The Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket subreddit is full of leaks right now, and while everyone seems pretty happy about the new cards, everyone is furious at the new trading system.
Cards for the Pokemon TCG Pocket Space-Time Smackdown set have been leaked, as has details of the trading system. You’d think trading would be as simple as it is in the games or real life. You have a card someone else wants, they have a card you want, you trade. No. Firstly, trading costs trade stamina. This is fairly standard gacha game fare. It regenerates over time or you can buy items to speed it up.
What’s got everyone riled up is the trade token system. You can only trade cards of the same rarity, and if you want to trade higher-rarity cards, you need trade tokens. These can be obtained by scrapping cards you have multiples of. The issue is the exchange rate. If you want to trade a 3 Diamond rarity card, you’d need to turn five other 3 Diamond rarity cards into trade tokens.
You need 500 tokens to trade an Ex card, and each Ex you destroy is only worth 125 trade tokens, so you need to get rid of four just to trade one.
One Redditor summed up the new system perfectly. “Are you a Whale? Yes. You don’t need any card with the tradeable rarities. No. You don’t have the resources to make trading viable. They somehow made it suck for everybody.”
One player who describes themselves as a whale says they won’t be spending any more cash on the game. “The main issue here is that it simply doesn’t work. It fits such a narrow scenario of someone who is missing card X but happens to have a bunch of dupes to burn. So insanely narrow. They should probably remove ‘Trading Card Game’ from the title screen. It’s just insulting to look at.”
Rather than being a viable way to build up your collection, trading only seems useful for people who are looking for one specific card to complete their best decks and have already opened plenty of packs searching for it, so it’s clear you’re meant to have spent a lot of money on this game or played it for ages.
At least people seem to like the leaked Ex Pokemon. “The immersive Palkia is incredible,” writes one player. My favorite is one Darkrai variant that’s just the dream-eater straight-up giving a sleeping kid nightmares. It’s so evil, I love it.
Will these pretty cards be enough to make you put up with the terrible new trading system? Remember, if you want that Darkrai, you have to destroy four of your own Ex cards and then trade another. Hopefully some of the upcoming events give a lot of free trading tokens.
If this has put you off Pokemon, check out some of the best card games you can play instead.
