It feels like I have converted 148Apps into a website for attacking the hit game Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket. To be fair, I kind of did. It has been hard, though, to get my full range of thoughts on it across, because having to report on the actual news got in the way. Bloody facts, ruining everything.
Pokémon was an early gaming love
The fact of the matter is I don’t hate the Pokémon series, far from it. My earliest vivid memory is from the far-off days of 1999. I was but a small-yet-still-tall child, sitting on my window ledge waiting for my Mother to return home, for I knew she would be bringing a brand new Game Boy and a copy of the freshly released Pokémon Red. I also got Mario, but there was nary a hint of a Pikachu in that, so who cares?
Red consumed a lot of my life. My team consisted of a Charmander…and that was it. Child me would use nobody else, and yes, Brock and Misty were my first nemeses. This continued through so many different titles; the original Pokémon Trading Card Game, Colosseum, Rescue Squad, every mainline entry, and just everything they offered. It went off a cliff on the Switch, let’s be honest, but I still played them.
More to the point, I still play Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket. I open up my two daily packs, lament at yet another pack of duplicates, and play a few rounds against the computer. My problem is not that I hate it, it is that it is failing to live up to what it could be. It is a complete and utter disappointment, and it hurts that the developers keep making it worse.
Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket was a disaster from the start
To start off, the launch was abysmal. Genetic Apex has 226 cards split across three sets, plus a dozen or so Promos that were just fancier versions of existing cards. Because of this small pool, you always encountered the same three meta decks online, and it got really boring. When the main gameplay – card battles against humans – gets that tiresome, it is a massive issue.
A recurring issue is that it feels like Pocket is just a cash grab. Splitting Genetic Apex into three sets of unique cards is just trying to encourage people to spend. A Reddit user called Weens4Life calculated that it cost them $1,500.00 to complete the set, and, in my own experience, the drop rates on the rarest cards are horrific. Imagine having to do that for three sets.
When Mythical Island was released nearly two months after launch, I thought things would improve. This was just the one set of cards, after all. Even after around 80 card packs, I have yet to pull a single Gyarados, or Aerodactyl ex or regular Serperior. Out of all this, we also got two more meta decks, still a boring amount. And worse, they are going backwards with Space-Time Smackdown containing two sets.
I will take a moment to acknowledge that draw rates on physical TCGs like Magic the Gathering or Yu-Gi-Oh are also pretty low. And there are metas there too, but the difference is there are hundreds of choices. I have won with gimmick decks or just cards I like the look of because there is enough balance to do so. In Pocket, you need to use one of these decks, or you are done for.
The trading feature was an absolute failure
This is bad enough, and then they released the trading feature. I had some worst-case scenarios, and they managed to exceed them and then some. There is trading stamina, which, yeah, fine. We can live with that. But the Tokens are just ridiculous. If you don’t know, in order to trade, you need these Tokens, and the main way to get them is to discard cards.
Not just any card mind you, only the higher rarities, and the conversion rate is terrible. You need to discard four cards to trade one. It is giving a giant two fingers to their free-to-play audience who can’t afford to pull hundreds of packs to get enough high-rarity duplicates. And even if you do, there are a raft of cards you can’t trade. This includes every single one from the newest expansion.
The Pokémon Company released a statement claiming these restrictions were made to discourage bots and alternative accounts. They claim to see the error of their ways and will be revising the whole feature. I will believe that when I see it. There has been a blatant undercurrent of greed in this whole release.
As for wanting to combat bots, I don’t think that was the main goal. Bots and alts would no doubt be replaying that first stretch where you get dozens of packs and hourglasses for free, hoping for high-value cards. This would lead to real-money trading, and the developers don’t want just one person pulling those Golds and selling them. They want every player pulling for the golds themselves to make them more money.
The verdict: Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket has far too much greed
In all my gaming life, I have never seen something this greedy. I have played a lot of Genshin Impact, a lot of Honkai: Star Rail, and an insane amount of Wuthering Waves. Three gachas, a genre where the whole model is to entice you to pull the same character multiple times to make the developers a ton of money. None of these feel as aggressively monetized as Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket.
I wish that I could love this game. Every time there is an announcement or an update, I am bracing myself for the bad news. I don’t want that. I don’t want to constantly insult it, not least because nothing I say will change anything. They will just keep on bastardizing a cherished franchise from my childhood for as much money as they can wring from it, and that is kind of heartbreaking.
