Pokémon TCG Pocket has a staggering 12 different currencies and counting

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We have already discussed the murky, insidious nature in great detail Pocket Pokémon TCGunpleasant free-to-play modelbut an aspect of this peculiar and hugely successful mobile spin-off of the long-acclaimed card game is how many in-game currencies you have to juggle. For now, they are twelveand it is completely astonishing.

Free games having multiple currencies are, again, nothing recent and it’s all by design, part of the psychological systems that make you desperately want to top up your account, keep everything in order and, if you can, Just get three more and then a completely different thing will unlock! Again, the main problem is that this is the case Pokémon doing it in front of an audience of huge numbers of children and actually delivering it in the most byzantine way imaginable.

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To give you an idea of ​​how crazy this all is, on the game’s home page there is a button in the lower right corner with three lines. Click this and under “Store” you will see an option called “Items.” Click on this harmless word and the madness will be revealed.

Let’s put it all together:

  • Poké gold (free)
  • Poké gold (paid)
  • Shiny dust
  • Buy a ticket
  • Special ticket to the store
  • Premium ticket
  • Pack an hourglass
  • Miracle Hourglass
  • Event hourglass
  • Ticket in advance
  • Event Shop Ticket (Meowth)
  • Emblem Ticket (Genetic Top)
  • Rewind your watch

We’re being generous here by including two types of gold as one to make a total of 12. And if you don’t have many of them on your list, it’s because you don’t currently own any of them. This is a constantly growing list, and given the specific nature of Event Store Tickets and Emblem Tickets, we must assume that other types of these tickets will appear in the future.

You might expect me to explain in detail what each type does, but you know what? Even The Pokémon Company doesn’t want to share it. The entry on this advance ticket reads: “This ticket cannot be used yet. Wait and see what it does!”

NO? Just tell me? This is already annoying enough.

Picture: : Pokémon Company/Kotaku

Most of these currencies are used to purchase items on specific pages of the game’s store, which itself is laid out as if it’s caught in one of those Doctor Strange spells where all the buildings and train tracks start spinning and weaving together. To spend an Event Store Ticket (Meowth), you must go to the “Limited Time/Events” section of the store and then to the Events page there, as opposed to the Premium page, the Gold Poké page, and the mysterious and always empty “Other “. There is another Other in the “Home” section of the store that is also empty! Is it empty of the same things? Nobody knows!

Tickets to the Special Shop are earned by sacrificing multiple versions of full or better cards, which the game never explains and requires you to somehow collect three or more of the same extremely uncommon pieces of art. We’re talking about cards that have a 0.3 percent (or worse, just 0.013 percent) chance of coming out of the deck. You get it one the card ones (I know because I annoyingly pulled out three gorgeous cards with full Snorlax art), and the cheapest item in this store costs seven Tickets to the special shop. This applies to the presentation backdrop, not the fancy black and silver sleeves, play mat or coins you might want – they cost 12 tickets each!

Oh wait! Withstand! This Is thirteen currencies, because I completely forgot to include Pack Points! Yes, there is another system that you don’t even have to remember when listing your possessions. These are points that you can apply to exchange for cards you may have in your deck, earned by opening packs and only appearing – not when building packs or on any of the card screens – but when you are on the page to select a recent sealed pack for opening…

WHO ALLOWED THIS?!

I have to stop writing now, because if I discovered a fourteenth currency that I hadn’t seen before, I would have an aneurysm.

Why is this so? To deliberately mislead you. To make sure you’re never sure which currency you should stick with and which has no other purpose than to spend there and then. And constantly having numbers displayed in front of you that could go up if you just bought a diminutive piece of gold. Some directly, like hourglasses, in which deficiencies can be made up by paying extra with gold you have; others indirectly, only arriving if you buy the (pointless) Premium Pass or win by continuing to play the Event where you just ran out of hourglasses…

Next time eight different sides of the Mission!

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