Pokémon returned to McDonalds in 2023 to celebrate the release of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. If you ever wanted to see everything about this release, you’ve come to the right place!
This Year’s Box
The Match Battle box is slightly smaller and thinner than the previous year’s box, and it came with four items: a coin, sticker, instructions on how to play Match Battle, and a pack of four cards. The boxes themselves had one of five different Pokémon (Pikachu, the three Starters, and …. Cetitan for some reason), albeit in Scarlet and Violet forms. Take a look:
| BOX DESIGN | COIN TYPE | STICKER | NOTES |
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#1 – Pikachu |
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#2 – Quaxly |
| #3 – | |||
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#4 – Fuecoco |
| #5 – | |||
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#6 – Pikachu |
| #7 – | |||
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#8 – Sprigatito |
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#9 – Quaxly |
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#10 – Cetitan |
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Back view of box and Scarlet coin | |
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Pack that came in every box, and back view of Violet coin |
How to Play MATCH BATTLE
Basically you flip a coin, which randomly chooses a card stat and whether the “highest” or “lowest” of that stat wins. Then look at your cards. Whoever has the best example of that particular card stat will win!
Set List
This year there are 15 cards in the Match Battle packs. Below is the full setlist, as well as what card they were originally sourced from:
| № | Type | Name | Mark | Holo? | Source |
| 1/15 | ZG | YYYY | |||
| 2/15 | ZC | YYYY | |||
| 3/15 | ZC | YYYY | |||
| 4/15 | ZC | YYYY | |||
| 5/15 | ZC | YYYY | |||
| 6/15 | ZC | YYYY | |||
| 7/15 | ZC | YYYY | |||
| 8/15 | ZC | YYYY | |||
| 9/15 | ZC | YYYY | |||
| 10/15 | ZC | YYYY | |||
| 11/15 | ZC | YYYY | |||
| 12/15 | ZC | YYYY | |||
| 13/15 | ZC | YYYY | |||
| 14/15 | ZC | YYYY | |||
| 15/15 | ZC | YYYY |
“Print Run” Analysis
Before I say too much, I just want to say this: it’s not exactly possible to determine a “print run” for this set, by virtue of the fact that there are just so little cards to pull any kind of appreciable data from it.
HOWEVER! There is still a very interesting pattern with the packs of this set. That is to say… as mentioned above, a pack of McDonald’s cards contains four cards: one holofoil card and three randomly inserted cards. Now very early on I noticed that certain Pokémon would only appear in certain “slots” within those three randomly inserted cards. I took note of the cards I got in a pack and their position, and low-and-behold!, they actually DO follow a pack position pattern!
- For the sake of clarity, I will label the position of the pack as:
- HOLO: the first card in the pack
- (POSITION) A: the first nonholo card, the ones after the holo card
- (POSITION) B: the second nonholo card
- (POSITION) C: the third nonholo card, and the last card in the pack
Here’s a quick overview of my discovery:
| № | Type | Name | A | B | C | |
| 1/15 | ZG | |||||
| 2/15 | ZC | |||||
| 3/15 | ZC | |||||
| 4/15 | ZC | |||||
| 5/15 | ZC | |||||
| 6/15 | ZC | |||||
| 7/15 | ZC | |||||
| 8/15 | ZC | XX | ||||
| 9/15 | ZC | |||||
| 10/15 | ZC | |||||
| 11/15 | ZC | XX | ||||
| 12/15 | ZC | X | ||||
| 13/15 | ZC | |||||
| 14/15 | ZC | |||||
| 15/15 | ZC |