Creatures Inc. and DeNA have announced major changes are coming to ranked mode in Pokemon TCG Pocket, which will make the game more enjoyable for the majority of players.
Ranked mode has been out for a couple of months now and many players have already been struggling with the grind, but this is seemingly about to change.
In an announcement made on X (formerly Twitter), it was announced that both Ultra Ball and Master Ball, the two highest tiers in the game, will remove deranking and award win streak bonuses.
Coming at the end of June, Ultra Ball and Master Ball will finally award bonus points for winning multiple games in a row. This will massively reward consistency and should make the climb much easier to stomach.
As players have found, it takes hundreds of games to get to the game’s top division of Master Ball. It took Reddit user u/Dams96 329 games with a 60% win-rate to do so.
It can also take well over one hundred games to get to Master Ball from the second-highest division, Ultra Ball.
With no streak bonus at higher ranks, a lot of players got stuck in Ultra Ball 1 and ended up giving up on their climb to avoid deranking back into Great Ball.
However, coming in late July, players will no longer be able to drop down from Ultra Ball to Great Ball or Master Ball to Ultra Ball. Once a player reaches either of those ranks, their rewards are safe.
Not only will this keep people playing, it will also be crucial for meta diversity. Now players who want to continue playing can experiment with new decks stress-free with no worry of falling down into Ultra Ball and having to grind back up.
This could be the biggest change to meta diversity since the last update, which gave us Rare Candy and the yellow bird that ruined 18 trainer decks in Pokemon Pocket.
However, it is frustrating that we’ll have to wait two months for these changes to come into effect.
The ranked grind will still be brutal once the new season starts on May 29th with the release of Extradimensional Crisis, but at least it should be the last with the win-streak bonuses coming at the end of June.
In my seven years of esports writing, I’ve introuduced esports coverage to newspapers, interviewed some of the biggest names in the industry, and driven viewers mad with the puns in my YouTube scripts. I’m most proud of the latter.
