Pokemon TCG Pocket is more than a mobile game: It's a money-making machine. The virtual trading card app raked in more than $900 million in its first six months, eclipsing even Pokemon Go's revenue in the same post-release time span. As it turns out, fake Pokemon cards are just as much of a hot commodity as the real thing.
People love ripping open card packs, hunting down ones with their favorite illustrations of fan-favorite Pokemon. It feels great to beat the odds by pulling an elaborately inked full art or a shiny secret rare. But it really starts to irk me when I'm missing only one or two cards from a set and I can't get lucky enough to pull them out of a pack.
Pokemon TCG Pocket has a "pity points" system that's supposed to make this feel less terrible. Every time you open a pack, you earn five pack points, which you can directly trade in for a card of your choosing.
You can trade in 35 points for a common card, but if you want to get the rarest cards from a set, they could eat up 500 points, 1,250 points or even a whopping 2,500 points each. That means you'd have to rip open 500 card packs in order to earn a single copy of one of Pokemon TCG Pocket's rarest cards.
It sounds absurd (and it is), but that's to be expected for a free-to-play game, especially one where the developer makes money by encouraging players to pay for extra card pulls. My real big issue with pack points is that they're restricted to the expansion set you earned them in.
For example, I have 315 pack points for the recent Secluded Springs set, which is an expansion I'm missing a great deal of cards for. I also have 700 pack points for the game's first-ever expansion Genetic Apex -- but those points are locked to Genetic Apex, and can't be used for any other set. I've accrued hundreds of pack points, but they're essentially useless to me because they won't help me complete the sets I'm still missing cards in.
Pokemon TCG Pocket expansion sets are released on a monthly basis, which means no one really has time to earn enough pack points for a rare card before the next shiny slate of cards is dangled in front of your eyes. It propagates a desperate sense of FOMO that I've criticized in the past, and the latest expansion set has exacerbated this issue more than ever before.
The glittery golden Deluxe Pack Ex expansion will juice your Pokemon TCG Pocket collection up -- but your pack points probably won't help much. DeNA/Screenshot by CNET
If Deluxe Packs are time-limited, what happens to my pack points?
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