Next year is to bring us a whole new set of shiny Pokémon, when the Paldean Fates set hits streets January 26. We already knew it would, of course, contain a shiny Charizard. But now we’ve seen it, and oh god it’s going to cost so much money.
I Didn’t Play Final Fantasy XVI ‘Right,’ And That’s OK
Japan is getting its version of this set, Shiny Treasures ex, a lot sooner, cards going on release December 1. So this means we’re seeing what a lot of the cards will look like a lot earlier on than we have with more recent sets (the current Paradox Rift had cards appear internationally before some of their Japanese equivalents appeared), and today we’ve seen the Special Illustration Rare of the shiny Charizard. It has every sign of being the biggest, most sought-after new Pokémon card in years.
Image: The Pokémon Company
What’s the reasoning for this? It’s the combination of three factors. First, and most obviously, it’s Charizard. Anything featuring the not-a-dragon beast gets tagged with a premium, due to its overwhelming popularity among players. Make that Zard shiny, and it’s entire other leagues.
Secondly, it’s the complexity of the card. The more detail present, the more popular cards tend to be, and this terastallized Charizard is a spectacular piece of art.
Artist Akira Egawa has been producing the most astonishing string of incredible cards in the last couple of years, and is responsible for by far the highest priced on the resale market. She was behind all four of Crown Zenith’s blisteringly good gold cards, Fusion Strike’s Mew VMAX alt-art, the Mewtwo V-Union four-parter, and most relevantly here, Obsidian Flames’ Charizard ex. On release the latter was selling raw at over $100, and still sits at over $60 pack fresh.
And thirdly, yes, it’s that this new card matches that Charizard ex, and will inevitably send the price up on both of them. This new shiny version is a wholly original piece of art, but one that matches the style and theme of the former. It shows a Charizard terastallized into a Dark-type, but now in its black-skinned shiny form, the red insides of its wings reflecting a hundred other colors in the cracked-mirror design.
Image: The Pokémon Company / Kotaku
I couldn’t care less about Charizard, and I want this card. (A desire not helped by my son’s mad luck at pulling the Obsidian Flames version from a pack.) My guess would be the Japanese version will start selling for around $300 pack fresh, and the international version next year will easily hit $200, before coming down to about half that. I also think this could be the first new card in a very long while to see PSA 10 prices hitting $750. (For reference, 2021’s infamous Moonbreon peaked at $1,300 in a 10, and is now around $740.)
The scarcity will be increased by Paldean Fates being a s0-called “special set,” meaning booster packs won’t be sold individually (unless your LCS tears down boxes). However, there’s a small glimmer of hope given that this will be the first time there will be six-pack Booster Bundles of a special set, The Pokémon Company’s incredibly welcome way of selling just packs without vast cardboard boxes also containing oversized cards, pins, stickers and goodness knows what else.
Paldean Fates is the third shiny-containing set to hit the Pokémon TCG, following 2019’s Hidden Fates and 2021’s Shining Fates. We’ll bring you a lovely gallery of the all the prettiest cards revealed so far in the near future.
Cyberpunk 2077 and its Phantom Liberty expansion have a problem with wasting your time. CD Projekt Red’s open-world RPG has a feature where you have to wait an undetermined amount of time for certain quests to activate, and that persists into Phantom Liberty. Even now, after the epic 2.0 update revamped a bunch of the game, it’s still making players wait around doing nothing, praying for the next mission to pop.
Phantom Liberty Is Undoing One Key Thing That Cyberpunk Got Right
I suppose you could argue this is a creative choice meant to encourage you to spend time dipping into side missions instead of just barreling through the main quest. Cool, but then you have to wait large chunks of time before you can get back to the quests you actually want to play. The largely excellent new Phantom Liberty expansion has one of the most egregious examples of this yet, and it sounds like a lot of players are struggling with it.
The final mission in one of Phantom Liberty’s two routes is called “The Killing Moon.” Without getting into the specifics, some messy shit goes down and you have to wait for a phone call from Songbird, the skilled netrunner you meet at the beginning of the expansion. While I was playing Phantom Liberty for review, I noticed that this specific wait was probably the longest I’d experienced in my three years of playing Cyberpunk 2077.
I killed time by using the in-game wait feature, knocking off side-quests, and aimlessly sprinting around the map in hopes that she’d finally hit my line. Eventually, I got the quest to proc but it took days, maybe weeks of in-game time. I discussed this moment with other reviewers who experienced the same trouble, but we couldn’t pin down any real throughline as to what finally got Songbird to make the call. It seemed arbitrary.
Now, the expansion is out, and I was watching video producer and writer Sam Greer stream the expansion on her Twitch channel. It took her around 40 minutes to get the quest to activate. This prompted me and other viewers to try and find answers as to what the hold-up was, and it turns out that a lot of people are running into this issue. There are a handfulofReddit threads about “The Killing Moon” and the painful wait to get back into the action.
Some Redditors have suggested that you need to complete the quest “Run This Town,” which you get via a phone call from Mr. Hands, before events will progress, but Greer was able to finally continue “The Killing Moon” without completing that other quest.
Kotaku has reached out to CD Projekt Red about the issue and will update the story should we hear back. But if you’re running into this problem, know you’re not alone, and the quest is likely not bugged. There’s conflicting information on how to actually get it moving again, though.
An Alabama corrections officer was arrested and fired over the weekend for stealing Pokémon cards at a Walmart.
12 Marvel Snap Cards That Can Go Into Any Deck
According to an article from Alabama news site Advance Local, which had a bit of fun with the headline “Gotta catch ‘em all?” Calhoun County corrections officer Josh Hardy was arrested on August 12 at 7 p.m. for attempting a five-finger Poké-discount by opening up multiple Pokémon card packs and swiping individual cards into his pocket within full view of a Walmart loss prevention employee. When Hardy was confronted over his act of theft, he fled the Oxford, Alabama store on foot, the news site reported.
Sometime after Walmart staff reported the crime to the Oxford Police, Hardy was found at a local restaurant with the stolen Pokémon cards still in his pockets, at which point he was arrested and charged with theft. To make matters all the more awkward, Hardy had committed the Pokécrime and was subsequently arrested while in uniform. Irony found dead.
“It is with great embarrassment that we have to report this incident, and Hardy has been terminated from the Calhoun County Sheriff’s Office,” Calhoun County Sheriff Matthew Wade said in a statement to the public. “He has tarnished our agency and the image of all law enforcement. As sheriff, I promised to be transparent and hold my staff accountable to a standard higher than average citizens.”
Former Alabama corrections officer Hardy’s cartoonish card theft closely follows another peculiar trading card game-related heist committed in broad daylight. Just last week at Gen Con, an annual tabletop gaming convention held at the Indiana Convention Center, a couple of thieves stole boxes full of Magic: The Gathering cards worth an estimated $300,000.
Photo: Goldin / The Pokémon Company / Kotaku / Eric Espada (Getty Images)
Playing in the NFL is tough and many players leave because of career-ending injuries or bad seasons. But after seven years in the league, Las Vegas Raiders linebacker Blake Martinez has retired mid-season for a different reason: He’s making enough money selling Pokémon cards—recently selling a very rare card for nearly $700,000—and doesn’t need the income he gets from playing anymore.
Las Vegas Raiders player Blake Martinez shocked many fans when he announced last week that he was retiring from the NFL at the relatively young age of 28. He was first drafted by the Green Bay Packers in 2016. Following four years with Green Bay, he joined the New York Giants in 2020 before suffering a torn ACL in 2021. He was released shortly after, and joined the Las Vegas Raiders where he seemed to be doing well this season. In his last game before his retirement, he racked up 11 tackles. However, selling Pokémon cards appears to be Martinez’s true passion—not to mention a pretty good source of income for him—and he’s focusing more on that now.
As reported by Dexerto, two weeks before announcing his retirement mid-season, the NFL pro sold an extremely rare and valuable Pokémon Illustrator card for a hefty sum. Last month, the card was graded a 9.5 “Gem Mint” quality rating, making it one of the best examples of this coveted card. On October 29 the card—which Martinez nicknamed “The Swirllustrator” because of two small swirl marks in the card’s artwork—was sold via Goldin auctions for a whopping $672,000.
Yes, this is the same type of rare card that Logan Paul paid over $5 million for earlier this year and wore around his neck during Wrestlemania in April, although his was graded a 10, or perfect quality.
Still, this is a big sale, and hardly Martinez’s first time buying and selling Pokémon cards. The former NFL player is a big fan of the cards and has been collecting them for years, though in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, his love for collecting and selling was reignited. He opens old and new card packs on his Instagram and shares his finds online frequently. In fact, Martinez claims to have found the rare “Swirllustrator” during one of these pack openings. The pro player also has a collectible card business, buying and selling rare cards online.
“I have chosen to step away from this career at this time to focus on my family and future passions,” explained Martinez in his retirement post on Instagram. It appears his “passion” is using the wealth he made in the NFL to buy and sell rare Pokémon cards. And honestly, I’m happy for the guy. He’s far less likely to suffer a terrible concussion while buying rare Pikachu cards online.
If you, like me John Walker, are still fathoming your way through the lower echelons of Marvel Snap, there’s a good chance there are cards you’re clinging on to because they were working so well for you. However, you’re now starting to lose more often, wondering what went wrong. The answer is: Kill your darlings.
With the help of my colleague Zack Zwiezen—who has been playing the game for some time now—we’ve come up with a list of cards that you might want to cut from your decks.
Now, let’s be clear: Neither of us is saying these cards are totally useless, or that keeping them in your deck is always a bad idea. It’s just, they’re the ones that felt so good early on that you might not have been able to bring yourself to acknowledge their weaknesses, and are holding you back from experimenting with more interesting combinations. Be bold, be brave, and let these babies go.
And remember you can always add them back later if you experiment too much and end up with a stinker deck! Anyway, let’s start cutting some cards!
Quicksilver
Image: Marvel / Second Dinner / Kotaku
G/O Media may get a commission
As Kotaku has previously broken down, Quicksilver was developer Second Dinner’s brilliant solution to entirely removing the concept of mulligans from their deckbuilding card game. Guaranteeing a 1-cost card in your hand at the start of every game ensures you can always play in the first round, every time, and add 2 power to the board right away. Which, at first, felt vital. Except, the more you play, the more you realize that being able to play in the first round isn’t actually all that important.
Chances are, you’re not going to be placing down anything game-changing that first turn. And indeed by not playing in round one, you fend off other 1-cost cards like Elektra. You can even obnoxiously opt out of playing a 1-cost you might have in your hand in Round 1, just so you can play two of them more tactically in Round 2. Again, for example, Elektra!
And, as we’ll get to below, decks that opt for as many 1-cost cards as possible will get increasingly weak as you climb the ranks, meaning Quicksilver’s lack of any further abilities quickly makes him more of a burden than a boon.
Uatu
Image: Marvel / Second Dinner / Kotaku
When you first stumble upon Uatu, he feels like a secret hack, a card offering you special insight unavailable to anyone yet to find him. His ability to show you the properties of unrevealed locations feels like something that lets you plan ahead and make psychic moves your opponent can’t predict. And, to some extent, on some level, he sort of does.
Except, that won’t happen nearly often enough to justify Uatu taking up a valuable slot in your 12-card deck. The issue lies in the number of conditions that need to be right for him to actually prove helpful. Rather obviously, you need the luck of drawing him early enough to work. Unless you get him in the first or second round, Uatu’s ability is pretty useless. Secondly, you need to be playing a game with locations where prior knowledge is actually of use.
So many locations have properties where foreknowledge is of very little value. Finding out that when it reveals you’ll get a random card added to your hand, a random card taken from it, or a 12-power card added to both sides…it’s very rare that this will be vital information to you. Yes, there are absolutely circumstances where it’s great, where knowing each card will get 5+ power when played there means you can load up and dominate where your opponent might not know to. But does that happen frequently enough for Uatu to remain a vital card? Really, no.
Hulk
Image: Marvel / Second Dinner / Kotaku
This one is hard. But listen: There are better and more interesting ways for a big finish. Hulk’s there from the start to give you that satisfaction of playing a ridiculous 12-power card on those Pool 1 bots. But he’s baby food, and you’re ready for solids.
Sure, you’ve nothing else in your deck that offers that much power. It’s simple logic. But Hulk’s simplicity is the issue. Using up all your energy in Round 6 on one card that does nothing other than add a bunch of power means you’re missing out on much more fun big finishes. Never mind that Shang-Chi, available from Collection Level 222, can obliterate him with his “Destroy all enemy cards at this location that have 9 or more Power.”
But there are so many cards that do more interesting things in the final round. Like Odin, who adds 8 power, but also refires all the On Reveal abilities of the other cards at the location. That means you can see White Tiger putting out another 7-power card onto another location, bringing her total contribution to 15, while at the same time retriggering Gamora’s additional +5 power if the opponent plays a card there. That puts Gamora up to a total of 17, even without taking into account a possible third card at the location, just playing Odin has increased our power by 20. Take that, Hulk.
America Chavez
Image: Marvel / Second Dinner / Kotaku
When you first get this card you might be excited. America is a 6-cost/9-power card that always shows up on turn six, which is usually the last turn of most Marvel Snap games. And yeah, it’s nice knowing a powerful 9-power card is definitely going to show up at the end of your match. But this also means she’s not hanging around in your hand, meaning she can’t get buffed or randomly tossed into the field early on.
And while adding 9-power at the end of a match can be useful, you’ll quickly encounter games as you rank up where 9-power just isn’t enough to win back a zone or lock something down. Worse, America has no special abilities beyond showing up on turn 6. So, like Quicksilver, she shows up and doesn’t really do anything. And unlike the Hulk who is very strong, America is only sort of strong. In a specific deck built around buffing, she can work, but there are better 6 and even 5-cost cards to swap in instead.
Domino
Image: Marvel / Second Dinner / Kotaku
Let’s just toss this on here too, while we are talking about America Chavez and Quicksilver. Like those cards, Domino has a unique ability that means she is guaranteed to end up in your hand on turn two. And as a 2-cost/3-power, she seems useful as a follow-up to Quicksilver on turn one. And early on, you can definitely win with Domino. But eventually, you’ll need to get over these cards.
It’s hard, I know, but while giving them up means you give up the consistency of always knowing what’s coming on turns one, two, and six, you are also giving up three slots in your small 12-card deck to characters with no other purpose. They don’t buff, boost, move, kill, destroy, or do anything useful like that. Again, in certain decks, these cards can be useful. But there are just so many better cards that you could use instead of Domino, Quicksilver, and America. Say goodbye to consistency and hello to chaos. It’s the Marvel Snap way.
Mantis
Image: Marvel / Second Dinner / Kotaku
Mantis, like the other Guardians of the Galaxy-related characters, has a reveal ability that pops when your opponent plays a card in that location on the same turn it’s played. But unlike Gamora, Star-Lord, or Rocket, Mantis doesn’t get a power boost, instead drawing a card from the opposing player’s deck. This is fun and chaotic, which we support! Snap is more fun when things are hard to predict and wild. But this becomes far less useful in most situations pretty quickly.
The number of times people play Mantis, get a card, and then never use that card because it doesn’t sync up with their deck’s synergy is high. And that’s if your opponent plays a card that turn and you guess the location right. If you don’t do that, then Mantis is a crappy 1-cost/2-power paperweight just begging to be killed by Elektra or worse, left there with no way for you to remove it, taking up valuable real estate. So, yeah, ditch Mantis. And if you are screaming “Well, she is a part of my Zoo Deck!” right now, here’s more bad news…
Zoo Decks
Image: Marvel / Second Dinner / Kotaku
The “Zoo Deck” was certainly one of the most popular meta decks of Snap’s early days, but in the face of the more common addition of Killmonger to players’ decks, it’s now proving a liability.
A Zoo Deck is a community-given name for decks that put together a lot of low-cost cards, especially 1-cost cards, which often have animal art on them. (Not often enough to justify the name, but that’s the name they’ve gotten anyway.) Advocates celebrate that they allow you to play multiple cards in later rounds, surprising players who rely on hefty 5 and 6-cost cards, like some sort of cheeky rascal scampering between the angry giant’s legs. Except, because of Killmonger, they’re pretty much useless.
Killmonger does appear to be an incredible OP card, although he can only be picked up by players who’ve reached Collection Level 462. At just 3-cost, with 3 power, it’s a card that can be played from round 3 onward, and devastatingly takes out every single 1-cost card from the board. Yours and theirs. And people in Pool 2 are reporting seeing it showing up a lot. The effects are brutal. Oh, and Zoo Decks can also get beat badly by a Scorpion, which lowers the attack power of all the cards in your hand by one, which can easily cost you a close match when most 1-cost cards are low in power. So yeah, Zoo Decks are fun…but not worth it later on.
