The builders of Pokémon TCG Pocket have lastly provided particular particulars on main enhancements coming to the sport’s much-loathed buying and selling perform, which has been an absolute mess since launch. And the enhancements sound genuinely nice, however it should take endlessly for them to be applied.
In a post to the Pokémon community forums, the builders defined the upcoming adjustments. We’re itemizing them right here as written:
The largest change right here is that TCG Pocket will take away the foreign money that is at the moment getting used for buying and selling: Trade Tokens. Trade Tokens have been added to the sport particularly for use with buying and selling, and admittedly, they suck. They’re completely vital with a purpose to commerce in any respect, however the one option to get them is by successfully vaporizing playing cards you already personal.
We defined it in additional element right here, however the tl;dr is that as issues at the moment stand, if you wish to commerce one ex Pokémon for a pal’s ex Pokémon, that you must throw 5 different ex playing cards within the bin first to get sufficient commerce tokens to commerce the one you need. And your pal has to do the identical. While there have been just a few different methods to get bonus commerce tokens since then, the system total has remained extraordinarily discouraging for anybody who truly needs to make use of it.
The new system, on paper, is significantly better. Shinedust is a foreign money that already exists in recreation and is at the moment used to buy “flairs” for playing cards — little animations to make them sparkle in particular methods while you use them in matches. You acquire shinedust mechanically everytime you get duplicates of playing cards you have already got, and extra shinedust is on the market from occasions and different strategies. Unless you are massive on flairs, you in all probability have a whole lot of it simply sitting round already, and the TCG Pocket devs say they’re trying into methods to provide you much more to make sure trades can occur.
And for what it is value, it’s important for TCG Pocket to impose some price to buying and selling. Otherwise gamers might recreation the system by making tons of recent accounts, opening the quite a few packs handed out to gamers early within the recreation, and simply commerce all their new rares to their most important accounts. Then rinse and repeat. Imposing a value ensures that individuals are buying and selling thoughtfully — the commerce token system was simply approach, approach too costly on your common participant to ever trouble.
There’s yet another massive change listed right here that can make a large distinction: the characteristic that can permit gamers to share playing cards they’re fascinated about buying and selling. As issues at the moment stand, you’ll be able to put a card up for commerce, however there is not any option to inform anybody what playing cards you may want for it except you name up your folks outdoors of the sport and inform them. Everyone else simply has to guess. As a consequence, most gamers aren’t even bothering to try to commerce with strangers. But if we are able to supply some clue as to what a suitable commerce can be, gamers could make affordable provides and truly use the system.
All in all, the community seems pretty happy with these changes, and early responses are optimistic. There is one huge downside, which is that gamers have already thrown away tons of uncommon playing cards simply to gather the present buying and selling foreign money, and there is actually no option to get that again. Even although current commerce tokens shall be changing to shinedust, the playing cards are nonetheless gone.
And there’s one different situation: we will have to attend months earlier than any of this takes impact. The weblog put up suggests these adjustments will not be applied till fall of this 12 months. In the meantime, it is probably that buying and selling will grind to a complete halt, for the reason that present system is horrible and nobody goes to need to nuke their uncommon playing cards to do it if a greater resolution is on the best way. We’re more likely to undergo a number of extra expansions earlier than the “buying and selling” in “Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket” actually takes off.
Save that shinedust, I assume!
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can discover her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a narrative tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
