Pokémon TCG Pocket is already nine months old, because time has come loose from its moorings and there’s a global conspiracy to cover up this chronological catastrophe. Over its three-quarters of a year, the mobile version of the collectible card game has introduced many new sets of cards, a new ranked tournament mode, and also an absolutely disastrous method of trading. Some six months on, the developers are finally beginning to roll out some fixes to trading that should see it become slightly less awful.
In an update due to arrive in the app on July 29, Pocket will at last allow you to indicate to others which cards you’re interested in receiving in exchange for a trade, although it’s not exactly clear how or even if this will work. And it’s doing away with the needless complexity of yet another in-game currency to add to the 12 that already existed—a currency that required you to mindlessly “shred” cards from your collection to gain.
I have played Pocket every single day since its release on October 30. Really, that’s just a ten minute commitment rather than some disturbing obsession, and I genuinely enjoy opening the packs and finding new cards. I’ve built shared binders, taken part in its many single-player tournaments, and lament entirely forgetting to participate in one “drop event” meaning I have an awkward gap in my Promo cards that can never be filled. I’m also obsessed with ever getting the animated card from Celestial Guardians: Solgaleo, because then I’ll have collected every animated card released. I’ve reached the level cap. I’ve nearly hit 7,500 cards. Which is all to make the point, I’m no drive-by Pocket player. And despite all this, I’ve traded a total of one time, and that was with my son, moments before he got bored of the game.
The “T” in “TCG” was always going to be an issue for the new mobile app. As soon as you introduce a way to trade, you open up the possibility of external real-money markets that people absolutely will exploit. In The Pokémon Company International’s desperation to avoid their new product becoming embroiled in the inevitable scandals, it instead added a version of trading so limited as to be almost entirely useless. It all pretty much boils down to this: you can’t communicate with others which card you’d like to receive in return for the one you’re offering for trade. And that’s madness.
The game limits you to like-for-like trades when it comes to a card’s rarity, so you can’t be ripped off by receiving a common basic card in return for your full-art ex, but that still doesn’t make the process useful. People trade because they want a specific card in return! You don’t walk into the grocery store and put fifty dollars on the checkout, then look down to find out what food has been put in your shopping cart. But by restricting this, it also prevented off-app markets from letting people set up payments for trades.
This was made worse by the Trade Tokens needed to do a trade, occasionally gained through rewards, but primarily gained by “shredding” your cards to gain more. Literally destroying the cards you don’t want in your collection, in order to be able to, er, trade the cards you don’t want in your collection.
But this is now going to change. First of all, Trade Tokens are to be scrapped, replaced with the more ubiquitous Shinedust. You’ll need to convert your current stock in increments, although the update note suggests that can be as much as 100 Trade Tokens at a time, with each single token worth 10 Shinedust. Without ever trying, I’ve got 9,900 Trade Tokens, so that’s going to be something of a tiresome chore, making 99 bloody exchanges. However, in better news, it’s also going to allow us to switch tokens for Pack Hourglasses too, at a one-to-one conversion, although only 60 times. Still, that’s five more packs you can open for a handful of imaginary coins.
But more importantly, there’s what’s called a “Wishlist feature,” which says, “You will be able to indicate to other players which cards you’d like to trade for.”
Now, that’s pretty damned ambiguous, and it’s possible to read that as saying it’s just a suggestion, other players still able to trade you something else instead. If so, this would be no improvement at all. The best possible reading is that people will be restricted to only trading for the card you’ve marked, which would make the feature workable, but of course open the external markets for business. We’ve contacted TPCi to see if we can get more clarity on this.
Apparently this update is going to take a weirdly long time to add to the game, meaning that trading will be down entirely between July 25 and 30, which even more bizarrely contains the time at which the update is supposed to go live. Pokémon be Pokémon.
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