When the three-year era of Sword & Shield came to an end in January 2023, it went out with a bang. Crown Zenith was a set so great that it spoiled the next year of the hobby, with its stunning pull rates, incredible art, and fan-favorite pocket monsters. For reasons that are impossible to fathom, The Pokémon Company has chosen to mark the ending of the Scarlet & Violet era with, um, a set based on Black & White.
The Pokémon TCG has been on quite a ride over its Scarlet & Violet era. We’ve seen the reintroduction of ex cards, the return of Trainer Pokémon, and even a new invasion from Team Rocket. At the same time, we’ve also seen a lot of drab sets with pull-rates that ensure you’ll get something, while making the most desirable full-art cards near impossible to collect. Then, during fall 2024, everything got out of control. The hobby saw a new surge of interest, driven by skyrocketing prices made vastly worse by scarcity caused by scalpers, and ever since it’s been close to impossible to buy a new pack of Pokémon cards from the store without waiting in line, or engaging in a fist fight. Multiple attempts to thwart scalpers have failed, and even pre-ordering a new set months in advance is now a lottery. Unless you want a pack of the entirely unloved Twilight Masquerade. Everywhere has that poor set.
It’s into this furore that the English-language’s first ever split set is launched. Black Bolt and White Flare are two overlapping sets of cards, each with their own unique Pokémon and cards, released as a so-called “special set” to finish off the SV generation. Except, “special set” actually means, “harder to buy for some reason,” where packs are only sold as part of collection boxes, or in Elite Trainer Boxes, with no single packs available (unless you go to a canny specialist store, that’ll strip the collection boxes down for their packs), and certainly no 36-pack booster boxes. Then, released as a split set, it’s twice as hard to collect all the cards you might want, given you not only need to be able to find any at all to buy, but you also need to be sure to get the right half of the collection. Yay?
All 156 Pokémon from…Unova?
Black Bolt and White Flare feature all 156 Pokémon from the Unova region, as featured in the 2010 Pokémon Black and White video games. Why? Gosh that’s a good question.
Obviously, if you’re a fan, you’ll know the set features fan-favorite Legendary Pokémon Zekrom and Reshiram. And then, um, oh dear. Look, if 2010 was your entry into the hobby, then I imagine the Pokémon within have a special place in your heart. But looking back across all the new monsters, it’s surely by far the worst. Filled with deeply unimaginative creatures, like three different evolutions based on flipping ice cream and a second pigeon-based pocket monster, I struggle to muster passion for such a derivative set. Oh, and it also forced Pansear, Pansage and Panpour on us, three creepy-faced monkey-things in a game that was already just fine with Aipom. (Simisear, the evolution of Pansear, was once voted the least popular Pokémon, ever.)
This means it’s not easy to get worked up about seeing the set get celebrated here, especially when—and italicized all-caps is really the only option here—THIS IS THE LAST SET FROM SCARLET & VIOLET. Maybe celebrate that set? Just perhaps?
There’s some absolutely gorgeous art to be found in the packs, along with the brand new all-black and all-white Zekrom and Reshiram cards, but based on my experience of opening 35 packs, you’ll be lucky to see the rarer ones. Pull rates are tricky to convey at this point, because Black Bolt and White Flare are packed with so many twiddly extras that you’ll inevitably get something out of a couple of packs. Because, oh my, there are so many variants here.
There are new holo Energy cards that show up pretty frequently, and then the most egregious array of reverse holo versions of every card. So, for every Basic Pokémon (the ones with the small window art on the top half), there are four different versions. The regular, the standard reverse holo, then a Poké Ball holo pattern, and then a Master Ball holo pattern. This means to complete a master set, you’ll need to collect a ridiculous 800 cards, and also be a billionaire scalper who lives in a Pokémon card factory.
What about pull rates?
To give you an idea from my unscientifically small sample of 35 packs (very kindly supplied by The Pokémon Company, and roughly half Black and half White) I pulled a gratifying seven full-art cards (six Illustration Rares, one Ultra Rare full-art Trainer), four standard ex cards, eight holo Energies, 14 Poké Ball holos, and one Master Ball holo. And written down, that might sound like a really impressive haul. But given just how common Poké Ball variants clearly are, they immediately didn’t feel special, and the Energies are much the same, while ex cards have been bland throughout the last three years. So, it’s really only those seven full-arts and the Master Ball that felt like special pulls. Still, eight out 35 is vastly better than we’ve seen from other sets, and not to be sniffed at.
The other side, however, is that this meant I didn’t see a single Special Illustration Rare at all, from either Black Bolt or White Flare, meaning those 18 valuable cards must be incredibly tough to find. Obviously I could have just gotten unlucky, but if they’re really fewer than one in 30 or so, that’s going to be grim.
The collection sets themselves are pretty nice. The poster collection’s poster is just enormous, while the binder collections come with a top-quality 3×3 side-loading binder, featuring either Reshiram or Zekrom. ETBs have nine packs of either Black or White, depending on the box, while the two-pack mini tins have one of each. As ever with Pokémon, everything is super-good quality, none of the extras feeling like tat.
But, you know, I’m left feeling a lot of anticlimax. Is that really it for Scarlet & Violet? Does it not even go out with a whimper, but not even starring in its own branded packs?! (This is, after all, “Scarlet & Violet: Black Bolt”.) Also, was that it for Trainer Pokémon? We had the awful Journey Together set, followed by the fantastic Destined Rivals, and then…they’re all gone. There are no Trainer Pokémon here at all, so I guess that’s just done already? Next up we have the first of a whole new era, presumed to plug the gap after no new mainline Pokémon game has been revealed for this year, simply called Mega Evolution.
Perhaps it’s a bluff, and next January we’ll see a proper goodbye to Paldea and its new monsters, get the Crown Zenith equivalent the region deserves. I do hope so. But if not, then Black Bolt and White Flare is a pretty naff way to end things. If you can find it, you’ll likely pull something glittery out of it, but given it’ll be a Unovan Pokémon, won’t add anything radical to the table-top game, and is extremely unlikely to be rare, it’s hard to get all that excited. The sets are available from Friday, July 18.
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