Nintendo announces Pokemon Trading Card Game Online
Nintendo recently announced “Pokemon Trainer Challenge,” a program which aims to allow players to play the Pokemon trading card game online.
Since the early days of the Pokemon trading card game (TCG), players have turned to online battle simulators as an alternative to face-to-face Pokemon card battles. In the early days, this took the form Apprentice, a program originally made as a Magic: The Gathering simulator. Nowadays, players use the program Redshark to practice against players from around the world online without the burden of having to own the (often expensive) physical playing cards.
Nintendo is poised to launch their own Pokemon TCG online program this April—with a few catches.
First off, the program isn’t confirmed to feature player-versus-player games: according to The Pokemon Company’s announcement, the program will allow players to battle against virtual trainers, reportedly controlled by AI that are designed to “replicate real-world game play and strategy.” The program also limits players’ freedom when choosing cards to play with. Rather than allowing players to construct their own decks card by card, the program will initially feature three pre-constructed decks to choose from.
Players who want access to more than just the three basic pre-constructed decks will have the chance to unlock additional decks on April 6, when Nintendo will begin selling new theme decks based on the latest Pokemon Black and White games. Buy the new playing cards from stores, and you’ll have the ability to access to the same pre-constructed decks online, presumably with some kind of unique activation code that comes packaged with each deck.
This isn’t the first time a trading card game company has offered a virtual alternative to playing face-to-face. Magic: The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers (available on XBLA, PSN, and Steam) is a video game based on the Magic: The Gathering trading card game. Like the new Pokemon TCG Online, Duels of the Planeswalkers limits players to using only pre-constructed decks (with a few potential modifications). However, the Magic: The Gathering game offers an important feature that has yet to be confirmed for the Pokemon game: online versus play.
Magic: The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers allows players to go head-to-head in online versus
Pokemon TCG Online might prove to be a good way for new players to practice the game before getting deeply involved, as this mainly seems to be a marketing tool for Nintendo. However, competitive TCG players will likely find it a woefully inadequate substitute for real battles. As mentioned earlier, the unofficial program Redshark already allows player-versus-player for Pokemon TCG online. Not only does Redshark offer online versus play, but it also has the all-important feature of allowing players to directly tweak their decks, card by card. The official program will likely remain untouched by serious players, unless it manages to offer both of these features in the future.
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