You Have My Sword and My Shield and My Axe

Pokemon leapt forward a generation back in November with the Nintendo Switch releases of the twinned video games Pokemon Sword and Pokemon Shield.  These succeeded Pokemon Sun & Moon, which in turn succeeded Pokemon X & Y, which in turn succeeded Pokemon Black & White and so on.  Each time it has largely been an excuse for Nintendo to iterate the tried-and-true game formula right around the time that spiffy new hardware was available.

To be sure, formulae are used because formulae work.  There is a reason we are excited to see yet another James Bond 007 film this year that will contain almost the same exact story beats as the last twenty-plus installments.  Pokemon, a focused distillation of the "nurturing" mechanic integral to most roleplaying games both paper and virtual, is already the most successful media IP in human history, far surpassing even Star Wars and Batman.  They are under no specific pressure to change up the game plan, but instead may refine it at their leisure.

The Pokemon Trading Card Game shot to amazing heights in 2016 during its 20th Anniversary release slate.  (Don't let that fool you Millennials into thinking your childhood cards are "Old School '96;" the game did not appear in North America in English until early 1999.)  The 20th Anniversary sets released during the XY cycle, and unfortunately the toboggan ride down afterward proved steep.  Despite the Sun & Moon sets offering some of the game's most beautiful graphics and design elements and plenty of card power, interest in Pokemon as a game in general had collapsed rather badly by about halfway through the cycle.  Demand-manipulation gimmickry like unannounced shortprints and additional chase card cycles defined the last several Sun & Moon sets, which sold passably well for all that.

This week launches a new cycle, titled Sword & Shield to match its video-game namesake, and if prerelease attendance is any indication, interest in the game may be on an upswing again.  New base sets always carry a demand premium, so we don't want to draw any big conclusions yet.  But early signs are promising and demand at Play Pokemon early-release stores like ours was strong right out of the gate yesterday.

Pokemon TCG does have some problems, both again and still.

For all its sales success, the staff devoted to managing organized play is a fraction of the personnel count that other publishers have successfully used, so any tremor in the course of scheduling, administering, and recording such activity causes considerable disruption.

With standard rotation but no compelling non-rotating "Commander" format, Pokemon's singles market is trapped in the "anime TCG" ravine of cards being either trash or treasure and nothing in between.  Cards are either in a competitive deck and thus being worth top-of-the-market, always sold out from stores, and ripe for try-hards to rip little kids off in trades with bulk holographics; or cards are not in a competitive deck and basically worth bulk regardless of rarity or popularity of the character depicted.  This whipsaw discourages stores from offering strong buy pricing like you see with Magic: the Gathering or video games, and instead resorting to essentially a "safe lowball range."  Because of this, nobody trades in the cards that are demanded, and thus the vicious cycle feeds itself.

Meanwhile, an internet full of clickbait articles promises people their old 1999 cards are worth a mortgage payment, even though everyone looking to tell just has the same ratty Ash binder full of Base Jungle Fossil missing the Charizard.  This leads to negative customer experiences no matter how much the store finesses the explanation.  Nobody wants to be told they aren't getting the jackpot they thought they had, and the messenger gets the blame, not the hype pusher.

There is some amount of "money talks so shut up" happening where I simply can't bring myself to complain too vocally about any of this.  I think the main disappointment is the sense, justified or not, that Pokemon's IP is so strong that we should be seeing far greater performance out of the TCG, relative to behemoths like Magic.  We are told that such performance does occur in the mass market, and I can't prove that isn't so, but then why bother with independent specialty retailers?  We can't possibly be little enough hassle to be worth the incremental revenue.  We're the very definition of hassle, as a tier overall.  We ingest resources and emit complaints.

Nintendo has been around for literally over a century and I'm sure they will figure out what they need to do if they decide anything is necessary.  There is a legitimate argument to be said for changing nothing and just iterating the content.  That formula is a delicious mix, as far as those imbibing it are concerned.