Pokémon Sun and Moon: Guardians Rising Expansion Review

The latest release of the Pokémon Trading Card Game released last week to much fanfare, and for good reason. With new cards and artwork for Pokémon fans to enjoy, this release adds to the already outstanding Pokémon Sun and Moon lineup of cards. Thanks to the Pokémon Company, we have received a number of items to unbox and review. In this article, we will focus on the Booster Packs and Tin for the Pokémon Sun and Moon: Guardians Rising Expansion!

Aesthetically Pleasing

The first thing I notice when unpacking the booster packs from the box the Pokémon Company sent over was the excellent artwork on both the tin and the booster packs. The packs are adorned with one of many monsters from Pokémon Sun and Moon, and they all look fantastic. The art this time around, both on the regular cards and the rare and full art cards are fantastic, and is more impressive than much of what I’ve seen to date. As is traditional, 10 cards are available in each pack, with a good mixture of at least one energy card, trainers, items, and 6-7 Pokémon to add to your collection. Each pack will have a rare or better card included, with some also having the chance of a hidden rare.

This release brings along new Alola forms of popular Pokémon. The Alolan Sandshrew for example, is particularly awesome, taking what was generally a pretty bland Pokémon – both in the design and artwork on the cards – and turned it into something awesome. It is definitely a card I’d love to have in my collection.

Solid Line Up of Pokémon

What’s great about this pack, however, is that it isn’t just limited to one or two good looking or powerful cards. From top to bottom, there are very few cards in the release that I wasn’t a fan of, and there also seems to be a higher number of quality cards overall. While unboxing, I often caught myself saying, “That would be a great addition to my ‘x’ deck.” With 140 cards in the deck, its not inconceivable that many would be ‘useless.’ As far as I can tell, this is not the case!

The Tin we received in this package from the Pokémon Company was not for the Guardians Rising expansion, but I felt like I would review it here anyways. As you can see from the video above, we were able to snag a full art Incineroar card, which might be my favorite card ever released in the history of the Pokémon Trading Card Game. As you can see from the tin, the Alola sets are full of the new GX cards, which we will attempt to explain a bit more below.

GX Cards are Here!

Below is an explanation of GX cards from the website, PokeCards Online:

GX cards appear to operate much like their EX predecessors. Should your GX Pokemon be knocked out your opponent will take 2 prize cards. They will have higher HP than standard Pokemon and stronger attacks. The main difference will be in their most powerful attack known as GX attacks. A GX attack is an attack that can be used only once per game. That means 1 GX attack for the entire game, not one for each GX Pokemon! This limitation is balanced out by the game changing power of these attacks. A good example of the power of these attacks is Lunala-GX’s Lunar Fall GX attack. If you use this attack you can knock out 1 of your opponent’s Basic Pokemon regardless of HP left!

I wasn’t sure how much I would enjoy the GX cards – since we already have EX cards, and many other powerful monsters spread across generations of card releases – I’m actually pretty happy with them. To be honest, however, I have yet to pull out and place a GX card in a real game, so until that happens, I’ll probably have to reserve judgement on how effective – or ineffective – they really are.

Conclusion

We will dive further into the Guardians Rising expansion for Pokémon Sun and Moon in the near future when we unbox and review the Sun and Moon themed decks. Look for that article and video soon on GamesReviews!