Pokémon TCG: Scarlet & Violet – Paldea Evolved | The Coolest Cards We Pulled

The latest Pokémon Trading Card Game expansion, Scarlet & Violet – Paldea Evolved, arrives next month. As the name implies, this new version delivers plenty of evolved forms of Paldean Pokémon while expanding on the pre-existing catalog of Paldean and non-Paldean monsters.

This second expansion in the Scarlet & Violet series of cards brings with it more than 190 new cards, including 15 Pokémon ex cards, Tera Pokémon ex cards with a crystalline appearance, more than 30 Trainer cards, and dozens of Pokémon and Trainer cards with special illustrations. The Pokémon Company sent over several booster packs for us to open and see what we could pull, and those with the special illustrations ended up being the highlight of my pack-opening experience.

You can see my favorite of the cards I pulled in the gallery below.

I was pretty happy with the cards I pulled from the packs. My favorite is probably the special Elite Trainer Box Pikachu card, which features the three Paldean starters in the background, though I also love the Pikachu I pulled from a booster pack. Outside of that, I enjoyed seeing the various Paldean starters’ evolved forms, though, for some reason, my pulls skewed heavily toward Quaxly’s evolution line. Outside of this most recent generation of Pokémon, I was happy to snag some updated cards of old favorites, such as Gyarados, Raichu, and Tyranitar.

In addition to being the second Pokémon Trading Card Game to bear the Scarlet & Violet name, it’s also the second pack to come at a higher price tag. However, The Pokémon Company has at least tried to deliver some benefits to this, as each pack includes more foils, and even the wrapper of each booster pack feels thicker and of higher quality than the original Scarlet & Violet expansion.