It’s 9 a.m. when my morning alarm goes off on New Year’s Eve. I quickly shut it off and then jump into my usual morning routine: doing a round through my most used apps before getting out of bed. But my first instinct isn’t to look at the weather, check my social media notifications, or read the news. Instead, I open up the one app that I know I’m going to spend a chunk of my day complaining about: Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket.
Since its release in October, the free-to-play card collecting game has taken up more and more real estate in my head. What started as a harmless curiosity has since grown into an infuriating obsession. I fiddle with it constantly as if I’m using a digital fidget toy. When I don’t have packs to open, I aimlessly scroll through my card collection. I’m in multiple Discord chats where friends screenshot photos of the same few cards that every player can pull.
All of this for a game that I flat-out dislike.
This isn’t new for me; it’s the latest in a long line of gaming habits that I can never seem to shed. What keeps drawing me to games like Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket even when the serotonin dries up? That answer is a complicated tangle of predatory game design and genuine human connection that’s led me to evaluate what I want from certain games I play.
I’m a sucker after all
When Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket was first announced, I couldn’t really understand the appeal of it. I assumed that the free mobile game would be a straight adaptation of the real-life card game it was based on, but that didn’t seem to be the case. Instead, trailers emphasized one thing above all else: collecting. While it would have a streamlined battle system, the focus was squarely on ripping open booster packs and building a collection of digital cards.
The red flags went up immediately. It sounded like an all-too-easy way to sucker nostalgic players in with early freebies and then entice them into ponying up with microtransactions. I’m not the kind of person who falls into that trap; as far as I can remember, I’ve never spent money in a free-to-play game. I figured it was the kind of game I would just ignore altogether and spend my time playing games I cared about.
And yet, I quickly downloaded it onto my phone come release day. As much as I’d like to convince myself that I’m not an easy mark, my childhood love for Pokémon remains easily exploitable. Still, I went in as a hardened skeptic to protect my wallet. I pulled my cards and marveled at some classic art, but still found myself critical of how the entire app was built to take advantage of impatience. If you don’t spend a dime on it, you can only open two booster packs a day. Hourglasses can be spent to reduce the cooldown, and Wonder Picks allow players to fill in the 12-hour gaps by choosing one card at random from their friends’ daily pulls. It’s just enough gameplay to give players a taste of card collecting fever, but not enough to make a day’s worth of pulls feel satisfying. That’s where microtransactions and monthly subscription fees come in, letting players open more packs per day.
After about three days, I felt like I had seen behind the curtain enough to stop – but I kept logging in. It was like peeking behind the counter at McDonald’s, seeing toppings squirt from tubes, and ordering a second Big Mac. Like a slow morphine drip, I could get enough moments of comfort early on to push back the discomfort. Anytime I opened a pack and collected a card I didn’t have, a small smile came across my face. When I got my first portal card, one of the rarest available in the game, I nearly jumped for joy in a bodega. All of that was enough to placate me, allowing me to convince myself that I was having a great time.
My relationship with the game went downhill fast — and that almost seems to be by design. The more cards I collected, the more infrequent those daily moments of elation became. The app is at its most enjoyable when it surprises players with undiscovered cards, but it turns on a dime when it becomes about chasing a few elusive cards needed to complete a collection. By December, I was firmly locked in that grueling grind. I’d grown bored of pulling the same cards and participating in repetitive events, so I figured I’d stop … as soon as I completed the Kanto Pokédex to finish off a secret mission. All I’d need to do is acquire a Hypno and Muk. Easy, right?
It turns out I was one of those suckers after all.
Weeks went by with no luck. I’d wake up in the morning praying the randomness would be in my favor, only to unpack my 20th Helioptile. I’d impatiently log in multiple times over the next 12 hours to refresh my Wonder picks and hope that the two monsters I needed were winnable in someone’s slot machine. No dice. The most I could hope for was that I’d acquire enough pack points to eventually buy the cards I needed with in-game currency, but that would require me to keep logging in to accrue 10 points a day on the road to 300.
Momentary relief came when the app added a new booster pack, Mythical Island, but I was back to the Kanto grind in two weeks once that also stopped feeding me new cards. I tried to alleviate that a bit more by dipping into the app’s competitive mode, but that experience quickly became frustrating. I kept facing off against the same few overpowered decks, ones full of multiple copies of ultra rare cards — likely from people who were putting money in to keep up with a very inflexible early meta. The only way I was going to feel like I hadn’t wasted my time was by completing my goal.
This is the vulnerable state that games like Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket need players to be in. The more my impatience grew, the more likely I’d be to spend in some way. Why not sign up for the Premium Pass and get an extra pack a day? That would both give me more chances and more pack points. If not that, why not buy some Pokégold with real money to reduce my pack opening cooldowns faster? Perhaps if the two cards I wanted eluded me long enough, I’d become desperate enough to spend. And if that happened to work, maybe I’d be more open to spending down the line, too. And if I declined to spend? That just meant I’d have to keep engaging with it longer if I wanted to complete my goal.
What was once gentle fun soon became a habit. It turns out I was one of those suckers after all.
Gathering around the watercooler
The more time passed, the more I was left wondering what drew me to this kind of game. As much as I’d like to say that I’m impervious to free-to-play tricks, that’s not true — this isn’t even the first Pokémon game to hold me captive. When Pokémon Go launched in 2016, I was quick to download the app and just as quick to find it terribly boring. The first week or two was a blast as I captured new critters, but it turned into a grind once my collection filled up. Still, I played for months with my eyes glazed over.
Even one year before Trading Card Game Pocket, I fell into the same sinkhole with Pokémon Sleep. My relationship with the gamified sleep app was the same as what I’m feeling today. The early months provided steady serotonin as I kept getting new stuff and then eventually gave way to a monotony I was too deeply invested in to walk away from cold. In a cruel twist of fate, I finally broke that habit the same week that I picked up Trading Card Game Pocket. The void needed to be filled.
It’s easy to say “just stop playing if you don’t like it,” but it’s more complicated than that. Any successful live service game needs to have its player retention strategy down to a science, and any free-to-play game needs to create the perfect bait to catch whales. It’s a devilish design philosophy that has transformed my mother, a woman who does not play games, into a Candy Crush Saga obsessive for the past decade. Every booster pack in Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket is a slot machine filled with colorful rewards.
But it would be too simple to blame my habit solely on predatory design. As much as the app infuriates me, there are other aspects I’m drawn to that don’t feel like negatives. For one, I’ve come to accept that I appreciate games that have clear routines. Starting my day by looking at cute Celebi art rather than doomscrolling social media feels like a positive trade-off. My 9 p.m. second pull has become an efficient way to mark time at night, making sure that my free hours don’t slip under my nose. Pokémon Sleep had a similar impact on my schedule, as players can feed their Snorlax three meals a day. Whenever I’d log in midday to feed my pal lunch, it was a gentle reminder for me to take a break and eat.
I’m more wary of games like Destiny 2, an MMO that had me hooked for years in a much more intrusive way. While I enjoyed having a game I could fold into my daily routine, its constant updates and long activities could take up hours of my evening. I only poke around in Trading Card Game Pocket for a minute or two per session, just a small bit of downtime that feels like the kind of light break I so rarely allow my brain to take during a day.
More than that, though, my commitment to apps like this are social ones. Since its launch, it’s been a way to connect with friends from multiple eras of my life who are all playing it. It’s united me with the people I used to play Pokémon with in high school as we’ve all gotten to relive our glory days and show off our daily catches. My favorite memory from attending this year’s Game Awards came when a friend and I both pulled out our phone during a dull stretch of the ceremony to do our nightly pulls. Seeing my pal nab a full art Articuno EX was more exciting than a good chunk of the trailers that night.
The more things change, the more the bonds with my close friends stay the same.
The truth is that I miss gaming socially. When I was young, the Nintendo GameCube was a great uniter in my friend group. Countless gatherings began with Super Smash Bros. Melee tournaments or F-Zero GX races. With local split-screen largely being a thing of the past and myself being too busy to regularly play online games with friends, I’ve had to fill the void with asynchronous gaming experiences that still connect me to my buds. There’s plenty to criticize in Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket, but this is the one area where it excels. It captures a rare kind of schoolyard sharing that’s so hard to find as an adult. Showing friends my cards, seeing theirs, and even complaining about it all brings a bit of light to my day, even when the game we’re talking about doesn’t.
As I sat down to write these thoughts out, I vocalized a lot of this to a Discord full of high school friends. I questioned why I still felt compelled to collect and wondered if it all just came down to effectively sinister game design. A longtime friend pointed out that this was how I was when we played Pokémon together as kids too. We’d hang out on long nights, each playing our own games on separate Game Boy Advances. He’d EV train his monsters for battling, while I’d put my attention on completing my Pokédex. Now, here we were decades later, him focused on PVP in another game while I was still trying to catch them all. And in both instances, the game itself was just an excuse to come together and talk over a shared interest. There is comfort in knowing that the more things change, the more the bonds with my close friends stay the same.
Sometimes a game is a fulfilling experience. Sometimes it’s just a conversation starter. Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket is a lousy game, but it’s a great excuse to reconnect around the watercooler.
