Pokemon Destined Rivals Is The Themed Set I've Been Waiting Decades For

The hype surrounding new 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Destined Rivals expansion can’t﷽ be overstated. Scarlet & Violet’s gap year has delivered hit after hit, starting with January’s 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Eevee-ful Prismatic Evolutions, going into the return of Trainer’s Pokemon in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:March’s Journey Together, and now with Destined Rivals, we’re finally getting a new Team Rocket set for the first time in over two decades. This is the most exciting the Pokemon TCG has been since 2021’s Evo🐭lving Skies and Celebrations double feature, maybe even more so.

Destined Rivals has a concise narrative hook that😼 brings its Team Rocket-centric theme to life. Following the return of Trainer’s Pokemon in Journey Together, Pokemon’s most infamous baddies are seizing the opportunity to make some trouble, and maybe snatch up some of these iconic Trainer’s Pokemon for themselves. There’s a lot to love here for fans of every Pokemon generation, and plenty for both competitive players and card collectors to sink their teeth into. Destined Rivals sets a new bar f🌱or theming and storytelling in the Pokemon TCG. In many different ways, this is the set I’ve been waiting to see for decades.

Blasting Off Again

Pokemon TCG two cards from Destined Rivals

As an elder Pokemon trainer, nostalgia is no doubt doing a lot of the heavy lifting in Destined Rivals. Seeing the return of Dark/Rocket/Giovanni Pokemon under the unifying Team Rocket’s Pokemon label brings me right back to the days of swapping Team Rocket cards on the playground (I still have my Dark Charizard around here somewhere). I love seeing new takes on old classics like Giovanni’s Persian, Dark Raticate, and Rocket’s legendary birds. Other than 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Jesse and James (a frankly bizarre omission), Destined Rivals has everything you could want from a 🎃modern Team Rocket se🍒t.

But it isn’t just a bad guy free-for-all in Destined Rivals. As the title sugge🎀sts, the set also features a new collection of Trainer’sღ Pokemon here to oppose Team Rocket’s agenda, including some notable names who felt weirdly missing from Journey Together. Along with dozens of Team Rocket’s Pokemon you also find Pokemon and Trainer cards featuring Cynthia, Arven, Marnie, Misty, Steven, and everyone’s favorite Johto Champion, Ethan. There’s a real heroes vs. villains flavor to Destined Rivals that almost feels like it should have been a split expansion instead of the upcoming Black Bolt & White Flavor set. Who wouldn’t want to open complimentary friend and foe packs?

Naturally, all these naminಞg conventions lend themselves to deckbuilding synergies nicely. While we’ve seen Pokemon approach typal strategies with things like Battle Styles, Destined Rivals is loaded with cool combos and card packages that rely on combining one trainer or team’s Pokemon. There are practically deck recipes built into this set, particularly if you’re keen to play a Team Rocket deck. It’s a good way to introduce new deck strategies♋, and an awesome way to inject some flavorful roleplaying into the TCG. You’re not just playing a water deck, you’re playing Misty’s deck.

A New Way To Collect ‘Em All

My biggest criticism about the modern Pokemon TCG is how bloated sets have become with cards. With Black Bolt & White Fl𝓀are featuring a combined total of more than 800 cards, it doesn’t look like this trend is going to change anytime soon. But what I admire about Destined Rivals is that it features a lot of opportunities for collectors to create their own custom collect🎃ions. The cards are grouped in such a way that you don’t have to own absolutely everything in order to feel like you’ve completed a meaningful collection.

It does this by offering a few different categories of cards that are more well-rounded than the typical Pokemon expansion. While the rarity types haven’t changed, the cards featured at each rarity level are more consistent than usual. In this set you’ll find Illustration Rare cards featuring seven Team Rocket’s Pokemon, as well as Cynthia’s, Ethan’s, Misty’s, and Arven’s Pokemon. Each trainer (except Misty) then gets one Full Art to Team Rocket’s ten, Ethan, Cynthia🌼, and Arven each get a Secret Illustration Rare while Team Rocket gets six. And finally, Ethan, Cynthia, Arven, and Team Rocket each get a Hyper Rare gold card.

When you break it down this way, you can see a variety of different collection goals, depending on what your interests are. If you just want to collect every Misty card, it’s a pretty obtainable goal. In Destined Rivals, Misty has three common, two uncommon, one rare, and two Illustration Rare cards. Collecting all the Cynthia cards would be a lot harder, and collecting all the Team Rocket cards will be even harder tha♒n that (there are over 80 of them).

Maybe you just want to collect all five of the Illustration Rare Trainer’s Pokemon, or all ten of Full Art Team Rocket’s cards. Maybe you’re really ambitious and you want to find the four gold Pokemon cards, or maybe you’d just be satisfied getting all eight of Marnie’s Pokemon, since none of them are rarer than an ex. The🐓re are a lot of opportunities to break Destined Rivals down into bite-sized collections rather than look at it like one giant set, which is something I’d love to see more of going forward.

While I was lukewarm on Journey Together, Destined Rivals delivers just about everything I could want from a Pokemon TCG set. There’s a great variety in card types, lots of interesting deck building oppo𒁃rtunities, and a heavy dose of nostalgia that makes me want to hand over all of my money to my local game store immediately. Destined Rivals answers most of the complaints I’ve had about modern Pokemon by delivering a fully fleshed out and thoughtful collection of cards that are going to be just as fun to play with as they are to collect. I’m still worried about July’s monster-sized split set, but this is the kind of expꦉansion I hope Pokemon continues to deliver.