Pokemon TCG Pocket Probably Needs To Rethink The Wonder Pick

I play a lot of sealed events at my local game store. The setup, if you don’t know, is that everyone gets six packs, you open all of them, and then use whatever you get to try to build a deck that doesn’t suck. As soon as the packs are handed out, I always offer to trade mine with my opponent. It’s a joke because, no matter who they are, they always say no. No one has ever taken me up on the offer, and it’s easy to understand why.

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As bad as it feels to open a pack and find a bunch of junk inside, it would feel infinitely worse to choose the wrong packs and know you chose wrong. My six packs are just as likely to have hits as your six packs, but no one ever wants to do the trade because they can’t stand the idea of making the wrong choice.

Wonder Pick Is Made To Make You Feel Bad

Pokemon TCG Pocket’s Wonder Pick is a system entirely built around forcing you to make a bad choice. Wonder Pick is designed to be a cute reference to the old Wonder Trade system from the video games, a chance to target a specific card you’re after, and a fun little social feature you can share with your friends. And while it is all of those things in theory, in practice it’s mostly just another way to be disappointed, and feel like a total failure while you’re at it.

If you haven’t picked up Pocket yet, Wonder Pick is a second-chance system that allows you to browse through packs your friends have opened and then choose a card from it to keep for yourself. It doesn’t take it from your friend, you get your own copy, but you can only Wonder Pick from a particular pack once. When you choose a pack to Wonder Pick from, the cards are flipped over and randomized, and you get to choose one. That means you’ve got a 20 percent chance of picking the card you’re after. Statistically, you’ll get the card you want one out of five times, but the pain of getting the wrong card is so devastating that those odds might as well be one in a million.

I’ve been playing Pocket for a few weeks now (if The Pokemon Company asks, I was visiting friends in New Zealand) and I’ve been laser-focused on getting a couple of copies of Mewtwo ex. I’ve opened 80 Mewtwo packs and I haven’t seen a single one, which is pretty disappointing, but I get that. That’s the whole deal with trading card games and I’m used to opening packs and being disappointed, so it hasn’t bothered me too much. You know what has? Seeing Mewtwo ex show up in a Wonder Pick and still not getting one because I chose wrong.

It feels like the game taunts you for picking incorrectly. As soon as you pick one all the cards flip over, so you know which one you should’ve picked instead. Then, the pack remains on the Wonder Pick menu for awhile, just to torture you. For the rest of the day, every time I scroll through my Wonder Picks, I’m confronted with my failure.

There Are Other Problems With Wonder Pick

The Wonder Pick menu features 19 packs, 15 you can Wonder Pick and 4 that have expired (packs are available to pick for a few hours, so you have to use a different type of currency to pick from expired packs) which means you’re scanning through almost 100 cards whenever you check the shop, often looking for one specific card. That’s a lot of time and mental processing for something that hardly ever pays off, especially because most of the time, the packs being offered are garbage.

I’ve had friends open incredible packs that never showed up in the Wonder Pick shop. I don’t think a pack should appear here unless it has at least a four-diamond in it (the equivalent of a double rare or ultra rare in a regular Pokemon TCG pack). When the chances of getting the card I want are so low anyway, I’d at least like to see good packs somewhat frequently.

Of course, my biggest problem with Wonder Pick is the shame. Once or twice a week I’ll see a Mewtwo ex in a pack, and every time I’ll pick the wrong card. When the cards flip over and I discover that I should have chosen the bottom right card instead of the top middle card, I want to scream. What a fool I was. Top middle? Who picks top middle?? Of course it was bottom right. I deserve this. I deserve to suffer.

When I pick a pack to open off of the carousel, I’m making a choice. If that pack is a dud, I might think darn, I wonder if I would have had better luck by choosing the next pack in line. With Wonder Pick, there is no wondering. When you pick wrong, which you will four out of five times, it shows you your mistake.

It’d be like trading your packs away in a sealed game and watching the guy across the table from you pull out the legendary that should have been yours. It’s unbearable. It’s evil. It probably violates the Geneva Conventions. I don’t hate the idea of Wonder Pick, but it makes me feel so bad that I’d rather not use it at all.

Experience the fun of collecting Pokémon Trading Card Game (TCG) cards with Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket, an upcoming game for iOS and Android devices from Creatures Inc., the original developers of the Pokémon TCG, and DeNA Co., Ltd.

In this game, you will be able to open two booster packs every day at no cost. You can collect digital cards featuring nostalgic artwork from the past as well as brand-new cards that are exclusive to Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket.

Be on the lookout for new “immersive cards,” which will make you feel as though you’ve leapt into the world of the card’s illustration.