Let's open some Charizard booster Packs in Pokémon TCG Pocket

Well, I always wanted to collect some Pokémon cards and learn to play with them but that never happened but I can satisfy that urge by collecting digital versions of the cards. Sure, it is not as good as opening some packs with your hands but this new game called Pokémon TCG Pocket gives me quite the feels and excitement of opening packs.

This new game launched just a couple of weeks ago on mobile for iOS and Android. It was free to download on the Google PlayStore. I downloaded it and expected a half-assed job of a game with a lot of paywalls and the game annoying me to bug stuff at every step. But to my surprise, it was a rather good experience. You get a free booster pack every 12 hours to open along with some items, which can also help skip the wait time. Sure, there is a premium subscription which gives you a lot of benefits over completely free-to-play gamers like an extra pack opening every day and earning rewards from premium missions. But for a casual gamer like me who is just looking to collect some cards and get into the TCG side of things, this is quite impressive.

The artwork is amazing and they did very well with UI. There are a lot of pack-opening animations and good music too. One of the rarest cards I have is Marowak ex. I have a few ex cards now. And one of my favourite basic cards is Charmander. I love the artwork on this card. Look @incublus, isn't it cute?

---

There are a lot of missions which you will passively complete while you play the game and collect more cards, build your deck and battle. One of the rewards you will get for completing this random mission is the Pack Hourglass. One hourglass will reduce the pack opening cooldown time by an hour.

I went on to save just over 100 Hourglass in the first couple of days and decided to open 10 Packs at the same time.

I opened the Charizard Packs this time because I wanted the Charmander, Charmeleon and Charizard cards.

---

I recorded a video of these pack openings so you can also see the fluid animations and amazing artwork of these cards. I got a few rare cards too including a Charizard Ex and a Trainer card. (Ignore the audio issues, there was an audio lag when using the screen recorder)

---

Humble beginnings

I am now level 6 and collected 142 cards in a couple of days. You get a lot of extra items at the start so you can get going quickly and not have to wait for days to get a good deck. But many of these 142 cards include duplicate cards. They should add the feature to trade cards between players soon or the ability to burn duplicate cards for some extra items. That would be really cool.

Once you have enough cards you can build your deck and battle. There are tutorials to teach you how to play the game. I have never played it so it was fun learning a few things. You can practice with an AI opponent first before venturing out to fight against real online players. I played a few games in solo mode to learn the game better. Then I played an online game and got thrashed by them. Clearly, I need more practice for now...lol.

---

I am not sure if I will battle actively but I will keep collecting the free booster packs now and then and maybe I will buy a few real packs too.

Who knows, this might be the start of my Pokemon collection journey. I will post if I find a super rare card. That's it for now. Let me know which is your favourite Pokemon and why. Mine is a three-way tie between Pikachu, Charmander and Jigglipuff.