It took me 20 years to fall in love with Pokémon cards

My name is Ravi. I’m 43 years old. And I just opened my first pack of Pokémon cards.

Okay, to be clear, it wasn’t a “real” pack of cards — they were virtual cards in the iPhone game Pokémon TCG Pocket. But it’s something I never thought I’d do.

This might seem surprising because I am, to put it mildly, a huge Pokémon fan. I started with Pokémon Red in 1998 and since then I’ve (literally) caught them all. I play Pokémon Go so often that I carry a second phone to keep the game running all the time. My professional Zoom backdrop has a plush Pikachu positioned artfully over my shoulder.

But for some reason, I never got into the Trading Card Game. Part of it is that I don’t really like card games at all. I don’t play poker. I never got into collectable card games like Magic: The Gathering. I don’t even play card-based video games like Slay the Spire or Balatro.

Then they announced TCG Pocket last year, a scaled-down, free-to-play version for smartphones. And right at the start of the trailer, they showed how you open packs with a swipe of your finger:

Seriously, watch this: the way you slice a pack open with your finger, and the crinkly sound it makes when you do it... it’s perfect. It is so weirdly compelling to me that it might as well be witchcraft.

Oh, and you get two free packs a day. Which means I get to do that twice a day. Yeah, I'm hooked.

To be fair, it isn't all about this terrifyingly addictive little feature. I didn't really pay attention to Pokémon cards before this. I hate to admit it, but there was more than a bit of snobbery at play. It felt like there was just something… lesser… about the card game. Maybe it’s that my younger siblings collected the cards, so I saw it as a game for kids. Or maybe it’s that, having played the “real” games, it felt odd to play an analog approximation. I've got a Game Boy. I don't need cards!

But I was focusing on the wrong thing. By thinking about the game, I was missing the point; it’s not about the mechanics of it, it’s about the actual cards. Because the cards are beautiful.

A couple of years ago, I visited Yokohama shortly after it hosted the Pokémon World Championships, and one of the malls held an exhibition of Pokémon cards. Dozens of cards were enlarged and displayed as standees, and it was the first time I’d really had a chance to actually look at them and appreciate their unique art.

There’s a variety and boldness here that feels so unlike anything else in the series. There are so many Pokémon games, shows, books and products, but the designs are relatively homogeneous. Even something seemingly wild like the stop-motion Netflix show Pokémon Concierge stars Pokémon that look just like Pokémon anywhere else; they just happen to be physical models, not cartoons.

I’m not used to designs like these cards here. This is so wildly different to anything else in Pokémon, and I love it.

The Yokohama exhibit may have changed my mind on Pokémon cards, but it wasn’t enough for me to start collecting… yet. It seemed too big, too daunting and — thanks to speculators — too expensive to commit to. I already have expensive hobbies, thanks.

I needed TCG Pocket – and the offer of two free packs a day – to give me the push I needed to jump in. A few months in and I've got over 2,000 cards, opening the app every day to open new packs to try to collect more rare (and beautiful!) full-art cards.

Sometimes I even play the card game itself. It’s not quite what you think: I haven't changed my mind, I'm still not a fan of card games. But every so often there’s an event that gives you a chance to collect rare cards if you participate in card battles. And I want those cards, so if I have to actually play the game to get them… sure, yeah, whatever.

It took a few decades, but I’m all in on the Pokémon Trading Card Game. But it's not about the game. I just want the cards.