It’s been a very quiet week in the world of Pokemon, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have any news for you. Rather than hitting you with a bunch of updates from the games, we’re taking a change of pace this week, and focusing on other areas of the franchise.
From the anime, to the trading card game, here are the biggest Pokemon stories from the past seven days.
Ash Is This Close To Finally Becoming A Pokemon Master
For those of us that started watching the Pokemon anime around the time of Gen 3 and 4, Ash seemed less like a hero and more a subject of ridicule. While we were battling our way through Elite Fours with ease, he just kept stumbling on his journey to become a Pokemon Master. In fairness, he did beat the Alolan Pokemon League back in 2019, but that was after 22 years of trying. With that alone taking more than two decades, you would be forgiven for believing that it would take another two for us to see him take another title. But that might not be the case at all.
As TheGamer’s Eric Switzer covered this week, Ash is on the verge of beating the World Coronation Series - an international Pokemon tournament that determines who is the best Pokemon trainer in the world. Ash looks set to go up against his rival, Leon, to claim the title. And given how powerful his current team is, he might just make it.
Pokemon Go Players Are Using Their Buddies To Send Each Other Messages
When a game doesn’t come with a text chat, players will end up improvising. Back in my Overwatch console days, that meant sarcastically spamming the “thank you” button whenever anyone on your team messed up. Now, Pokemon Go players have found their own, much less toxic way of communicating.
As reported by Ben Sledge this week, Pokemon Go players are using codewords in their Pokemon’s names to communicate with one another. Ben noticed this with a buddy Pokemon named “Egg 11BST Sat”. This indicated that the player is cracking a Lucky Egg on community day. Pokemon names are full of helpful notes like this, including info on coordinating trades, or even their ‘mons stats. Until Niantic finally adds a text chat, it’s likely that players will continue using these unique workarounds.
Logan Paul Awarded Guinness World Record For Spending More Than $5 Million On A Rare Pokemon Card
Come on, we couldn’t let you go without a mandatory Logan Paul Pokemon card story, could we? Surprising no one, he’s just bagged himself the Guinness World Record for most money spent on a single Pokemon card, thanks to his $5 million purchase of a Pikachu Illustrator card.
Also surprising no one, Paul went on to wear the card in question around his neck when he made his Wrestlemania debut last week. Pricing all of us out of our favourite childhood hobby is a pretty good heel gimmick, to be fair.