Good news! You can finally trade cards with friends in Pokémon TCG Pocket. Bad news! It sucks. It feels even more limited and backwards than when it was originally teased, and fans are in full revolt over the long-anticipated feature’s completely bungled rollout.
The update bringing trading to Pokémon TCG Pocket went live earlier today, and if you’re not seeing it yet that means you need to go to your app store of choice and manually force the update. After it installs, you’ll have the option to trade any card that’s a 1-star or below in rarity with whoever is on your friends list. And that’s where things go off the rails. Fans have been losing their minds about it all morning.
To trade you need to have enough enough “trade stamina” which slowly refills over time or can be purchased for real money. You also need to have enough “trade tokens.” These are collected by trashing extra copies of cards you already own, and the results aren’t generous. Cards that are 2-diamond and below can’t be turned into trade tokens at all, and even 1-star cards only get you 100 tokens each.
Meanwhile, it costs 400 trade tokens to trade a single 1-star card with someone else. Both players are effectively trashing four cards, and trading a fifth, just to get one in return. It’s nuts, and yet somehow that’s not even the worst part. When you make someone on your friends list a trade offer, you pick which card to give away but you have no way of telling them what you want in return. The entire thing is ass-backwards.
The only way to really trade for any cards missing from you collection is to coordinate over DMs in another app or meet up IRL. It’s a weird set of hoops to jump through for very little payoff. You can’t trade for the rarest cards in the game, and new players won’t have nearly enough good cards to get the trade tokens they need to make a worthwhile swap. And even if they do, they’ll have to start DMing with a total rando or find that one friend who also plays Pokémon TCG Pocket and happens to have a card they want.
“As a whale, this game isn’t getting another dime from me,” wrote one hardcore player on Reddit. “This trading update is an insult.” Another wrote, “Let’s face it, the game does NOT want you to trade cards.” When the game’s developers previewed trading earlier this month, it already seemed like a flawed system. Creatures, Inc. and DeNA promised players they’d take the feedback in stride and evolve it in the future. But the day-one impressions so far are that trading is even worse than many expected.
“The Trading system is predatory and downright greedy,” reads one of the most upvoted threads on the Pokémon TCG Pocket subreddit. “The token conversion rates are evil.” Will it get any better? There may be hope, at least for the types of things players can trade in the future. “We’re planning to expand the range of cards that can be traded,” reads the fine print near the bottom of trading’s in-game announcement. Maybe the ability to trade rarer cards, including even gold crown cards, is coming in the future after all. For now, Pokémon TCG Pocket’s big trading extravaganza is a bust.
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