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If there is one thing that is happening with every expansion in Pokémon TCG Pocket, is that the game is getting faster. On the first expansion, we only had Professor Research and Poké Ball as cards to draw from the deck (and Meowth or so). Then slowly but surely, we started seeing cards like:
- Sprigatito: a “Find a Friend” user with stronger Meowscarada followup.
- Rare Candy: speeding up the evolution timing of Stage 2 pokemon
- Shiinotic: with an ability to also “Find a Friend” but of any characteristic
- Sylveon Ex: which basically feels like having 4 Prof. Research.
- Silvally: that can hit 100 on turn 4 and it's not an Ex.
- Baby Pokemon: allow you to use a move on turn 1, or speed up a bench pokemon
and most recently Suicune, Raikou, and Entei allowing you to draw an extra 1 card on every turn!
The evolution of speed in Pokémon TCG Pocket
Although fallen out of the meta, one of the fastest decks during the Eevee Grove set was that of Solgaleo Ex. This is because it only requires 2 energies and with the help of Rare Candy, and cards that help thin your deck faster and it can hit up to 120.
Now, the question still remains… What is the fastest way to get Solgaleo Ex active?
To answer this question, and after losing plenty of games in the ladder, I decided to use a bit of programming and data analysis. The idea was simple. Simulate a lot of games, half with Sylveon Ex as support and half with Shiinotic as support.
I chose these two since they are the most common supports I both see in the ladder and in tournaments!
Experiments
To make sure the simulations would ensure I was counting the fastest way to play Solgaleo ex, I made sure to have the bots prioritize the moves in this order:
- Use Poké Ball (if possible)
- Use Shiinotic’s Illuminate Ability (if possible)
- Use Professor Research (if possible)
- Use Rare Candy (if possible)
- Evolve all possible Pokemon (and say “Yes” to Sylveon’s Ability)
- Attach Energy and Attack. Not that it matters much in this experiment, since I am just counting when Solgaleo gets to the field, but added this to finish games in a timely fashion.
This I believe is the optimal way to play either of the decks. In the case of Shiinotic, playing Poké Ball first, ensures your Poké Ball doesn't go unused (since in theory Shiinotic could pull your last base in the deck, leaving the Poké Ball disfunctional).
Similarly, Prof. Research is played after Poké Ball and Shiinotic, since Prof. Research could also accidentally pull pokemons, leaving the Pokeball and Shiinotic without impact.
Lastly, evolving Sylveon is also left to be done after Pokeball in particular, although the order between it and Prof. Research doesn’t matter much; what matters is that they are both done as soon as possible.
The decks used for the simulation where the following:
Solgaleo ex Sylveon ex variant
Solgaleo ex Shiinotic variant
The rest of the items used are actually ignored by the bots in this analysis, since they don’t play a role in the speed of Solgaelo being online. They might indeed be more optimal versions of the decks out there, but if just looking at the speed of the deck, all the ingredients are there.
Results
Now onto the results. To my surprise they are both fairly similar when it comes to the speed of the deck, but Sylveon ex is slightly faster. In particular, if you play 100 games with Shiinotic in 48 of them you’ll have Solgaleo Ex active in turn 4. Whereas, with Sylveon you’ll have Solgaleo Ex active in turn 4 in 51 of the games.
This means in terms of raw speed Sylveon Ex is slightly better. BUT, and this is a very big BUT, given the utility that Shiinotic can give us against our favorite yellow bird, the one and only Oricorio, I think we should conclude that Shiinotic is probably a better choice. In general, Shiinotic is also worth less to the enemy and can actually attack in an only- Energy deck.
These two additional benefits from Shiinotic I think outweigh those 3 games out of 100 of differences. Although to be fair, Sylveon ex has only 1 retreat cost and Shiinotic 2, which takes me back to thinking it's not all that simple.
The ex killer
That is why I think the only way for us to fully understand what is the optimal deck to play a Pokémon is to simply check it out empirically. Meaning, play out (or have bots play out for us) thousands if not millions of games with different configurations of the decks. This way we can actually account for all the complexity the beautiful game of Pokemon TCG Pocket entails!
What’s Next?
The analysis above is just a narrow comparison of Shiinotic and Sylveon as supporting pokemon to Solgaleo. There are many more aspects of the game we have to consider. For example, is it better to have Giant Capes or Rocky Helmets in this deck? To answer questions like this, in my opinion the only way we could do it is by simulating millions of games with the different variants, since the game is too complex to analyze theoretically otherwise.
If you believe in this mission, there is an open-source game engine being developed right now that does exactly this. It’s a slim re-implementation of the game that can be used for large-scale simulations like these as we strive to find the most optimal decks out there!
The code is in Github here: https://github.com/bcollazo/deckgym-core. Feel free to check it out and build out your own experiments! It’s also a great way to learn how to program in Rust or use the new AI-assisting technologies to code!