It’s the end of an era. In the last three years, the Pokémon trading card game mainly focused on the Pokémon and characters from 2019 sword and Sign (SWSH) game, but it all comes to an end on March 20th. Then the world outside of Japan will see their first official sets of Scarlet & Violet (SV), marking the trading card game’s three-year transition from one game to the next. but Sword & Shield don’t go away quietly. His last hurray is a set called Crown Zenith, out tomorrow, and we call it: this is the best set in the world Pokemon TCG has ever seen.
The secret is the sheer volume of full art cards and the frequency with which they are likely to appear in packs. While so-called “full art” cards were first introduced in the PTCG back in 2011, about the first Black-and-white Card sets, they’ve never been as productive as they have been in the last three years. To these initial full arts is added intervention Sun Moon Sets introduced rainbow rares, redesigned gold cards, and towards the end introduced the “alternative art” cards, where artists could reinvent a card with typically far more elaborate or detailed imagery.
All of this became the standard throughout SWSH‘s run, and last year came the potentially permanent addition (after a precursor to the idea in Cosmic Eclipse 2019) of the Trainers’ Gallery – about 30 card sets within sets featuring Trainers and their Pokémon in beautifully drawn out-of-combat situations. The result has seen players and collectors focus more on drawing these far flashier cards, with the previously coveted holos being relegated to the lower ranks with the rest of the crowd.
The problem with all of this was the “pull rate”. Admittedly known as “Ultra Rares” and “Secret Rares,” the rarity of these cards has far too often made those expensive 10-card packs feel like duds. If you can’t get — at least — half a V-Card, a $4-$5 pack can feel like wasted money, just a bunch of bulk. Well of course there are a lot of qualifying arguments here, especially if you want to build a deck and really need that fourth unusual horsea for your water deck, or whatever you have. But for collectors, let’s not play around: it’s all about the Ultra Rares.
The Pokémon Company International (TPCi) is not stupid. This is of course a motivating factor to draw such cards harder and thus gives people a reason to spend a lot more money. It’s always been like this, ever since your great-grandmother collected baseball cards. But since Brilliant Stars last February, where the 172-card set actually contained 216 different cards – 14 of them secret rares – and 30 in the Trainer Gallery, it may have gone a little crazy. Of the 216 almost half were extremely rare or higher. This hobby got silly expensive even before you speak of a PSA 10 Alt-Art Charizard V from this set. (Let alone Evolving Sky’s infamous Moonbreon.)
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did you draw
Enter, Crown Zenith. Essentially the rest-of-world version of the Japanese VSTAR universe Set, this culminating collection of SWSH Maps offers by far the most beautiful maps PTCG ever seen, including the 70-card Galarian gallery with stunning full-art slides. And perhaps more importantly, it offers easy.
The Pokémon Company shipped my city a few samples of the set including an elite trainer box, a tin and a collection box totaling 19 packs that we can open ahead of the shelf date. Enough to get a decent idea of pull rates, even if they’re a little short on science. Combined with watching the unembargoed Chosen One YouTubers we were able to get a good feel for the set and wow it is so much better.
Out of the 19 packs my son and I ripped open, we scored a total of 18 ultra rares or more, which is unheard of outside of Japan. (And those aren’t the ones that came with the tin and collector’s box, just the ones from the packs.) While we missed my chase card, the Alt-Art Leafeon, we managed to hit some of the cards , which we wanted most. As a card collector of This is me and Yuka Morii, I was thrilled to get the full artistic contributions of both artists respectively Altaria and Drapion V. My boy was thrilled to get the brand new Zacian VSTAR, a Radiant Eternatus and the Brilliant Stars Charizard V reissue. And we both squealed with delight as he pulled the adorable Galarian Gallery Ditto disguised as a grinning Numel. Oh, and the beautiful GG Swablu! And the brand new Eevee V! Or what about that GG toxicity? And the ridiculously beautiful Gardenia’s Vigor… In all, we got seven of the Galarian Gallery cards, meaning we hit more than one pack out of three!
To put this in perspective, the boy got a 36-pack booster box of Silver Tempest cards as a Christmas present, a stunningly bad box from a set with – anecdotally – a particularly bad pull rate from which he got lots, lots pulled less . This was a very different experience.
Crown Zenith decrypted
I hate to celebrate that too much, because honestly I think that’s how the cards should always work. If half your set is made up of cards like this, you should have a much better chance of seeing one of these in a pack than maybe one in five has seen in recent years.
For reasons that probably have to do with the weight of the packs (the texture and extra ink of an ultra-rare can cause packs to weigh a few micrograms more, making it easy for nefarious types to filter out the otherwise better packs), for one few years Pokémon card packs contain “code cards” (cards with a QR code for the online version of the game) with borders or colors that indicate the quality of the cards inside. Get a white border and you know your backpack is probably a dud (albeit with a slim chance of getting a trainer gallery or alternate art in the inverted holo position). It’s incredibly stupid to make a “white code card” the deathblow of joy when opening an expensive box collection.
I don’t know why, but Crown Zenith got rid of this system, and all code cards have a black border, regardless of the contents of the pack. (Once they’re properly released, we’ll soon know if they can be weighed.) They also don’t have holos, and you won’t mind because they’ll be replaced by so many more full-art cards. Of the 19 packs, four contained double hitters, each with two excellent cards. This is also far higher than we have seen before.
Crown Zenith vs Universe
This apparent generosity is tempered somewhat when compared to the Japanese version of VSTAR Universe. Because if you were hoping to see pull rates as high as this set, tragically I have to tell you that it’s nothing like it. VSTAR Universe is absolute crazy
Another bad news: While Crown Zenith includes energy holos, they are not extraordinary Patterns we saw in VSTAR Universe. The Japanese set’s special Energy cards have a holo effect that switches from Pokéballs to Energy-type symbols when you flip the cards, something the cards have never seen before. Why further Earth That wouldn’t be replicated for the international maps, is confusing, and ours are just plain foil gloss. boo
Rebalance expectations
Aside from the disappointment that we weren’t confronted with the excess in Japan, the Crown Zenith remains the best set in the world PTCG has seen. It’s part best-of, featuring reprints of popular cards from years past, and part bumper-to-bumper collection of some of the best artwork the game has ever seen. While they’ve avoided reprints of the biggest money cards (there’s no Brilliant Stars alt-art Giratina or Evolving Skies Umbreon, for example), the set instead focuses much more on releasing the most playable favorites, alongside others that will surely be ridiculously collectible.
This is a fitting conclusion for the Sword & Shield era and due to the greatly improved pull rates, it really does achieve its intended goal of celebrating the Galar region. Had it been as abysmal as we’ve seen the past few sets, it would have felt disastrous, not least when this set doesn’t come in booster boxes, making it extra expensive to buy in bulk. The art is wonderful throughout, and it was quite an experience opening a stack of packs and not feeling cheated.
Of course, this rather offsets expectations for the first sets in March Scarlet & Violet. We’ve already been told that booster pack prices will go from $3.99 to $4.49, but this may be offset by the fact that each pack is guaranteed to have at least three foils, and all rarities will now be foil. However, it seems unlikely that the rate of full art pulls will be the same, which will be a bitter pill after the end SWSH at such a height. Hopefully, the promise of the returning Pokemon-ex mechanic, along with the mysterious possibilities of terastalized Pokemon cards, will be interesting enough that the focus on live-game implications might steer away from it. However, how many Beautiful rare works of art can be found in the Japanese versions of the setsthere is reason for hope.
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