

I finished out the weekend with a round of Bomb Busters. We… blew up. I thought Bomb Busters was neat, but not my favorite co-op deductive game I’ve played recently. That’s still the Lord of the Rings trick taking game.

Anyway, weekend complete. I had a good time, I played a lot of games, and I am now going to lie down in bed and play Pokopia for 4 hours, or until my Switch 2 runs out of battery.

Card City Critters – March Update

It’s early March, we’ve finished up our largest playtests yet, and that means it’s time for a progress update on Card City Critters!

Here’s the short version: We’re still plugging away at the game. We’ve run two larger scale playtests that are closer in vision to what we want the final game to look like. We’ve added dozens of cards, a bunch of activities and puzzles, and we’re working hard to add more.

Now for the longer version.

After Boston FIG, we were confident that people enjoyed the base battle card game. As a result, we’ve been focusing on some of the other components. In our minds, the final version of Card City Critters is a longer and slightly more involved experience, something a bit more like an escape room or immersive theater.

We’ve run two playtests of this version of the game. These were 2.5 hour events at local game stores, where players started out by getting a deck, and then solved puzzles, challenged their fellow players, and dueled NPC’s to earn additional cards for their deck.

These have given us a lot of great feedback, but also illustrated some pain points in our current design.

A lot of our puzzles are hit or miss. Some people really enjoyed searching through bulk cards, other folks found it frustrating. Most folks have enjoyed our scavenger hunts, but felt let down when someone else solves or gets the grand prize first. Our “find lethal” puzzles are too difficult.

We’re also still working on our grand finale. At Boston FIG, this was a boss battle with the Magnate. For our first playtest, this was something similar, but we found it didn’t work well with a higher player count. For the second one, we tried something new (but no spoilers)!

While this worked much better, the boss cards were overtuned, and the result was a sweep for the boss. Whoops! Still, some of these boss cards seemed to work well, so we’ll be revising those ones that worked well, and redesigning the few that didn’t.

Probably the biggest thing that we’re still grappling with is how to balance puzzles and dueling. Right now, people feel like if they do one, they miss out on the other. We’ve tried a few fixes for this, but none have really worked. Solving this is our next big challenge.

Still, it’s a bit of a bummer to just focus on what isn’t working, so let’s talk about what is! First up, we’ve got a shop, and over a dozen unique shop cards.

These include some unique and powerful cards, and players have enjoyed them. It also has our first set of non-standard emblems that you can be swapped out for the base ones! (You might recall that emblems are our deckbuilding restriction: you can have one of each color to go along with your deck, and choose any to flip over. Each emblem you flip prevents you from playing cards of that color in your deck, but gives you a permanent bonus instead.)

Also, we’ve added a set of cards called fossils! These are cards that you can collect, and then fuse together into powerful dinosaurs, becoming more powerful the more fossils you find, and these have also been quite popular. I need to redo the art on a few of them though….

So yeah! We’ve been up to a lot. While we don’t have a date yet for our next big public playtest, we’ll be at Granite Game Summit later this week with a smattering of decks and puzzles for folks to try out. We’ll be there on Saturday, March 7th at 10am, so if you happen to be swinging by, feel free to give it a try!

As always, more updates to come as we continue to plug away on this thing. The best way to stay up to date is to join us over the Card City Critters Discord, where we’ll be recruiting players for playtests, and posting updates on the game, or to join the game’s mailing list here.

We also might be at PAX East in Unpub! Maybe! Not quite sure yet!

As always, thanks for playing our game, and more info to come in the future.