Dec 27th, 2025

by Juha-Matti Santala

I’m a big fan of Pokémon TCG Progression Series (or Evolution Series as some call them). In such series, players open booster boxes of consecutive sets and after each box, build a deck with cards they’ve pulled so far and play games.

Azul GG Garcia and Chip Richey are currently in the middle of their Scarlet and Violet series in Youtube, some years back GamingLair started from the very Base Set and what got me originally excited in the format was Omnipoke’s Sun and Moon series that unfortunately never finished.

I’ve always wanted to play one but with physical cards, it’s so freaking expensive especially these days to purchase a booster box for each set that it never seemed doable. Last summer, I started putting together an idea where we’d open virtual packs using PokemonCard.io’s Pack Opening Simulator and Pokémon TCG Live. Scarlet and Violet block had just finished and it was relatively cheap to craft missing cards in Live so for the first time it felt doable.

I sent a message to our local game group’s Discord and in total, five people were interested in starting such series and in September, we opened the first packs starting with Scarlet and Violet base set.

This week, just before Christmas, we finished our 15th round and thus completed the series. It was so much fun!

Everyone seemed to enjoy the series enough that we’ll be playing a different block early next year. My hopes are with HeartGold & SoulSilver block but let’s see what we decide as a group. If you’re interested in seeing how that goes, keep an eye on the Pokémon tag page on my notes as I’m going to keep track of it there.

Deckbuilding challenge

I consider deckbuilding to be the biggest weakness of mine when it comes to TCG. There’s so many options and building a balanced, focused and consistent deck is hard. That’s why I welcomed this challenge with open arms as I wanted to get better at building decks.

Did I? Probably not.

I had a great start to the series, finishing with strong 3-1, 3-1 and 2-2 records in the first three sets. I’m used to playing jank rogue decks rather than meta decks so I think I had a bit of an advantage over the others in the early phases.

Once others started pulling better cards, especially ones with energy acceleration, I fell to the bottom tables. 1-3, 1-2, 0-3, 1-2 in four consecutive sets. Cards like Baxcalibur, Gardevoir ex and Electric Generator started to dominate the field and I had not pulled anything with proper energy acceleration to keep up with these new decks.

Midway our series, I managed to get a set of Electric Generators from compensation packs (after each set, you’d get to open extra packs from previous set based on your ranking) and got my hands on Iron Hands ex and got a 3-0 sweep.

I had another clean sweep victory in Stellar Crown with a Terapagos ex/Pidgeot ex deck that was really strong thanks to Crispin. After a nice streak of positive records, I made the biggest blunder in Journey Together set where I tried to put together a Raging Bolt ex deck despite only having one Professor Sada’s Vitality. My deck played one draw supporter and bricked completely in all three matches.

In Destined Rivals, my Ethan’s Ho-oh ex/Crustle deck was massively dominant picking up easy 3-0. I got so excited about the deck that I made a commemorative Tag Team GX card out of it

In the final combined set of Black Bolt and White Flare, my Cinccino deck fell short after 3 excellent and most fun matches in the entire series.

I had a lot of fun playing a wide variety of decks and always trying to come up with something new, especially after sets when I had won 3-0. I decided early on that I’d retire decks that do too well because otherwise the format can have a tendency of staying with just a couple of decks and new sets having little to no impact.

I finished with a positive 25-24 record and 2nd place which was a big surprise for me, especially given how good the other players in our group are.

If you’re into Pokémon TCG and have accumulated some recent cards in Live, I recommend finding some friends to play this format. It’s super fun!

Software

I kept notes of my own progress with remarks on pulls, decks and matchups in Scarlet & Violet Progression Series and built a website to keep track of series scores, decks and matchups. A lot of these ideas evolved throughout the series as we learned what was fun.

Originally, my idea for keeping track of what we’ve pulled was to print the page to PDF (and I believe that’s what most others kept doing throughout the series) but I quickly came to the conclusion that it was gonna get out of hand real fast.

So first I built export-pack-sim, a bookmarklet that extracts the card pool information for each set into plaintext and then started building my own selfhosted homelab solution for being able to add the cards to database and view them on a website. This turned out to be a great solution because it helped me brew new decks and think about my growing collection of cards even when I wasn’t logged in to Live.

It’s still in its infancy as software as I just had to get something up and running while we were playing. It’s tightly connected to my own toolkit software that has its own card API, personal collection info and bunch of other helpful Pokémon TCG tools. I’ll try to see if I can find a way to open source them eventually but due to the fear of Pokémon Company lawyers, I’ll likely never be able to publish it as a web app.

One of its strengths is that it shows Pokémon by their evolution lines regardless of which set they came from. And it separates trainer cards by their subtype (Item/Tool/Supporter/Stadium), making it easier to find what you’re looking for.

I did start building a management tool for a Progression Series however. In it, you can invite players, select which sets to include in a series and how many boosters to open per set. Players could then open the boosters, have cards automatically added to their pool and in the best case scenario, even build the decks directly in the app. The goal with the deck builder portion especially is that it could use your pulled cards pool as the source from where to search and pick cards so you wouldn’t accidentally add cards you don’t have.

And then submit and confirm match scores so everything could be done within the app. Some parts of it I have working but it’s not quite ready yet for our next series. Maybe for the one after that.

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If something above resonated with you, let’s start a discussion about it! Email me at juhamattisantala at gmail dot com and share your thoughts. In 2025, I want to have more deeper discussions with people from around the world and I’d love if you’d be part of that.