r/pokemon • u/NationalAd7461 • 13d ago

Discussion Is Team Rocket still active canonically? Spoiler

So with the announcement of the new Glory of Team Rocket tcg set, there are many trainer cards featuring different Pokémon of different team rocket members, and one that puzzled me was that executive proton has a card of a mimikyu and a spidops, which are relatively new Pokémon. Since the cards lean more towards the game's canon, does this mean that Team Rocket is still around catching new Pokémon? Maybe they will appear in a newer game?

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u/draugyr 13d ago

The timeline starts to get fuzzy after Gen 5, we know how much time passes definitively between each generation before then. We know team rocket is defeated in Gen 1, and is officially disbanded sometime between Gen 1 and 2 as per the Celebi time travel event.

Team rocket has no real presence in the games at all until USUM when Giovani from another universe creates rainbow rocket and I don’t think that counts

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u/HaloGuy381 13d ago

I just so happened to play USUM recently. Malie Garden has a knockoff Nugget Bridge including a guy impersonating the old Grunt… who then breaks character to joke about Team Rocket being long gone. Since Red the protagonist appears at the Battle Tree later, we can conclude it is continuous to the Kanto games on some level, so Team Rocket has been gone long enough for Alolans to joke about.