Pokémon's biggest TCG set changes everything

By Joshua Yehl

Pokemon has just released its biggest trading card game ever created with Sun & Moon: Lost Thunder. With 236 cards, he beats the previous record holder of 2003, Aquapolis with 186 cards. Lost Thunder is such a big game that instead of combining two Japanese games into a product to be sold in the United States, it combines three games as usual: Explosive Impact, Fairy Rise and Thunderclap Spark. The result is a gigantic set, the first ever to have broken 200 cards in the history of the Pokemon TCG, including seven Prism Star cards and 13 Pokemon-GX, as well as a handful of Rare Secret.

Lost Thunder is about to have a huge impact (even explosive) on the competitive stage. Generally, one game introduces two new deck archetypes, and one of them will be viable competitively, but the size of this set makes that there are many powerful decks hitting all at the same time. The Standard meta-game was just starting to stabilize with Malamar, Zoroark / Lycanroc, Buzzwole / Lycanroc, Buzzwole / Shrine and Vikavolt / Rayquaza in the front row, but this set upsets everything with a lot of new cards that are instantly viable. We suddenly find ourselves in a wild west meta-game where the old power structure was thrown out the window and everything is left behind.

Here are the new Lost Thunder cards that should appear on your radar. Discover them by flipping through the slideshow gallery below.

What do you think are the best cards in Lost Thunder? Let us know in the comments.

Joshua is editor at IGN Comics. If Pokemon, Green Lantern or Game of Thrones are frequently used words in your vocabulary, you will want to follow it Twitter @JoshuaYehl and IGN.