Pokemon TCG Pocket continues to be ridiculously widespread, however within the early days of the sport there are solely a restricted variety of methods to have interaction with different gamers. Buying and selling nonetheless hasn’t been launched but, and battling solely has one common format that allows you to begin a match with a good friend, or a random participant. So with a view to spice issues up, the group is arising with its personal workarounds, together with a model new battle format that is been very well-received to this point: NOEX.
“NOEX” is a battle format with one easy rule: no EX Pokemon allowed. EX Pokemon, in the event you’re unfamiliar, are ultra-powerful monsters which can be very troublesome to defeat, however which award two factors upon destruction versus only one. On account of their sheer energy, most good meta decks in Pocket are constructed round not less than one EX card, and the top result’s that you simply are inclined to run into a number of the identical decks again and again while you interact in random battles. For the final month or so, for example, I have been enjoying a deck that revolves round Pikachu EX, and have been preventing a number of Mewtwo EX, Charizard EX, and Starmie EX.
However in NOEX, all these playing cards are banned, which forces gamers to construct decks round different Pokemon for some attention-grabbing combos. For this text, I engaged in a few NOEX battles myself. In a single match I confronted a Butterfree/Dugtrio stall deck that I would by no means seen earlier than that decimated my military of Nidoran, and in one other I barely scraped out a win towards a wacky Dragonite/Weezing combo due to a fortunate closing draw. It is a enjoyable format if you wish to shake issues up a bit.
Sadly, NOEX exists on an honor system. There isn’t any method to formally create your personal battle codecs in Pocket simply but, so gamers have created this by word-of-mouth. If you wish to be part of a NOEX battle, merely choose “Non-public Match” beneath battles, and use “NOEX” because the password. However you are primarily in your honor to make use of a deck with no EX Pokemon, as there’s nothing within the system to cease you. Some players are already complaining about opponents bringing EX Pokemon to a NOEX fight and ruining their enjoyable – an unlucky hazard of a community-created format.
That mentioned, it feels like NOEX is in any other case going fairly properly. Neighborhood members are praising it on Reddit, and whereas my private expertise is proscribed, the pace with which I used to be capable of get into matches with others who had been respecting the format signifies this may need legs. It additionally feels like some gamers are suggesting different sorts of codecs that may be accomplished in the identical means, similar to solely permitting a single EX card per deck, or no decks thought-about by the group to be “S-tier.”
Hopefully, it will not be lengthy earlier than we begin to see new options creep in that can hopefully get rid of the necessity for the group to invent stuff to do. We have already discovered that there is a “major update” coming within the close to future that can embody buying and selling, and new booster packs on the best way will hopefully boost the meta a bit as properly. Given how wildly popular TCG Pocket is, the updates cannot come quick sufficient.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You will discover her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Received a narrative tip? Ship it to rvalentine@ign.com.
