jackscharp

[jackscharp]

Maybe I’ll actually post again on this second blog since I’m arguably more into Pokémon than I was when I made it.

For starters, my Pokémon journey:

Right around the time it got huge in the United States, my mother enrolled me in a summer camp. A kid there introduced me to Sandshrew, and he was so cute that I wanted to know more about this game.

So somehow I convinced my parents to buy me the Machamp starter deck. I didn’t recall there being any fire type cards in the deck, but Im sure I’d remember having learned how to edit decks so early, so it must have had them and just only the holo Machamp stands out in my memory.

Bringing your cards to school to show off or trade was a thing, so I did that, but my backpack wouldn’t fit in the lockers for gym class and so it was left out and some jerk stole my cards. (sidebar, you’d think I learned my lesson but someone got into my unlocked drawer at one of my desks at work this year and stole some Matchbox cars I had in there that I’d take out to decorate the desk; unfortunately I hadn’t been issued a key to lock them - and work stuff - up and this location).

I was dejected enough that I lost interest in Pokémon, and it was pretty quick that it seemed everyone else at my school did too, or at least they stopped being vocal about it. I don’t think I ever heard if my friend Matt got his Charizard he wanted.

Years later, Pokemon Go comes out. I wasn’t going to try it out, but my wife wanted to and so that was my getaway free card to nerd out. Our son wasn’t born yet so we had lots of time to hit up the parks, drive slowly through cemeteries, and follow the online postings of where to find Snorlax and Blissey and the Dratini family.

When my son was born, taking him for stroller-supported strolls through pretty parks with pokestops, gyms, and Magnemite and other nests became a weekly occurrence and was my preferred way to spend the days I’d take off every year for my birthday. Though my wife eventually stopped liking the game, he became old enough to understand and start catching for himself (though unfortunately that was a gateway to all sorts of other videogames and for a while it seemed absolutely nothing interested him other than screens, so introducing PoGo to him had downsides). As he learned to ride a bike, having that with me during those times was an extra plus. I even got the Pokémon Plus or whatever that first edition was called, to discretely fill up my inventory on pokeballs at museums without getting distracted by a desire to catch every Sandshrew, Magnemite, etc. I could find despite not caring whether I got a better one and not needing any more candy.

Some time in the last two years, I realized that the battles were less fun than they had been for me when they first came out and I found multiple types of teams for each league. Battling to win stardust to further power up Pokémon to hopefully win more battles so I could get stardust to… That cycle just wasn’t as fun anymore. It wasn’t long after that that I was rarely opening the game except for trips, to send Postcards to friends. Around this time I had also learned of the mobile game for Wizards of the Coast’s Magic: The Gathering called Magic: Spellslingers. I had never got into Arena and here comes what I found to be a more approachable mode of playing. The matches were more intellectually stimulating than I had found the PoGo battles to be, which is what I was missing from that.

I really liked that game but it didn’t last: Earlier this year, WotC announced that the app - which had little meaningful updates since like fall 2022 - was shutting down in July 2024. The Kotaku article that I read mentioned other similar games that have come to an end but also games that are still going, including Pokémon TCG Live. So: A free-to-play all of the card game, so an even more one-to-one upgrade in the planning and strategy I missed from PoGo, but still with the characters that I know and love, than Spellslingers had been?

So I started into that, and just hit Master League level in my second season. I highly doubt I will get to Arceus and won’t even try, but I’m glad to have gotten this far. I’m the meantime, I remembered that my friend Red had gotten me a Galarian Darumaka theme deck years ago for some reason. We had never played the TCG together - though he was one of my PoGo buddies for raids and we did remote battles occasionally - so even he forgot he bought it for me. Around that time I had come up with some ideas if I were to ever make a second deck, and now here I am planning to get my son the Pokémon Battle Academy from 2020 for his birthday and myself an Ampharos EX Battle Deck. I don’t be going to no Friday Night Pokémon or whatever they call that sort of thing on this side of the TCG aisle but I look forward to teaching my son this weekend and finally getting some matches in with Red.

I’m hoping there are some other Pokémon TCG Live fans out there among my MtG followers and maybe I can hear about your decks or favorite cards. I plan to share my two favorite homemade brews, as In not sure my minor tweaks to the game-provided intro decks would be that interesting to anyone since my win percentage is sub-50% (and in anticipation of that, my chosen slogan in the game is ‘The most important thing is to have fun. Winning just happens to be fun!’ Or something like that). Maybe you’ll be interested. If not, we’ll, I probably don’t need another blog time sink like my Magic one was at first!

[jackscharp]

Going Through Changes - Stardust

Obviously plenty of PokemonGo players love and hate the game. I'm not sure there's a game I've hated so much that wasn't just an in-the-moment-because-I-can't-be-the-boss situation. There are so many bugs. To name a few: the game crashes far too often, hides the sightings and other things on the map out of nowhere and when you're just walking or sitting like you're supposed to be doing, still has refused to let me place Pokémon in a gym because the gym is under attack when it isn't despite the game website saying the problem was fixed... And those are just some of the bugs. There's plenty of ways the game works but doesn't necessarily work quite as well as we think it could. Here's on of them, and one of the ones I find the most obvious: You get a daily catch bonus of XP and stardust. I'm over level 31 so the XP only matters in that I like free stuff for leveling up (though I'm not quite sure I got anything the last time- bug or odd choice / oversight by Niantic?) But that stardust, on the their hand, is quite desired as I'd love to power up all my Pokémon, but especially the good defenders and the ones supposed to be great at certain raids. So everyday, an extra 600 stardust for catching your first Pokémon that day until finally 3000 extra stardust over the normal amount for just any old catch. Why the sudden jump though? Don't most games with a daily bonus slowly increase that bonus? If not, it's still weird. My work bonuses every year don't stay the same until randomly it's $500 one year in the far-off future. Since it's already 700 on day one and 3100 on day 7, I'd think it'd make more sense to be something like this: Day 1 - 700 Day 2 - 900 Day 3 - 1200 Day 4 - 1500 Day 5 - 2000 Day 6 - 2500 Day 7 - 3100

[jackscharp]

My Pokemon Story

I thought my first post here, for whomever is going to find this, should give readers an idea of where I come from with my Pokémon experience and thus where I come from in my writing and whatever dumb things I might say that should be obvious to more seasoned fans. The short explanation is that I've never played a Pokémon proper game, be it Red or Blue or even Yellow or the new fangled Sun and Moon. I've never had a handheld system, as my friends mostly spent their money, and thus I with mine, into computer gaming, not handhelds, and I was much more into consoles and trying to find the next Goldeneye/PerfectDark/Halo experience for system-linking LAN parties, so that's where that money went instead of a Gameboy which I'm sure I would have then and would now enjoy if I just took the plunge. Having a phone though, I of course have access to Pokémon through Pokémon Go. Hopefully more long-term fans are glad this property that they are so fond of has (some) more acceptability (though in some ways the game had probably hurt that too) and popularity and less care about being first or who are 'true' fans, as I am neither, though my first experiences with the franchise were fairly early. The one and only time my parents convinced me a summer camp would be cool, I was introduced to Pokémon the trading card game. Little did I know, it was made by the same company that makes Magic: The Gathering, a game I wouldn't get into for more than a decade but would get into [b]hard[/b] (see my Disciple of the Cards blog, if you can clean the dust off of it and find value in those ancient posts). For some reason the kid let me have a single card: Sandshrew. And perhaps because it had the picture of this cute, unassuming creature, I was hooked. Again though, I didn't have a ton of money to spend on it amongst all the other things I 'just need'ed back then, but I was able to get a Starter Deck and promptly get whomped every single time by my then-best friend who could afford booster packs and somehow thought that $100 Charizard could be a Christmas present (his parents disagreed). I never it to see if I could adjust the deck to something more personal (and probably Sandshrew-centric) and better power-wise, as it got stolen from me at school from a gym locker that either didn't lock or that I had failed to lock, I can't recall. And this ended my obsession with the game, the excitement over it that was experienced school-wife dying down, and my lack of any cards hindering me from keeping the spark alive between just me, a replacement Sandshrew that was never meant to be, and my Charizard-desiring friend. Years later (two? More? I have absolutely no clue about timeline and can't be blathered to Google), Pokémon Snap was a thing, and somehow just plain watching Charitard (it's not insensitive if I don't say the actual word right??) play became a thing for a time. Seriously, maybe I played too but I don't recall. He was obsessed, I kinda dug it, but it didn't grow from there. But I think that might have kept my interest growing until last year's big release. Since high school, I've periodically checked the games available on the GameCube and Wii, but the reviews are just weak enough to prevent me from giving them a try. There's been too many games with weak reuses whose franchises or features I liked enough that I thought it would be worth it but it wasn't (Im thinking of you, Percect Dark Zero, Sonic Heroes l, and Kirby: Return to Dreamland). I had tried getting back into the card game a few years ago. Shortly before I got married, a friend stayed with me for a [i]really[/i] long weekend and spent probably too much money on cards. He tried to convince me to join in dropping Jacksons (maybe a Grant), knowing by that point I was a dozen decks deep into MtG, but with saving for a wedding and honeymoon I had no pennies to spare. I had suggested I could play if he built a deck for me, hoping he would just give me cards as I had done for my brother, a friend, my wife, and even a friend of my brothers for MtG before the wedding was even on the horizon and money had seemed to flow like honey (isn't that the simile? Because honey doesn't really flow. Just gets stuck in the bottle until you run it under warm water for a whole damn hour), but it never panned out. Then, finally, Pokémon Go comes out, and at last that one friend, flaky himself and to whom I'm not much better, was no longer the only person who had to catch them all (too much?). When I found out my wife liked it I new I had to try, and I became addicted. I still absolutely love it - and hate the parts that don't work well, but still love it more than not (maybe there's a post there) - and have found ways to keep my interest going even beyond my having caught all but 5 non-regional Pokémon from the two generations (on a related note, why do so many 'caught them all!' articles not mention they haven't caught the regionals - I know I'll never get all those but if they haven't either, that's not all of them!) And I guess I like it enough to be here, not being much of a Reddit fan and with my preferred Go news site - Forbes, of all places - not having a vibrant comments section, if at all from what I can tell. My MtG blog surprised me in the number of people who followed - small for most, sure, but I had not even expected 5 to stick around - so maybe this blog might interest some in the same way. If Go was your first major Pokémon experience, as it was practically for me too, and you happen to read this, let me know what made you take the plunge into nerdville (I say that being s lifelong nerd) and if you've since tried any of the other games available.