Pokémon TCG Pocket hasn’t even been out for a full week yet, and players have already become obsessed with a conspiracy theory: they believe there’s a way to figure out which booster packs secretly contain better odds of getting some of the game’s rarest cards. That’s because people desperately hunting for an EX Charizard or Misty trainer will take any advantage they can get, even if it’s 100 percent made up.
The free-to-play mobile Pokémon trading card sim revolves around opening booster packs. Every pack contains five cards, with disclosed odds about what’s likely to drop. A slowpoke or Rattata is many times more likely to appear than a Blastoise or Raichu. The special, more powerful EX cards of existing fan-favorites like Pikachu and an Mewtwo, and alt-art cards with larger illustrations, are especially hard to get.
But opening each booster pack is more than just a tap on the screen. Pokémon TCG Pocket will generate a bunch of booster packs at once in a virtual carousel and let you peruse them at your leisure, flipping them back and forth before you decide to pick one and swipe to rip off the top of the wrapper. That’s where a new mass conspiracy about “wrinkled” packs with “bent” corners comes in.
The theory took hold shortly after Pokémon TCG Pocket’s launch on October 30, when viral posts began to claim that opening packs with visual irregularities in their virtual wrappers were giving them outsized numbers of rare and powerful Pokémon cards. Japanese X user Jedis_tm was the first one I saw to begin circulating the idea on October 31, encouraging players to scour their booster pack options for ones with any slight twists, wrinkles, or bent edges in the wrappers when the packs are rotated on their side:
Jedis_tm wasn’t completely convinced of the alleged discovery. “This may not be a guaranteed hit, so consider yourself lucky if you get it,” they wrote in a follow-up tweet, according to the platform’s translation. Even some who have mocked the idea as obviously bunk have been pulled in by the alluring possibility that maybe, just maybe, it does somehow impact the card pulling odds in their favor. “NVM IT’S NOT EVERY TIME,” wrote another user. “Does seem to drastically increase hit rates though??”
Even people on the game’s subreddit aren’t sure what to believe at the moment. “done it twice and got jack shit both times so idk,” wrote one player. “Definitely a better chance. Got 2 exs out of 4 curved packs,” responded another. Others believe the entire carousel doesn’t matter at all and that the cards in a pack are decided the second it’s selected. One player recently claimed to have seen everything their friend was going to pull by checking their Wonder Pick as it was happening.
Anecdotal reports can’t really tell us anything meaningful about statistical probabilities on the whole, but it can activate that little voice in the back of your brain that says, “Well this is obviously completely made up…but what if it isn’t?” I’ve taken to checking every booster pack I open for wrinkles now, and have yet to get any startlingly good pulls that left me convinced it was making a difference. In fact, I’ve personally gotten more EX cards from packs I didn’t check beforehand for bent corners.
And yet I’m still doing it, because that’s what happens when people’s Pokémon fandom encounters the unintuitive black box of statistical mathematics. Even if there’s no truth to the conspiracy whatsoever, it makes the lizard part of my brain feel better while trying to navigate the whole probability-based encounter. It’s the same reason I still hop over cracks in the sidewalk and still held down the B button while trying to catch Gigantamax in Pokémon Sword and Shield.