Theme Decks for Pokemon TCG Sets Likely Discontinued!

If you’ve been following our Battle Styles news story, you probably noticed all its wonderful English products releasing on March 29th. But do you notice anything missing? That’s right, you didn’t — there’s no theme decks for the set!

The Battle Styles sell sheet also makes no mention of them. This is the first time a regular set has not listed theme decks on its sell sheet. The only exception was Neo Revelation in 2001. Compare the sell sheet for Battle Styles with Vivid Voltage‘s and you’ll see the theme decks are gone:

As posted before, we will be getting a new type of product called “V Battle Decks” on February 5th. Could these be replacing theme decks? They are bulkier versions of theme decks, as they come with Pokemon V. They’ll obviously be more helpful to new players entering a game where Pokemon V are in every deck. The old theme decks didn’t do anything to help with that.

There will also be another set of V Battle Decks releasing next October. This means we could be seeing two of these releases a year, rather than two to three theme decks every quarter.

Battle Styles is the start of a new era, so it seems we won’t be seeing theme decks again anytime soon, if ever. This may also be why Staff promos were discontinued; Pokemon likely re-evaluated their entire product line for this new era and decided to cull both. (Coincidentally, Charizard was featured on a Vivid Voltage theme deck and as one of the last Vivid Voltage Staff promos. Charizard is the bringer of death.)