Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket (2024)

I played Pocket almost every day for 3 weeks and even after I had the battle pass for a while, I didn't even get halfway through getting enough points to exchange for the full art May card I wanted. I also pulled only May's booster pack every day and didn't get May even after I used up almost all my items to do multiple 10-pack pulls for a total of 250 packs opened (1250 cards). In TCG Live, you can get pretty much all the cards in a set just by playing a few weeks and you get so much currency that can be used to exchange for the full art cards too and it's 100% free unlike TCG Pocket (the battle pass is free in Live and gives you more than twice the amount of cards that Pocket does)

Battling
The battle is oversimplified and feels dumb compared to TCG Live so even if I were to finally get the May card I wanted, there's not as much motivation to using it because the battling is too easy.

Pack Opening
Opening packs also takes too much time and there's no way to skip going through every single card like you can in Live. So if you do two 10-pack pulls, you have to either swipe through 100 cards or press and hold the fast forward button for it to show you each of the 100 cards. And then you also have to go through the screen where the packs fly, where you swipe the pack to open it, where you go through the summary of the cards pulled and add them to your collection... In TCG Live you can jsut press 1 button to "collect all" and skip everything.

The only positives I see in Pocket are:

• Cool parallax effect that makes cards look like the art is popping out of the card
• Some very rare cards have a mechanic where you press and hold them to go inside the card and see a wide art of the card that you scroll through horizontally and is slightly animated.

So, I just added Pokémon TCG Pocket to Grouvee because I realized no one else had. Usually I'm not a super big fan of mobile games but this has been really satisfying since I no longer collect Pokémon cards. It does have some premium features which I have not used. It uses real cards as models often with hollos and full art cards given really excellent details. You can open 2 packs a day and more if you save up your in game resources. Another cool feature is wonder picking which lets you choose a random card from another person's booster pack. It also has the TCG battling system which has been fun to get into, also if you don't know how to make a good deck it has plenty of rental decks you unlock via collecting cards!

Overall I recommend it to people who either have some Pokémon TCG nostalgia or are super cheap collectors. It's also fun for battling but I won't comment on how exceptional it is because I have only practiced against the AI thus far.

Please enjoy!

• Collecting cards and getting excited about what my friends get.
• Streamlined battles. They're simple and make it much less daunting to get new players involved.

• Lacking content. Not a ton of single player offering. Only one expansion on release, so not a variety of deck builds.
• There isn't a lot of way to get more resources. I wish you got more hourglasses per match because once you get to a certain point, you only get them via the shop and leveling up, which takes awhile. The most exciting part about the game is opening packs, but there aren't a lot of opportunities to do that.
• No trading yet. Part of being excited about playing a TCG and opening packs is sharing with friends. No trading in a "trading card game" is bonkers.