Over the past five years, the Pokemon TCG has fallen into a predictable release schedule. Every fall since 2017, a special mini-set has been released, followed by regular expansions every three months after it. Ever since the release of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Shining Fates last February, e♈ach expansion has broken from the traditional form in one way or another. Now a year later, Brilliant Stars is here to dramatically shake up the TCG by introducing a new card type, a special subset, and more chase cards than we’ve ever seen in a ๊single expansion. To put things into perspective: there are five ultra-rare Charizards in this Brilliant Stars, and they aren’t even the most exciting thing about it.
There’s so much going on in Brilliant Stars that I don’t even know where to start. Despite officially falling under the Sword & Shield base set, Brilliant Stars feel like the start of a new generation. Not only does it have thematic ties to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Legends: Arceus, but the energy cards sport a new background design - something you’d normally only see in a new base set. The new design is vaguely celestial, with a horizontal slash through the energy symbol that looks like the rings of Saturn and scatters of white dots that resemble stars in the sky. It’s a nice change from the Sword & Shield design🐼 we’ve had since early 2020 and a nice nod to Legends: Arceus.
The big new mechanic here to shake up the meta is VSTAR, an alternate evolution line for V cards that emphasizes powerful abilities over the large health pools of VMAX cards. Each VSTAR card has a VSTAR Power - a powerfu🌜l move or ability - and only one VSTAR Power can be used each game. VSTAR are functionally identical to GX cards, which rotated out completely this past September, but the added requirement to evolve them from V cards feels a lot more balanced. For once, the Pokemon TCG resists the urg🅺e to power creep, so you have to give it credit for that. There are only four unique VSTAR cards so I don’t imagine they’ll have a meta-defining effect on the game just yet, but they definitely have the potential to overtake some of the most ubiquitous VMAX cards like Mew and Jolteon since they only reward two prize cards instead of three. This seems like a healthy new mechanic, rather than an obligatory one.
Beyond VSTAR, Brilliant Stars also introduces the Trainer Gallery - a subset made up of 30 new trainer-centric cards. The bulk of the subset is made up of the kind of partner cards we last saw in Cosmic Eclipse. There are 22🦩 Full Art holos featuring Pokemon with their trainers. This is the best implementation of partner cards we’ve seen yet because they create the opportunity to pull multiple hyper rare cards in a single pack. I’ve already pulled two Full Art Trainer Cards, and I can’t wait to see what kind of amazing combos the community finds when they start opening up their own.
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Brꦑilliant Stars is unbelievably stuffed with chase cards. All told, there are 18 V, three VMAX, four VSTAR, 22 Full Art (including four Alternate Art), eight rainbow, and six gold in just the regular set. The subset has an additional 14 partner cards, six V, five VMAX, five Full Art Trainers, and two black/gold cards. Out of 216 cards, 92 are ultra rare or higher. Let me say that again, nearly half the cards in this set are above rare.
I’ve been trying 𓃲to draw attention to the growing bloat of the TCG for several expansions, but it seems like Brilliant Stars is in some ways taking steps in the right direction. For one thing, moving the Trainer Gallery into the reverse holo slot creates more opportunities for exciting packs. I haven’t opened enough packs to say for sure, but it feels like there are much better pull rates than normal as well. My Elite Trainer Box had a V, a partner card, two Full Art Trainers, and a Rainbow VStar (Shayꦏmin). Five hits out of eight packs - four of those being Full Art or better - is fairly remarkable. There’s no way to know what kind of value Brilliant Stars will hold, but these are good signs that it’s going to be an exceptionally fun set to open, which is the most important part.
I was somewhat dismayed when expansions started including 50+ ultra r𝄹are cards last year because it meant that targeting specific cards became nearly impossible. I’ve personally opened almost 200 Evolving🍸 Skies packs and have not found any of the six Umbreons yet. That&🎃rsquo;s painful for me as a fan, it makes me less enthusiastic about investing in new sets. I completed a master set of Sword & Shield base set, but doing the same for Chilling Reign or Battle Styles would be unthinkable.
If pull rates are indeed increased, I have no problem at all with the inflation of ultra rare cards. It’s a trading card game after all - trading is right there in the name. As long as people have reasonable access to chase cards without needing to break the bank to find them, then flooding the game with rare cards is actually a good thing. It keeps the resale value down/keeps the speculators away and encourages the community to do more trading to get the cards you want. That’s what I want for the TCG, and I have high hopes that🀅 Brilliant Stars will be the expansion that does that.
At the start of Sword & Shield, I criticized 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Darkness Ablaze for being a Charizard slot machine - a set little to offer beyond the chance to find a Charizard with high resale value. It’s important to recognize how far we’ve come since then. I have no doubt the Rainbow Charizard VSTAR will cause a bit of a frenzy when it starts selling for outrageous prices online next week, but I’m impressed by how much more Brilliant Stars has to offer. I can’t wait to see the pulls from this set, and even if I don’t find the Umbreons this time (there’s two in the Trainer Gallery) I already have some great cards I can trade for it. Pokemon has finally found a way to make normal expansions feel like special sets. Brilliant Stars has de𝄹finitely raised the bar, which isn’t an easy thing to do after 26 years.
