Path to the Peak, a four-part animated web series about one girl’s journey to become the Pokemon Trading Card Game World Champion, was revealed during last week’s Pokemon Direct presentation. Two episodes have premiered so far, but while attending the Pokemon World Championship Series last weekend, I attended an early screening of the complete series. Path to the Peak is a thoughtful and authentic TCG story - the first of its kind - that’s well-paced and often laugh-out-loud funny. TCG players will enjoy its many references to the game and its sentimental themes about community and the value of relationships, but its overly-saccharine message about following your heart to victory might not be as well received - especially if you know what it actually takes to play the Pokemon TCG competitively.
The story follows Ava, an angsty tween entering a new school who isn’t sure where she belongs. During Club Week, she makes a bad first impression with the archery, baking, and bee-keeping kids (typical clubs we all participated in) and is left out on her own, until she’s taken in by the Pokemon Card club. Ava rushes home to retrieve her mom’s old Pokemon cards (“Retro cards, nice!” her new friend Joshua remarks as I turn into dust) and as it turns out, she’s a natural… sort of.
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In the first episode, The Club, Ava loses handily to the more experienced Joshua, and handles it about as well as you’d expect a 12 year old girl would. She’s got a terrible attitude, she’s rude to her parents for no reason, and she even tries to throw her mom’s cards away. She’s being obnoxious, but it’s totally endearing. I appreciate Path to the Peak’s resistance to making its protagonist a benevolent and virtuous hero, instead allowing Ava to act out the way a child actually would, then learn and grow from those experiences. This is the same quality I admire about Lilo from Lilo & Stitch as well. Ava’s brattiness immediately endears you to her and grounds her character, making it easier to root for her when she later shows maturity.
Ava’s dad teaches her about forming a bond with her Pokemon cards, and encourages her to see the stadium in her mind’s eye and envision herself as an actual Pokemon trainer. Learning a respect and appreciation for Pokemon and being able to see them as more than just cards in a deck is what gives her the edge she needs to return to Pokemon Club and take down Joshua, the school’s best player Celestine, and eventually, become the Pokemon World Champion.
It’s a fun journey, and the series does a great job representing each game as an anime-style Pokemon battle to keep things interesting. Best of all, the characters speak using actual TCG vernacular, and the cards and strategies they use are at the very least reminiscent of real TCG cards. To win the Regional Championship, Ava top decks a Vileplume and attacks with the move Dizzying Pollen - an ability Vileplum cards have had before. This time it’s an attack that uses a coin flip to determine its success, which isn’t how Dizzying Pollen works in the game, but it is an authentic mechanic that other cards have so it makes the resolution to the battle feel believable.
On Ava’s journey to World Champion, she learns an important lesson about friendship. She gets so caught up on winning that she forgets that making new friends was the entire reason she joined the Pokemon club in the first place, and by remembering the friends she made along the way, she’s able to win the Championship and even impart that valuable lesson on her opponent, a self-styled Pokemon professional and a dark portent of the kind of joyless tryhard Ava could have become if she continued down the wrong path.
It’s a nice lesson that’s perfectly befitting of a Pokemon story, and perhaps even a valuable one for TCG players to remind themselves of, but the way Ava manages to achieve victory rubs me the wrong way.
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Throughout the entire series, it’s shown that Ava’s strength is her commitment to following her own style and battling with the Pokemon she has the strongest connection to. Despite warnings from more skilled players, Ava continues to push through the ranks with a silly homebrewed Oddish deck. It gets more powerful as she wins matches and she adds in stronger Pokemon like Zoroark, but ultimately the thing that gives her the biggest advantage over her opponents isn’t her skill at piloting or her deck-building prowess, it’s her love of the game, and the mutual respect she and her Oddish have for each other.
It may be a silly thing to get hung up on, but sitting in a theater at the Pokemon World Championship Series, I couldn’t help but feel a little cynical. The real-life professional players sweating it out in the tournament aren’t following their hearts, they’re smashing the same five Tier 1 decks into each other and hoping for the best opening hand. You don’t get to be the champion if you build a deck out of random cards that are special to you. There’s certainly a place for that in the TCG, but real champions have to be slaves to the meta. They have to adhere to the tried and true strategies and play the same decks that everyone else is playing.
The beautiful lie of Path to the Peak is that Ava’s passion somehow transcends the meta, and if you love Pokemon enough you can be a champion too. In real life, this year’s champion won with the Fusion Mew deck. This is the same deck that won this year’s Japan Championships, and the Singapore Championships, and the Philippines Championships, and the Indonesia Championships, and Asia Summer Open. I could go on.
I was never one of those people that complained about Ash using the power of friendship to win battles he had no business winning, because I can utilize some anime logic and accept that Pokemon battles don’t have to be completely realistic. But Path to the Peak does such a good job representing the world of the Pokemon TCG, and all the highs and lows playing a card game competitively, that I came away a little disappointed it had such a worn out, mawkish message.
It’s a small gripe all things considered, and in every other way it’s a charming story about the Pokemon TCG - something I’ve wanted to see for a long time. It just feels like Pokemon is trying to take credit here for something it has never, and will never accomplish with the TCG. There’s decks you build with your heart, and decks that make you the Champion. Ava’s Oddish shouldn’t be both, especially while espousing the message that having fun is more important than winning. In the end I guess the best fun is the kind you havewhileyou’re winning, which might be the most honest thing Path to the Peak has to say.
