We’ve already very carefully been over the grimly insidious nature of Pokémon TCG Pocket’s unpleasant free-to-play model, but an aspect of this peculiar and enormously successful mobile spin-off from the long-established card game is just how many in-game currencies it has you juggle. So far, there are twelve, and it’s absolutely bewildering.
Free-to-play games having multiple currencies is, again, nothing new, and it’s all by design, all a part of the psychological systems to have you desperate to top things up, keep things ticking, and if you can just get three more of these, then a whole other thing unlocks! And, again, the big issue here is that this is Pokémon doing it to an audience with a huge proportion of children, and indeed delivering it in the most byzantine way imaginable.
To discover just how bonkers this all is, on the game’s main page, there’s a button on the bottom-right with three lines. Tap that, and there’s an option below “Shop” called “Items.” Click on this innocuous little word, and the lunacy is revealed.
Let’s lay it all out:
- Poké gold (non-paid)
- Poké gold (paid)
- Shinedust
- Shop ticket
- Special shop ticket
- Premium ticket
- Pack Hourglass
- Wonder Hourglass
- Event Hourglass
- Advance Ticket
- Event Shop Ticket (Meowth)
- Emblem Ticket (Genetic Apex)
- Rewind Watch
Now, we’re being generous here, including the two types of gold as one to get to that total of 12. And if your list doesn’t have that many, that’s because you currently don’t own any of them. It’s a list that just keeps expanding, and given the specificity of the Event Shop Ticket and Emblem Ticket, we must assume that there are other types of these to come.
You might expect me here to go through explaining what each type does, but you know what? Not even The Pokémon Company seems willing to share that. That Advance Ticket’s entry reads, “This ticket cannot be used yet. Wait and see what it’s for!”
Um, no? Just tell me? It’s already annoying enough as it is.
Most of these currencies are used to buy items from specific pages of the game’s shop, which itself is laid out as if it got caught in one of those Doctor Strange spells where all the buildings and train tracks start spinning and weaving inside one another. To spend the Event Shop Ticket (Meowth), you need to go to the “Limited Time / Events” section of the shop, and then to the Event page within that, as distinct from the Premium page, Poké gold page, and the mysterious and always-empty “Other.” There’s another Other in the “Main” section of the shop, which is also empty! Is it empty of the same things? No one knows!
Special Shop Tickets are gained when you sacrifice multiple versions of full-art or better cards, which the game never explains at any point, and require you to have somehow gathered three or more of the same incredibly rare art. We’re talking about cards with a 0.3 percent (or worse, getting as low as 0.013 percent) chance of coming out of a pack here. You get one of those per card (I know, because infuriatingly I’ve somehow pulled three of the gorgeous Snorlax full-art card), and the cheapest item in this shop costs seven Special Shop Tickets. That’s for the presentation backgrounds, rather than the fancy black-and-silver sleeves, playmat or coin you might want—they cost 12 tickets each!
Oh wait! Hang on! It is thirteen currencies, because I completely forgot to include Pack Points! Yeah, there’s yet another system that it doesn’t even bother to remember when listing what you own. These are the points you can use to exchange for cards you might want in your deck, gained by opening packs, and only appearing—not when you’re building packs or on any of the card screens—but when you’re on the page to select a new sealed pack to open…
WHO LET ANY OF THIS HAPPEN?!
I have to stop writing now, in case I discover a fourteenth currency I’d not seen before now and have an aneurysm.
And why is it like this? To deliberately confuse you. To make sure you’re never certain which currency is one you should be holding onto and which is one that has no other purpose than to be spent there and then. And to constantly dangle numbers in front of you that could get higher if only you bought just a teensy bit of gold. Some directly, like hourglasses, where shortages can be made up by subbing in gold you own; others indirectly by only arriving if you buy the (abysmal) Premium Pass, or won by continuing playing that Event where you just ran out of hourglasses…
Next time, the eight different pages of Missions!
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