Move over Mewtwo ex, Caterpie is the new god of Pokemon TCG Pocket after a player managed to win a battle using the Bug-type as their only Pokemon.
Pokemon TCG Pocket has hooked more than 30 million users with its pared-down recreation of the popular trading card hobby. Keeping players amused with a steady stream of in-game events and a task-based progression system, it has racked up over $120 million in revenue.
The core of the experience is the tantalizing booster packs that you can open in your quest to hunt down the rarest possible cards. Those get some use in the game’s battling mode where, more often than not, the most powerful meta decks pick up the win.
We say more often than not because one Pokemon TCG Pocket player has made the least optimized deck imaginable and still managed to take home a victory. Reddit user Jumbunckley somehow managed to scrape a win with their baffling Caterpie-only deck.
Is Caterpie the off-meta answer in Pokemon TCG Pocket?
The aptly named deck only has one Pokemon in it: Caterpie. In Pokemon TCG Pocket’s deckbuilding, you can only have two of a card with the same name. This means that Jumbunckley had to fill out their Caterpie-only deck with a bunch of Trainer cards, many of which would be completely useless given they rely on having Pokemon of different types.
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With Caterpie’s abysmal stat line of 50 HP and the Find A Friend attack which does zero damage, it should be impossible to close out a game with it. The only way to do so is by stalling out to the game’s 30-turn limit which is exactly what happened in this situation.
Of course, Jumbunckley was technically handed the win by a benevolent opponent named Okuyasu who refused to attack. Maybe it was pity for the weak little caterpillar, maybe they wanted to see if there was some underlying strategy that was being built to. Whatever the case, the Caterpie-only deck can now claim to have a single win under its belt.
Jumbunckley did give Okuyasu a shout-out and offered some gratitude. “Thanks for giving me The Hand in this milestone moment,” they said. Perhaps the new meta-strategy for Pokemon TCG Pocket is seeing if you can make your opponent feel sorry for you.
