Set Overview
Pokémon Origins is a full custom set of the Pokémon Trading Card Game (TCG). It contains a total of 1080 original Pokémon cards, covering the entire National Dex (as of 2025) and regional forms, and 240 Trainer and Energy cards. This set is best played standalone, with a few modifications to the current rules.
The goal of Pokémon Origins is to take what made the early Pokémon TCG so special and combine it with modern design sensibilities, leading to the 5 key principles for this set:
#1. Restraint
100+ damage attacks, monstrous HP values, and glitzy Legendary/EX/Mega EX/V/VMAX Pokémon may seem cool, but when those apply to every Pokémon in your deck, it all just feels diluted and uninteresting. By scaling down both the numbers and the oversaturation of these “super” Pokémon, Pokémon Origins restores a more classic feel to the gameplay while allowing the truly cool and powerful cards to stand out. (Or better yet, have the players discover for themselves.)
#2. Resonance with the video games
The greatest value proposition that the Pokémon TCG has over most established card games1 is its inherent tie-in with a wildly popular video game franchise. So why not take advantage of that as much as possible? In Pokémon Origins, the stronger Pokémon cards are generally also the stronger Pokémon in the game—i.e., Evolutions are better, Basics are worse—and stats are calibrated based on stats in the games. Also, every single attack and ability in the TCG comes from the games.
By working with these restrictions (which is not that hard to do, and actually breeds creativity), this set offers a deeper immersion for the established Pokémon fanbase.
#3. Each Pokémon has its own identity
There is so much diversity of potential effects and strategies in the Pokémon TCG that, in theory, every single evolutionary line should be able to do something none other can. It can be a super-interesting never-before-seen ability, or it can be just a subtle but intriguing combination of attacks. It can be metagame-defining, or it can be a fringe casual strategy. The point is that in Pokémon Origins, you should be able to pick any of your favorite Pokémon out of 935 and build a deck around it that feels unique in some way.
#4. This game is called “Pokémon”, not “Trainers”
Trainer cards, by definition, are busted. Their literally free cost2 means that any Trainer has to have an effect that is at best “draw a card” (or something comparable) to be balanced. As we know, that is far below what we’ve observed in the nearly 30 years of the TCG’s history, making the game often feel like a battle not between Pokémon but between (decidedly non-Pokémon) Trainers. Pokémon Origins brings the TCG back to its core by significantly nerfing Trainers, making them more discretionary support pieces to the main components of the game—the Pokémon themselves!
#5. Simple, cool, and intuitive mechanics
The hallmark of a great card game is combining straightforward gameplay with strategic depth. And within its deceptively simple structure, the Pokémon TCG has an almost limitless range of basic mechanics on which it can build layers upon layers of strategy. Even in its 30 plus years, the TCG has still not yet explored the full potential of effects that can fit in a mere 2-4 lines of text. Pokémon Originals innovates in that direction, both by adapting familiar mechanics with a slight unique twist and creating completely original (yet still simple) mechanics that push the boundaries of what can be done in this game.