Pokémon TCG Pocket has officially been out for one full year, which means I have spent every single day of the last 12 months playing a game I don’t like. I could not tell you why I keep logging in twice a day like it’s my job. Maybe it’s because my first few months with it were tied to so many pleasant social encounters, as every Discord server I was in inevitably got a Pokémon channel where we shared our pulls. Things have changed the more my friends have peeled off of it, leaving me playing a soul-crushing collect-a-thon where the luck of the draw is rarely in my favor. It’s a nasty habit, but there’s finally a glimmer of good in it.
For the game’s one-year anniversary update, Pokémon TCG Pocket has finally done something to legitimately win me over. No, it’s not the addition of Mega Evolutions via a set of new Mega Rising booster packs. (I pulled more than 500 cards just to get my first Mega, only to be stomped in online battles by Mega Gyarados and its special ability that forces you to discard cards from your draw pile. Give me a break, man!) It’s the introduction of sharing, a feature that is bringing my social circles back to the game.
Unlike the initially convoluted nature of its trading system, sharing is mercifully simple in Pokémon TCG Pocket. When you open the Social Hub tab, you’ll now see a new button: Share. From there, you can choose a friend and see all the one- to four-diamond rarity cards that you have and they don’t. You can then send them that card without spending any resources or using up a tick of regenerating energy. The only minor catch is that you can only share with each friend once per day, and there’s a limit on how many shares a person can receive in a day. It wouldn’t be a TCG Pocket feature without some kind of arbitrary restriction, would it?
Even with the caveat, sharing is already bringing some long-needed brightness to my play sessions. Previously, the game’s euphoric draw was solely tied to pulling cards. (What, you expect me to engage with the infuriating battles in this game, in which I always seem to flip tails?) Getting a new one, especially something rare like a shiny or full art card, was a reliable serotonin hit. That’s probably why I’ve kept logging in every day against my better judgment. That has only become a shallower thrill the more the months have marched on, making the irritating random chance of it all stick out more.
Now there’s a new kind of joy to logging in. On the first day the update went live, I logged in and checked my notifications. A friend had sent me a Talonflame card on a whim. What he didn’t know was that I had spent months chasing that very card. It’s not rare, but the game’s RNG had been mocking me. I never got it in a pull, and I’d failed to get it in at least 20 wonder picks. Now it was just gifted to me without me initiating a trade or asking for it at all.
I immediately felt compelled to pay that kindness forward. I’m so much of a sharing fiend already that they should give me a condo on Sesame Street. I’m out here sending my friends as many spare ex cards as I can. It has completely changed my outlook on the game already. When I get a semi-rare card I already have in a pull, I’m now happy instead of aggravated. Repeats can now be recycled into an act of kindness.
I’m not ready to fully change my tune on TCG Pocket. The addition of yet another rare card type only makes pulls more obsessive and the competitive meta more frustrating. It’s still a game where it feels like you can never catch a break. No matter how good your cards are or how sound your deckbuilding strategy is, there’s always someone out there who will hard counter every single move you make — if the luck of the coin flip doesn’t get you first. Wonder picks are still a torture device. And I still don’t have a basic Misty card, which feels statistically impossible at this rate. But sharing finally adds a good currency to a game full of bad ones: karma. Maybe I’ll finally get that Misty just by being a good friend.