The cards you pull in Pokemon TCG Pocket are based on luck. You can spend real-life money to have a better chance of shaping the odds in your favor, but if you don’t want to dump over $100 for every pack, the game provides a lot of freebies, although you must put in the effort for it.
There’s no magic method to get rare cards faster. The pack-bending techniques have all been proven fake, and they’ve patched the god pack friend code exchange method because of abuse.
The real way to get rare cards quicker in the game is to earn every reward the game offers to free-to-play players. This guide covers that aspect so you don’t miss a thing.
Pokemon TCG Pocket has the following:
As mentioned before, this guide covers all the methods of getting free goodies in the game, so you don’t miss any of them. In addition to the list below, you can view regular missions by clicking the bottom-right floating icon on the game’s home screen; this lets you see how far away you are from getting rewards from collecting certain card sets, performing specific actions (eg. trade), etc.
I feel as though I shouldn’t have to mention this, but you should be logging in at least twice every day to see if you get lucky. Each new day lets you open two packs (between 12 hours).
You can get a free Shop Ticket and Pack Hourglass every day by simply logging in, opening the Shop, and claiming the daily gift. It’s recommended to open the Shop each day even if the notification isn’t on the tab (there was a glitch one time that caused players to miss out on their free daily gift)
One of the first things you should do is complete all of the tutorials when you start the game. You get a decent load of freebies, which can be used to do more pack pulls.
When newly added content changes how the game works (eg. Pokemon Tools), you should check back in the Tutorials because there might be a new tutorial to complete and gain more rewards.
Completing all solo missions can be challenging for new players; however, there are a lot of rewards to earn from doing so. Keep collecting new Pokemon cards and build decks to pass the solo mission requirements. New solo pack missions are added with each new pack.
There’s a trick to get a second Premium Pass trial; however, you’ll need both an Android and an iOS device. It works by activating your first premium pass trial on, say, Google Play. Later on, download the game on your iOS device and finish the login procedure. You should be able to activate another premium pass trial from the App Store.
Even after acquiring all of the first-time rewards from the drop events, you can still get a chance to obtain a Shop Ticket by continuing to win battles. These Shop Tickets can be exchanged for Hourglasses each month in the Shop.
There is the occasional Wonder Pick event where you can randomly select good rewards from Bonus Picks (eg. Pack Hourglass or Wonder Hourglass). If you’re bored or have nothing to do during one of these events, open the game and select Wonder Pick. There’s a chance a Bonus Pick will be available every 30 minutes (I’m not certain about the time, but it felt like 30 minutes to me).
You can get 5 free Shop Tickets each day if your friends “like” your Showcase daily. Create a Showcase (it doesn’t have to be anything special) and ask your friends to “like” it every day. You can also “like” their Showcase daily in exchange.
You can also get Shop Tickets by “thanking” players after an online match, but you stop getting them when you hit the max 5 ticket limit, and the limit is shared between “liking” and “thanking”. Instead of wasting energy every day to battle, I recommend exchanging Showcase “likes”.
I made the mistake of wasting my Wonder Pick stamina and Wonder Pick hourglasses when I first started playing Pokemon TCG Pocket. I learned it was better to use them only for full art 2-star Pokemon cards and rely on pack pulls for regular EX Pokemon and sometimes even 1-star full art cards. You save more resources this way instead of going broke fast.
The game sometimes offers players freebies as gifts for special occasions. An example is the recent guarantee rare card from 3 Genetic Apex packs. We have also had login events where simply logging in rewarded players with free items each day.
