Cyrus, a new Trainer card introduced in the latest expansion to Pokémon TCG Pocket, is doing my nut in. He’s doing my nut in because he is, frankly, just very, very good. Too good, in fact. The Cyrus card is, by most competitive game developers’ definitions, overpowered. It’s ubiquitous, used in decks with little to no real synergy. It’s having an outsized impact on the meta, elevating entirely new, dominating decks from obscurity. And most importantly: it’s forced me to rework my prized Charizard and Moltres EX deck, which is personally very annoying. I won every PvP challenge the game has had with variations of that deck, and suddenly it’s struggling. If this were League of Legends, where you get the ability to ban one character from the opposing team’s options, I would be banning Cyrus every time.
But this isn’t League of Legends – and actually, I’m glad it isn’t. Cyrus is overpowered, throwing the balance of Pokémon TCG’s meta all out of joint. But it’s also not really overpowered at all – in fact, it’s probably the best thing that could’ve happened to the game’s casually competitive scene. And probably a good lesson in what makes for good balance in competitive games full stop.
To wind things back for a moment: I actually think TCG Pocket has been remarkably well-balanced so far. There have been hugely popular decks, no doubt – first Pikachu EX, then quickly Mewtwo EX, Celebi EX, a smattering of other second-tier options like my Moltres-and-Charizard combo, and, well, probably still a lot of Mewtwo EX. (My one gripe with the balancing so far would be that one: an already dominant combo of Mewtwo and Gardevoir was given even more strength by the Mew EX and Mythical Slab cards that came in the first expansion, Mythical Island. But let me bore you with that another time!)
Crucially though, each of these decks has had a pretty smart, direct counter. The arrival of Celebi EX decks, which take a couple of turns to get going but do almost impossibly high damage once set up, also led to a rise in much more common, seemingly mundane cards being used like Rapidash and Ninetails, which suddenly found themselves as the perfect counter to the strongest, rarest ones in the game. Likewise, the way TCG Pocket’s competitive play is set up has naturally lent itself to experimentation: only the infrequent “win five games in a row” challenges require you to pick truly optimised, on-meta builds. The other challenges, and just general PvP play, instead favour the total amount of wins you can rack up. Coupled with fast games and pain-free conceding when you know you’re set to lose, it means you can play around with fun ideas without the risk of tumbling down a ranked ladder.
But there has still been just a slight, lingering sense of staleness in recent weeks, even with the steady flow of new cards and AI opponents. There are a lot of different decks you can choose from, I’ve realised, but they all play the same way. Excluding perhaps the Weezing-Koga deck (which had a brief moment in the sun early on), every deck that’s at least moderately viable in competitive play has revolved around one thing: get a lot of energy onto a Pokémon, and then do a lot of damage with it.
For some, admittedly, that’s more like ‘get a moderate amount of energy quickly, and then do a moderate amount of damage quickly’, such as the aforementioned Pikachu EX, or Marowak EX and the Blaine-powered Ninetails and Rapidash. But fundamentally the concept is the same. There is a powering-up phase, and then a doing-damage phase that is roughly proportionate to how quickly you can get to it.
And that’s fun! At its extremes, this is effectively the same thing as “turtling” or “teching” in an RTS, a usually not-that-competitive strategy of which I am a hapless fan. There, you stall, you defend, you deflect and delay enemy attacks until you advance to the final “age”, hit the end of the tech tree, complete all your game-long preparations and blow your foes away in one all-out assault. Or at least try to – playing RTS games online is more about sending small troops of early-game units to go and be very annoying, over and over again.
Here, however, see: waiting until you have a fully evolved Gardevoir to go with your Metwo EX; or evolving up a Seviper to go with Celebi EX; or flipping Misty coins for your Gyarados EX or Blastoise, etc. etc. Personally, I have loved the sub-optimal but wonderfully silly practice of stalling forever with Snorlax or Jigglypuff while slowly accumulating mixed energy onto Dragonite, twizzling my evil moustache as I go, succeeding probably less than half the time. My actually-competitive deck is this concept in the extreme: the Moltres EX and Charizard EX combo that requires gathering energy with one, and gradually sticking it on the other, until the latter is fully charged and ready to do more guaranteed damage than any other card in the game.
The only issue is it gets less fun when you’ve been doing largely the same thing for a couple of months in a row. Even the more off-beat counters to the format – playing Psychic-using cards like Jinx, Alakazam, or Exeggutor, which do more damage based on how much energy your opponent has – ultimately follows the same structure. You wind them up, wait for the right moment, and win or lose. Enter: Cyrus.
What’s infuriating – and brilliant – about Cyrus is that it is an incredibly simple concept that has completely turned this status quo on its head. Now, you can not only force your opponent to switch out their active card, but choose the card they have to switch back in, given you’ve done at least a tiny bit of damage to it. Suddenly, storing up energy or stalling for the right evolutions is much harder: your big, late-game monster is constantly getting yanked and shunted around the board, each retreat back to the bench inevitably followed by a get over here hoiking right back into danger. Players have become so quickly adept at using Cyrus – and the card has become so ubiquitous – that I could predictably bait it into use for grabbing this article’s screenshots within the very first match I played today.
More specifically, the infuriating bit is how predictable it is. There is a sense of inevitability with mechanics like this, when this type of game introduces a character, a weapon or whatever else and it becomes so popular you must factor it into every decision you make. But that’s also exactly what leads to the magic.
In Cyrus’ case, the knock-on effects have been brilliant. Firstly, the single-style-of-play issue has been resolved with the combination of Cyrus and Darkrai EX (and some other new and pre-existing cards that dovetail very nicely). That deck has you chipping away tiny amounts of damage at specifically targeted Pokémon of your opponents, sapping away their attempts to build up Energy by forcing them to spend it on continuously retreating and re-retreating, then swapping them in for the kill before they can build up any momentum. But it’s also blossomed out beyond that. For instance, Potions, present in just about every deck, now have a new significance – their role is to keep your precious benched Pokémon at full HP, instead of topping up your once-bulky staller in the active slot. Leaf, a Trainer card that lets you retreat for two less Energy, is now more important again for anyone who needs to stall. Faster decks are more viable, such as Exeggutor EX – as are many more of the once rather feeble Grass-type.
Across the game, good strategy has shifted from who can find a way to set up the fastest, to who can dominate positioning on the board most effectively. Decks that feature Cyrus and Sabrina, for instance, two variations on the theme, tend not to also have space for cards that let them reposition themselves on the cheap. Adding a Leaf to my once-great Charizard deck, to help escape the attention of Cyrus and Darkrai, has meant removing a Pokémon I was previously using to stall. Each consequence has another consequence lurking just behind it, a kind of tactical cascade.
This, in a lot of ways, is the definition of an overpowered system in a game. Paradoxically, I think it’s also the definition of how to handle balance. Metas are good and interesting when they are constantly in flux – when they change – but crucially it’s as much down to the player to find ways to change them as it is the developers dealing out the cards. Cyrus decks are incredibly annoying to play against, yes, but that little sunken-eyed fiend also forced me to stop and think, to return to the deck builder, dig through my piles of hitherto useless digital cards and find something new, then test it out and find some new competitive momentum all over again. Until someone else then finds a counter to that, of course, and the cycle spins around once more. Perfect balance – in the literal sense – leads to a kind of strategic flatness. Imbalance leads to invention. And really, that’s what any good competitive scene is all about.
