When you open up the plꦆayer’s guide that comes with Twilight Masquerade’s Elite Trainer Box, the ‘What’s New’ page explains the entire expansion in a single sentence: “Ogerpon upon Ogerpon upon Ogerpon upon Ogerpon.” We’ve got Rare Ogerpon, Ogerpon ex, an Ogre’s Mask trainer card, Shiny Ogerpon, Secret Illustration Rare Ogerpon, even a Gold Ogerpon. You can hardly open a pack without stumbling into an Ogerpon. Yo dawg, I heard you like Ogerpon, so I put an Ogerpon in your Ogerpon so you can Ogerpon while you Ogerpon.
I’ve often complained that Pokemon expansions lack coh꧋erent themes, so I have to give credit where it’s due here. Twilight Masquerade goes all-in on The Teal Mask, the first part of S𒀰carlet & Violet’s The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero expansion. It’s full of Pokemon and characters from that DLC, like Lucian, Kieran, Bloodmoon Ursaluna, and the Loyal Three: Okidogi, Munkidori, and Fezandipiti. There’s a location card for the Festival Grounds, and some of the artwork carries a celebratory theme. One of my favorites is Goldeen, seen from above, with bursting fireworks in the reflection of the water.
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The Ogerpon mechanics are interesting too (sorry you only get a one-paragraph break from the word Ogerpon). Each form - Teal Mask, Hearthflame Mask, Wellspring Mask, an🧸d Cornerstone Mask - has its own Tera-type e🎶x card, and by using the Ogre’s Mask item, you can swap any one of them you have in play with another one in your discard, to represent Ogerpon swapping its mask to change forms. I don’t know which ones will be competitively viable, but it’s cool to see a Pokemon expansion lean so hard into a novel mechanic like this.
There’s a number of thematically interesting cards in this set. Abra’s Teleporter ability does as the name implies by letting you shuffle it back into your deck. There’s a Palafin with the ability Zero to Hero, which lets you search your deck for the Hero Form Palafin ex and swap them whenever you move it from play to the bench, just as it does in the video game. Ariados ability, Big Net, makes it more expensive for your opponent’s active Pokemon to retreat, as though they’re caught in Ariados' web. I haven’t seen this much thoughtful theming in a Pokemon expansion in years.
For the collectors, Twilight Masquerade feels a lot like a sequel to March’s Temporal Forces expansion. It has the same breakdown of chase card variety, including Ilꦬlustration and Special Illustration Rares, a smattering of Shiny Pokemon, and a new batch of ACE SPEC items. A few of them seem incredibly powerful, and I’m interested to see how Un💟fair Stamp, Survival Brace, and Secret Box influence the meta.
As for chase cards, the big ticket here will undoubtedly be Greninja ex. I saw this one all over social media when it was first revealed in the corresponding Japanese expansion earlier this year, and thanks to its ability to tudor any card and deal damage to multipleಌ benched Pokemon, I can see this one getting a lot of attention from both players and collectors. I’m also impressed by the SIR Ogerpons, which all share a mosaic-style motif that really stands out from the r﷽est of the cards in the set. I would like to have all four of them displayed together, and I’m sure a lot of Pokemon collectors are thinking the same thing.
I’m always impressed at Pokemon’s ability to keep expansions fresh after so many years, and Twilight Masquerade is another great example of the TCGs ingenꦗuity and creativity. The next expansion will likely give a bigger spotlight to the Loyal Three💝, who only appear here as regular rare cards, as well as the TCG debut of Pecharunt. Pokemon has created a solid runway to carry us through the rest of the Scarlet & Violet era with expansions dedicated to each DLC. It won’t be long before this year’s Pokemon World Championships where we’ll find out what’s in store for the next era of the TCG, but with expansions this good, I’m not eager to leave the current edition behind.
