Just One More Pack: A Pokémon TCG Pocket Review
Eyes dilated, fingers primed, ears perked. This is the sensory cocktail I experience every time I swipe my phone screen and pop open a freshly picked digital pack of Pokémon cards.
Pokémon just celebrated its 29th anniversary on February 27th 2025 aka Pokémon Day — aka 29 years since the original GameBoy games were released in Japan. To mark this occasion, The Pokémon Company presented uhh.. a Pokémon Presents, a news update for anything Pokémon related currently in the works or set to release.
While there was collective salivation for info on the upcoming Pokémon Legends: Z-A (a wonderfully clunky title to say out loud), for the first time ever, I paid most attention to Pokémon TCG Pocket, the Pokémon Company’s newest free-to-play crowning jewel, money printing machine, and my fixation for the past couple months.
Pokémon TCG (Trading Card Game) Pocket is a digital, mobile version of the prolific Pokémon Trading Card Game, which began its run in 1996. Since then, an entire culture of fans, competitors, and major collectors formed to sustain the game through every generation, expansion pack and tournament. You can even play it online on its own client and bring IRL packs to the URL version.
Pocket is a simplified, mobile oriented version of the full TCG that came out on October 30th, 2024 to a ravenous audience. In less than a month, the game was downloaded over 30 million times and generated over $200 million in revenue with an average daily player spend of $6.5 million. Just to blow your mind a little bit, in 2016, Pokémon Go generated $160 million in about the same amount of time. Pokémon fans will not be denied, even in free-to-play apps.
All this to say, I started playing in November with what I thought to be a very healthy degree of skepticism and self control. The fact is, I wanted to catch them all. Two months and you’ll quit, Justin. Catch them all and you’ll quit Justin. But neither of those Justins showed up. Hours of daily pack openings persisted through the holidays and into the first quarter of the year. Something I didn’t realize was that it wasn’t just about having one of each Pokémon, but catching every variant of every Pokémon. If you had ever been interested in shiny Pokémon, you know how dangerously infinite this goal is.
In many ways, I am the perfect convert for this kind of game — a casual Millennial nostalgic for Pokémon turned pay whale (or Wailord). Pokémon is also the safest IP to emotionally invest in the morass of mobile free-to-play games justified by high quality art, music or the idea that the Pokémon Company has all the resources to guarantee a game that works and is at least somewhat enjoyable. But I haven’t spent a single dollar on the game (yet). And that’s the secret formula that I think many free to play games miss.
In Pocket, you get two free booster packs to open every day. You can earn hour glasses to reduce the timer. You can do missions, events, and solo battles to get your dopamine hits for extra packs. But at the end of the day, there is currently no incessant subscribe-driven ecosystem that is motivating a player like me to spend money. The high of opening a rare, holographic, immersive animation card is sooo intoxicating, but so is just the haptic feedback of opening the pack. I have made my friends, family, and co-workers open cards for me — inadvertently advertising for my digital drug. Even celebrities are being flagged down to participate.
As the telltale smell of a recession (even if it’s just the vibes of one) creeps ever closer, a game like Pocket is a steady supply of collecting cute Pokémon art without the baggage of the physical cards taking up space we don’t have in our apartments. Sure, there’s an argument to be made that The Pokémon Company can just pull the plug on the servers in a couple years and we lose all our cards, but you can still always buy the real ones if that’s important to you. Pocket isn’t the only way to get this type of fix, even for Pokémon cards.
On the other hand, maybe you can’t always buy the real ones. Pokemon cards have been selling out everywhere. And maybe that’s why more folks are turning to Pocket instead. The Pokemon Company is aware of the lack of card availability and has addressed it, but with the volatility of international tariffs, who’s to say?
I think that Pocket serendipitously struck a larger chord than originally expected. And just like Pokémon Go before it, the developers and those that prove to make lots of money are catching up and assessing the balance to keep the train chugging. I would say players like me are in a holding pattern to see if what the devs think are interesting and engaging are the very things that turn off their base. They will need to add more. The game will change.
While three expansions have already been released, the actual battling and player interaction are extremely limited. Ranked mode was just recently introduced. There remains a lot of quality of life features missing from the game like battle history and spectating. Maybe they’ll implement this over time. But part of me thinks the more they add to keep you playing the game, the less I’ll be interested.
It’s weird to say but I think gamers in general now have a greater sensitivity to how much any game is respecting their time. Between micro-transactions, incessant ads, and pay to win features in games, people do not want to feel extra exploited when they’re out for their virtual smoke break. There will always be players who play too much and spend too much, but I believe that demographic is shrinking.
I’m still playing the game. It’s good for the moment, and I think that it’s okay to pay for games you get a lot out of. Developers, maintenance, and improvements should be paid for. But the biggest reason why I’m still playing is because I know I can still quit without the telltale stench of corporate coercion.
