Hello everyone! This is Elena from Gaia Storm TCG and welcome to another article here at CCG. New year, new life. And that applies as well to Pokémon, for sure. We are about to embark in an era of changes, not only because a new Set is being released in few weeks but also because TPCI recently announced critical rules updates that will be applied in exactly a month from now (February 21st) when the new Sword and Shield expansion becomes legal. So, what are those changes and how will they affect the game? Let’s review all the changes!

1. The first and most importance modification is the supporter restriction in turn one. Now, the player that goes first won’t be able to use any supporter card, which of course means we will have to change the way we think about the early game. To me, this rule makes actually a lot of sense. I still remember when attacking turn 1 was allowed and what a nightmare the situation became with the advent of Mewtwo EX. In that situation Pokémon decided to limit the advantages of wining the coin toss and stop players from attacking in their first turn but I’ve always believed that starting the game was still a huge advantage. With the supporter restriction, players going first will struggle more with the set-up, technically having more problems to find the ideal pieces to start the engines and that balances the situation incredibly. But don’t think going first is going to be such a problem… some very powerful drawing cards are coming in Sword and Shield! We will talk about that in the following articles.
2. Weakness and resistance have also been changed.To date, Pokémon that were resistant to a certain type took -20 damage when attacked but now that number will increase and reach the -30 mark. My guess is that Pokemon is doing this to match the tremendous amounts of life points that the cards have right now. In addition to this, some general weakness and resistance dynamics have been updated so watch out as some Pokémon are suddenly going to acquire a weakness we are not used to (Eg. Darkness being weak to grass instead of fighting).
3. Following this same logic, Pokémon typing will be seeing a rearrangement and fairy types will disappear from the game. Being Fairy Toolbox my favorite deck, you can image how sad I feel right now. From now on, all Fairy Type Pokémon in the videogame will be have a Psychic version when arriving to the TCG.
4. Magnolia is bringing the game a much welcome draw-7 effect but Pokémon wants to make things clearer: We can’t play Juniper, Sycamore and Magnolia at the same time even if they have different names because they are basically the same card. That’s why the are going to create a new category, “Professor Research”, under which all of the cards with the “Discard and draw 7 cards” are going to fall from now on.
5. There are some minor wording changes like entering in the Pokémon “Check Up phase” (what before was “between turn”), the use of the verb “recover” and the fact that some cards will have their effects clarified with the exclusion of the sentence “before your attack”.
6. Finally, Pokémon is bringing the same system that for years has been going in japan and will introduce regulation blocks. Basically, this means that cards now will have, apart from their set number, a block icon (Block A, Block B, ect) that will be a way to control their legality status. For instance, in Japan, what rotates is not the sets and the cards within but rather, cards belonging to a certain block. I am very interested to see how this works in the future.

And that’s all (for the moment)! We will still need to see how everything goes and how players react to those changes. For me, I think we are heading towards very exciting months with all the new releases and can’t wait to start testing the SW&SH format! Thanks for reading.