Pokemon Pocket is the newest mobile Pokemon game. I've been enjoying it. It's fun to collect cards—yes, even though they are just pixels on a screen and entries in a database—and the quick battles fit well into my life. As I was looking through which cards I still needed to complete the initial Genetic Apex expansion, I got thinking, how much would it cost to just buy a missing card?
In the physical Pokemon TCG, you can get cards by opening booster packs or buying singles from sellers online. Opening packs is fun, but buying singles is typically far more economical.
A near-mint Charizard EX from the Obsidian Flames expansion is currently going for about $3 on TCGplayer. The Genetic Apex expansion in Pocket also has a Charizard EX. How much for that?
In Pocket, you can get cards by opening packs or spending Pack Points to buy a card. The problem is, you can't just buy Pack Points. You only get them through opening packs. Every pack you open gives you 5 Pack Points. As a shortcut, you can buy Poke Gold to open packs. Poke Gold to open packs to get Pack Points to buy a card. Complicated enough?
The Charizard EX costs 500 Pack Points. That's 100 packs. With the 2 free packs a day, it will take 50 days to save all that up. Don't want to wait? You can buy Poke Gold and use 6 Poke Gold to open a pack. The most cost-effective bundle of Poke Gold is $99.99 for 690 Poke Gold, which is enough to open 115 packs. 87 cents per pack. So that 500 Pack Point card in dollars? $87.00. A common card is about $6! The rarest cards that are 2,500 Pack Points will be about $435, or over 200 days of opening free packs.
Those are some expensive pixels. You gotta be careful. But maybe you'll just pull the card as you're ripping those digital packs to get those Pack Points!
I'm trying out the premium pass. It gives you an extra pack a day and some other missions. The extra pack a day comes out to be about 33 cents a pack, by far the best deal. Other than that, I'm not planning on putting any other real money into it. I'll stick to buying expensive paper cards instead.