There are too many currencies in Pokemon TCG Pocket. There are pack hourglasses, pack points, wonder hourglasses, premium gold, shop tickets, event shop tickets, special shop tickets, premium tickets, and the blue hourglasses to recover event stamina that I’m not even sure have a name. Phew.
This is a common situation with mobile games. The more currencies involved, the more obfuscated your spending is. How much real money does it cost to buy enough pack points to get that ex card you need? Impossible to work out, so just buy a bunch of gold and hope for the best.
But the developers could be adding yet another currency to proceedings: pack hourglasses 2.0. Now we don’t know for certain whether these will be added yet, or what they’ll be called, but rumours are circulating that your current crop of pack hourglasses will only be usable for Genetic Apex and Mythical Island.
Much like how pack points are counted per set, people are wondering if hourglasses will be counted per expansion. Genetic Apex is known as Set 1 and Mythic Apex as Set 1a; they’re part of the same expansion. The next set will be a brand new expansion, Set 2, and that could come with a brand new currency.
What Would New Hourglasses Mean For Pokemon TCG Pocket?
New hourglasses would disproportionately impact free-to-play players. They are the people who will have been saving up hourglasses from Set 1 in order to open as many Set 2 packs as possible on launch day. They will be the ones unable to compete with the next meta deck, whatever ousts Celebi ex from its perch. They will be encouraged to start splashing the cash on Poke gold in order to keep their collections up to date.
For players who regularly buy gold, very little changes. They can spend their remaining Set 1 hourglasses on whichever pack takes their fancy. If I was in their position, I’d splash out on Mewtwo in order to try to get that alt art Gengar ex that has been my chase card since the game released.
Trading can’t come soon enough.
Sure, if we get new hourglasses – and, may I remind you, that’s still a big if – free-to-play players will get to splurge all their savings on old packs, but that just doesn’t feel the same. You won’t get the same hit of serotonin when everybody else is pulling full art Raikou and making Cyndaquil decks if you’re stuck on the same old Psyduck.
How Would New Hourglasses Even Work?
After all this discussion, I’m not entirely sure how new hourglasses would even work. Which hourglasses would we earn on the daily timer? Presumably the new ones. But then how will we earn hourglasses for previous expansions? Will Genetic Apex suddenly be a premium-only set? I fully expect trading to only be available for sets previously released, but for hourglasses to stop entirely would be drastic.
The developer is hardly going to suddenly double the number of packs we can open a day. Some people pay a tenner a month to open a third pack a day, so to do that for free, albeit forcing you to open from two different expansions, seems unlikely. It also seems unlikely that you’d be able to choose which hourglasses you earn.
While everything in Pokemon TCG Pocket is so blatantly money-oriented, I also don’t see a world where previous packs become premium-only just three months after their release. You want a strong community of free-to-play players to support the whales, and this is upheld by giving the people what they want: packs.
If Pokemon TCG Pocket introduces new pack hourglasses for the next expansion, there will be outrage. Despite the fact that the app warns players that various currencies do expire, people have short memories and even shorter tempers. And when you have enough hourglasses for 100 packs of the new expansion, only to find that you can’t use them, you will be outraged. You’ll write an angry tweet, you’ll rage quit the app, you won’t play again for a week. Some may not play again ever.
Pokemon TCG Pocket can avoid this. It can satisfy everyone by keeping things the way they are. We don’t need another currency to try to keep track of, and people will revolt if it adds one. We’re barely three months into the game’s lifespan, don’t rock the boat now.
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