Pokémon TCG Pocket's Cyrus card is driving me up the wall, which is exactly why it's such a genius bit of design

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 . 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.