Four months after its release, Pokémon TCG Pocket gets its first Revive card
Celestic Town Elder, one of the new cards in the Triumphant Light Miniset in Pokémon TCG Pocket, introduces an important mechanic: returning discarded Pokémon to your hand.
The arrival of the Triumphant Light miniset in Pokémon TCG Pocket on February 28, 2025 brought new strategies to the metagame of this popular title thanks to the new cards introduced. However, one of the cards in this expansion has gone unnoticed, despite the fact that it adds an unprecedented mechanic: the ability to revive Pokémon, allowing us to retrieve them from the discard pile and return them to our hand. The card in question is Celestic Town Elder.
What is the strategy for reviving Pokémon with Celestic Town Elder in Pokémon TCG Pocket? How do you get this card?
Celestic Town Elder is a card that can be randomly obtained by opening envelopes in the Triumphant Light set, and we can get it in both the basic and full art versions. If we have no luck opening envelopes, we can buy each regular copy directly for 70 Pack Points, and each full art copy for 1,250 Pack Points. Remember that each opened envelope gives us 5 Pack Points, which can only be used to purchase cards from this expansion.
The strategy to follow with Celestic Town Elder is very simple, and can even allow us to turn around a nearly lost game if one of our key Basic Pokémon has been defeated. The effect of the card is “Put 1 random Basic Pokémon from your discard pile into your hand. This allows us to revive a Basic Pokémon that was defeated in battle, though not directly, and bring it back into play. This tactic becomes even more powerful when we use it to surprise our opponent by bringing a former Basic ex Pokémon back onto the field that was thought to be eliminated for the rest of the game.
While this card does not directly revive in the strictest sense of the word - like the Revive card in the Pokémon Trading Card Game, for example - its unique mechanic is groundbreaking, giving us a certain ability to recycle cards that can make the difference in the longest or most evenly matched games.
Advantages and Disadvantages of the Celestic Town Elder Strategy in Pokémon TCG Pocket
Below, we list the various advantages and disadvantages of this Pokémon TCG Pocket card:
- Advantage: Celestic Town Elder allows you to bring a random Basic Pokémon back into play from the discard pile, which can be crucial both for bringing back powerful Ex-Pokémon like Celebi ex, Mewtwo ex, or Mew ex that do not require evolution, and for bringing back key Pokémon for other roles, like Snorlax or Druddigon, which can serve as damage-absorbing walls. This flexibility in strategy can change the course of a match, depending on what is needed at the time.
- Advantage: Recovering previously weakened Pokémon is not only useful in itself, but also has the added benefit of providing a surprise to the opponent, who may have relaxed after thinking they had eliminated the biggest threat in our deck.
- Advantage: It can partially mitigate the lack of a second copy in our deck of powerful Pokémon, such as the aforementioned ex-Basic Pokémon.
- Disadvantage: The Basic Pokémon returned to your hand from the discard pile is random, so if you have several of them, you have to rely on luck to get the one you want, or the one that can get you out of trouble at the moment.
- Disadvantage: Since this is a Supporter card, we can only use one per turn. This means that if we previously used e.g. Professor Research - Professor Oak to draw two cards, and one of them is Celestic Town Elder, we will not be able to use the latter in the same turn, drastically reducing its effectiveness.
Celestic Town Elder is an extremely useful card, especially if you don’t have an optimized deck and don’t have a second copy of an important Basic Pokémon. Although its performance will not be the same, the ability to return to hand a Basic Pokémon that was defeated in battle can partially alleviate the lack of consistency in strategy, so do you dare to try it in your decks?
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