MeinMMO author Paul Kutzner was allowed to take a look at the Top Trainer Box and 2 Build & Battle Boxes of the upcoming expansion “Optimal Order” from the Pokémon TCG. And he had a lot of fun.
New expansions for the Pokémon TCG are regularly released. This is also the case on March 27, 2026. Then the next expansion “Optimal Order,” which is part of the “Mega Evolution” series, will be released. The focus of this expansion is the legendary monster Zygarde in its Mega-ex form.
I was allowed to take a look at some products of the new expansion and dared to engage in battles with the decks. And I had a lot of fun with them.
You can now also collect cards and engage in battles virtually:
First collect, then fight
What did I get to test? The products of the new expansion that I got to test were the so-called Top Trainer Box and 2 copies of the Build & Battle Boxes.
In the Top Trainer Box, in addition to 9 booster packs of the expansion, there is also a promo card, card sleeves, damage dice, a coin flip die, a plastic coin, dividers for sorting cards in the box, 1 code card, and 40 energy cards.
Particularly, I was impressed by the promo card of Balgoras. I find the Pokémon itself and especially the graphical design of the card very appealing. But even aside from the promo card, the boosters contained some great cards that really caught my eye with their design.
The Build & Battle Boxes come with 4 different contents, which are not recognizable from the outside. Each variant contains 1 promo card and 39 additional cards tailored to that specific promo card. Additionally, there are 4 booster packs from the expansion included as well.
In my two boxes, I got one deck with Monargoras and one with Thanathora. Since my girlfriend and I previously used beginner decks that we adjusted over time, it was time to test the new decks.
For this, we first took the cards from the boosters and added 20 additional cards to each deck so that we ended up with 2 decks of 60 cards each.
How did the battles go? We looked at the decks beforehand and discovered that their strengths were quite different. While one deck relied on Monargoras, which was almost unbeatable once it was in play, the other deck focused more on monsters with moderate damage that could be played more quickly.
My girlfriend chose the Monargoras deck while I took Thanathora. For the duels, we generally use a mat that has served us well in the past.
Overall, we played 3 duels, of which she won two and I won one. We had fun in all three rounds, thanks to the new cards and mechanics. There was, for instance, Thanathora’s ability to play one additional energy card each turn, or the PokéPad, which allows you to grab a Pokémon card from the deck.
However, we noticed during the games what cards we were still missing in the decks. The Thanathora deck often struggled to draw enough energy cards from the deck, and both decks lacked the ability to quickly or even at all swap their own and opponent’s monsters.
Why am I back in full swing? Essentially, we are both no longer in the beginner field, but we also don’t want to play with the meta-decks of the professionals. The battles in the Pokémon TCG provide us with a nice and relaxing change to have a few hours of fun. And we have already had quite a few.
Nevertheless, I always like to see what I can adjust in the decks without throwing away the fundamental mechanics of the deck. After the first rounds, I am already back to analyzing the decks and considering which cards we could remove and which to add.
The current realization, to add a few more energy cards as well as cards like Swap (free swapping of your own monsters) and Boss’s Orders (swap of the opponent’s monster), will certainly be followed by several more.
That’s exactly what excited me about our first beginner decks and does so again now. Adjust the deck, engage in battles, consider optimizations, adjust the deck again. Therefore, I am already looking forward to the next battles and the considerations afterwards on how we can make the decks more balanced and the battles even more exciting.
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