Pokémon TCG Pocket will reach its first birthday at the end of October, giving cause for everyone to look back at the last year and wonder at how it still hasn’t managed to figure out a workable version of trading. However, with an update due to arrive in time for the anniversary, there are about to be some slight improvements to trades, as well as a new ability to give away spare cards to your friends.
Of course, this being Pokémon TCG Pocket, it can’t just be a nice simple feature that lets you toss a bunch of dupes to your buddy who’s trying to fill in gaps in their collection. Come the new update, you’ll be allowed to receive one card a day, and only up to 4-diamond rarity (as in, no better than a basic ex). Woooooo. We can hand each other our bulk in the slowest way possible. Bizarrely, this new feature is being called “Share,” although there’s no sharing involved: You don’t get to keep the card after you hand it over—it’s what we humans call “giving.”
Slightly better is an improvement to the continuously dreadful trading in Pocket. So determined is The Pokémon Company that no third-party money should be able to change hands when organizing trading that it’s ensured it’s all wildly slow and frustrating to use, and until now has only been available for low-rarity cards. The best you can trade right now are the 1-star cards, or what the real-world sets would call Illustration Rares. But after the next update, trading will include 2-star cards (Special Illustration Rares), and 1- and 2-shiny star cards (Shiny Pokémon). Sadly, 3-star cards (the animated Immersive cards) and crown-marked cards (Golds) still won’t be available to trade, and neither will the damn Promos.
A couple of other tweaks are coming. Wonder Picks will now start to deliberately include cards that are missing from your collection (although they’ll still make you beg, with a one-in-five chance of actually getting the card you want). It’s also going to slightly simplify Flair, by which you add special twinkly effects to your cards, and no longer require you to spend shinedust to apply them—given shinedust is now required for trading, that surely ensured no one was ever bothering with Flair anymore, likely prompting the change.
And that’s it. It’s a pretty paltry range of improvements for a game that still hasn’t addressed some of its most egregious faults almost a year later. Of the 10 issues I listed last year as being most in need of fixing, a somewhat demoralizing 10 of them remain exactly the same. Instead, with the botched addition of trading, the list of issues has only grown far longer.
For what it’s worth, the best solution for trading I’ve found so far is a mobile app called PokeHub. It lets you create shareable lists of cards you’re after, and look through others, arranging trades and sharing in-game details with strangers. And it works really well—while you’re still stuck with Pocket‘s abysmal one-trade-at-a-time system, people on the app want super-fast exchanges, so you can swap out a bunch of cards at a fair pace. And no, no money changes hands at all.
It would remain far better if Pokémon TCG Pocket just implemented a similar system itself, given it would keep players within its walls and doesn’t involve any elements that would be frowned upon by the developers. It’s bewildering that it hasn’t already happened, and speaks to a situation in which TPCi seems more scared of Pocket than proud of it. It’s certainly bringing in enough cash to fund any improvements/castles they could wish for, but instead everything is so tentative and cautionary, and ultimately reeks of gacha greed instead of player happiness.
