Pokémon TCG Pocket’s new expansion is the game’s biggest misstep yet

Pokémon TCG Pocket got a brand-new booster pack today, as usually happens at the end of each month. Normally, this would be a time of celebration for fans of the game – a new pack brings new cards to collect, a new card dex to fill out, and more – but with the Deluxe Pack ex, players have very little reason to celebrate. 

The Deluxe Pack ex booster expansion is a bit different from prior packs. Instead of hosting a couple hundred new cards, it’s almost exclusively made up of cards from the last year of expansions. There are a few new full art cards, and some alternate foil variants of cards from past sets, but nothing here will have an impact on the meta, because no new cards in the pack are mechanically different from their prior appearances. 

The Pokémon Company described the Deluxe Pack ex booster as “another opportunity to collect past Pokémon ex cards,” and to that end, each pack is guaranteed to have a card at Pokémon ex rarity or above. The packs are smaller because of this – four cards instead of five – but having guaranteed Pokémon ex rarity would more than make up for that. 

It would, if this was actually “another opportunity to collect past Pokémon ex cards” like The Pokémon Company says. That’s not the case, though, because despite being identical in every way, and both the new set and prior sets being listed on the cards you pull, cards pulled from Deluxe Pack ex do not contribute towards the completion of prior card dexes. If you pull an Incineroar ex in Deluxe Pack ex, it will be filled out on the Deluxe Pack ex card dex, but not in the Celestial Guardians card dex, where the card originated. 

What’s weird about this situation is that these new cards do count towards other aspects of the game. If you pull an Incineroar ex card from the Deluxe Pack ex booster, it will count towards the completion of the loaner deck and theme deck, as well as all of the relevant themed expansions. The same is true of cards collected prior — players logging into the game today will find that most of the challenges and themed collections tied to the new expansion will be completed already. It’s just the card dexes that are seemingly not intertwined.

It’s hard to overstate just how frustrating this is for players. Collecting cards and filling out card dexes is the main point of Pokémon TCG Pocket — sure, cards pulled from the new set will have identical utility in card battles, but collecting is still the primary focus of the game. And when you have just a few cards left to complete a card dex, finding that card is a nightmare. Pokémon ex cards in particular can be a struggle, because they’re rarer for the most part and cost 500 pack points to craft, which would require opening at least 100 packs to craft a single card. 

Deluxe Pack ex is also massive, with almost 400 cards in its card dex. Again, most of these are prior cards, but the pack’s card dex is entirely separate from the prior card pool and prior cards don’t count towards it, so if you want to complete the card dex, you’ll need to pull almost 400 unique cards from the pack. 

That would be difficult enough on its own – the monthly release cadence of new expansions means you’d quickly be moving onto the next pack – but it’s compounded by yet another major frustration: the Deluxe Pack ex expansion is only here for one month. When October 29 rolls around, the pack will disappear, and you won’t be able to pull cards from the pack after that date. The Pokémon Company has said that it will return in the future, but for a large swathe of players, that means having an incomplete card dex for a considerable amount of time with no way to complete it in the meantime. 

It’s also mathematically impossible for a free-to-play player to complete the set before it disappears. A standard, non-paying player is able to open two packs a day, and given there are 4 cards in this pack, over a 30 day period they could collect 240 cards, far short of the 379 cards in the pack. A player could boost those odds with pack hourglasses, improving the situation somewhat, but even if they spent enough hourglasses to get 379 cards, the chances that every single one of those cards would be unique are so small as to be effectively impossible. 

To make matters worse, cards in your inventory know what set they came from. If you own only one Incineroar ex, and it was obtained in the Deluxe Pack ex, you cannot currently trade it, as you can’t trade cards from the current set. This poses a concern for the future of trading, too — what if you need one last Pokémon ex card from Extradimensional Crisis to finish your card dex, so you mark it on your wishlist and trade for it? There’s a 50/50 chance that the card you receive is the Deluxe Pack variant of the card rather than the one you actually need, and there’s no way to filter that out.

Cards also show up as “owned” in Wonder Pick once you’ve received them from the Deluxe Pack ex set, even if the pack you’re picking from is the original set, making it harder to track which cards you do and do not own. The whole thing is a giant mess, and the issues it presents are only going to compound in the future.

At this stage, it’s hard to know exactly why this card dex situation is the way it is. It’s possible that this is just a bug, and that a future update to the game will rectify the situation and fill out both card dexes. Or it could be the biggest cash grab to date, preying on FOMO and the collection-focused community the game has built up over the last 12 months. No matter the cause, though, it’s clear that this is by far the biggest misstep the game has made to date, and risks souring a large, engaged, and previously very happy player base.