Pokemon TCG Officially Announced for Mainland China, New Printed Language for Cards!

By: Water Pokémon Master · Posted Posted onSep 28, 2022 at 11:31 AM · 14 Comments

Pokemon has officially announced the Pokemon TCG will be coming to mainland China on October 28th! Three sets will release named Sun & Moon: Crossing the Sky, each featuring 151 cards (for a total of over 450 cards). As we previously announced, these are compilation sets featuring cards from the first Sun & Moon sets. A GX Starter Deck will also release.

As we posted a week ago, The Pokemon Company will be printing these cards in a new language: Simplified Chinese. This language is different from Traditional Chinese, which The Pokemon Company has printed for Hong Kong and Taiwan since 2019. Since Simplified Chinese is used for mainland China, this brings the TCG to a whole new audience.

China’s sets will release at a rapid pace so the country can catch up to Japan. Then China will presumably get the same sets as Japan. This was the case for Hong Kong and Taiwan when Traditional Chinese cards were first printed there — they started with compilation sets, then simultaneous releases once they were caught up.

The Pokemon TCG will now be available in Japanese, English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Korean, Indonesian, Thai, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese.

You can read more about this news from last week’s news story.

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I haven't considered this at first but yeah, PTCG will have three different ways/schedules of releasing cards for a brief time. Well, seems like at some point China will get the same goodies as Japan, unlike us.
 
I feel like a curmudgeonly old man about this, but as with last time, it would be disappointing to see this turn into a conversation about the politics of China. Absolutely, there are questions when a company extends its business to a new country, but that's true of ANY country – at any time. It wasn't without a fair measure of censorship – and butchering – that WOTC adopted the TCG for international markets. NOA themselves censored a fair amount of things when they translated the Pokémon video games for North America.

If you're a fan of the TCG, this is huge. It is expanding into a huge market and that can be great news for its long term. If you're a fan of competitive, well, it's either good or bad news that you might've just gotten a bunch of new competition.
 
I'm glad people in China can play with cards in their own language. That said, if you're hoping that having a new market will encourage Pokemon to fix any of their issues/failures, that hope is misplaced. Pokemon has demonstrated more money doesn't imply an increase in quality. Again though, glad people in China can get these cards!
 
Polaris said:
I'm glad people in China can play with cards in their own language. That said, if you're hoping that having a new market will encourage Pokemon to fix any of their issues/failures, that hope is misplaced. Pokemon has demonstrated more money doesn't imply an increase in quality. Again though, glad people in China can get these cards!
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Exactly. If anything, this will change nothing about the game because it just means TPCI will accumulate more money to sit their fat asses and not use to better anything, like they've been doing for years.
 
Yaginku said:
I haven't considered this at first but yeah, PTCG will have three different ways/schedules of releasing cards for a brief time. Well, seems like at some point China will get the same goodies as Japan, unlike us.
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We might get the same timeline as japan in the scarlet and violet era. We are rotating at the same time
 
Fairy type is an abomination. So have been the parade of power-creeping gimmicks of the last few generations.
 
Nintenfreak said:
I can; that take would be not bringing back the Fairy Type.
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HershelLayton said:
Fairy types were super cool? Unless they were competitively broken, I loved the look of them
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Carl Miller said:
Fairy type is an abomination. So have been the parade of power-creeping gimmicks of the last few generations.
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Fairy was needed for VG balance purposes. They did not maintain this balance when bringing it to the TCG. Culling the type and turning them all Psychic, while moving Poison to the underused Darkness typing, was among the best ideas Creatures has ever had and provides greater balance to the game as a whole, as opposed to leaving an outlier type which was created specifically to rein in a type that has never been a problem in the TCG and not once has been used to showcase its merits as something other than "the Dragon killer type"

The Fairy type suffered from poor implementation since day one. It didn't need to be so ridiculously lopsided as a type, but it was, and as a result of that poor planning, the correct play was to eliminate it from the game entirely. I hope we never see it again. It's just not needed.
 
PMJ said:
Fairy was needed for VG balance purposes. They did not maintain this balance when bringing it to the TCG. Culling the type and turning them all Psychic, while moving Poison to the underused Darkness typing, was among the best ideas Creatures has ever had and provides greater balance to the game as a whole, as opposed to leaving an outlier type which was created specifically to rein in a type that has never been a problem in the TCG and not once has been used to showcase its merits as something other than "the Dragon killer type"

The Fairy type suffered from poor implementation since day one. It didn't need to be so ridiculously lopsided as a type, but it was, and as a result of that poor planning, the correct play was to eliminate it from the game entirely. I hope we never see it again. It's just not needed.
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I dont' care I just like the aesthetics of hte card game. I don't think the game is any better or worse in gen 8 than it was in Gen 7 so bring it back
 
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