Hourglasses are the hottest commodity in Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket. Gathering 12 pack hourglasses means you can open a pack for free – well, for the low, low cost of your time and effort on the app – so they’re hot property. You can get four a day from completing simple daily tasks like battling, wonder picking, or opening packs. That’s an extra pack every three days.
The other best way to get free packs (other than the two you get just for waiting down the timer each day) is through shop tickets. 18 shop tickets earns you six pack hourglasses – halfway to a pack – and you can redeem these ten times a month. You mostly earn shop tickets from getting ‘thanks’. After a battle or wonder pick, you’re given the option to thank someone for their time. It’s a nice gesture, but they also gain a shop ticket from your kindness. It works the other way, too.
How To Get Shop Tickets In Pokemon TCG Pocket
Wonder picks are impossible to guarantee. Unless your packs are great (which mine definitely aren’t), you can’t force people to spend their wonder hourglasses on picking from your Pokemon, let alone thanking you for your time afterwards. I always think of a wonder pick thanks as a bonus. A pleasant surprise. A treat.
Battling thanks are much easier to acquire. Be polite, don’t run down the clock, stop flexing on your winning move, you’ll invariably get a thanks. Sure, people tend to give thanks more often when they win, but plenty of losers thank you, too. I count myself in that category, unless you got 12 energy from Misty on the first turn.
However, there’s another way to get shop tickets in Pokemon TCG Pocket. A way that few people remember when they’re mindlessly scrolling through their dailies. They forget to like their friends’ showcases.
Don’t Forget Your Friends
Every day, you should be heading to the Community Showcases section of the Social Hub tab and liking all of your friends’ showcases that appear there. You can like the ones in the popular tab too, if you want, but they’ve likely already reached their ticket limit for the day.
This grants each of your friends one free shop ticket. And hopefully, if more people start remembering this function, they’ll return the favour. That’s not why we do kind things, obviously, but who would say no to another shop ticket?
Shoutout to ‘one opponent’, who likes my showcase every day. Anti-shoutout (shoutin?) to all of my IRL friends, none of whom ever like my showcases.
If you’ve got so many friends that they don’t all fit on the social hub page, it refreshes every hour or so. This is going above and beyond, but waiting for it to refresh before liking again is such lovely charity that good karma is bound to flow back your way.
Presumably there’s a limit to the number of shop tickets you can earn from showcase likes, as there is with battling. But I’ve never hit it. I’ve never even come close. Because everyone forgets that this is here. If we only spent a few minutes hitting the thumbs up each day, we would all have more packs to open, more wonder picks to therefore choose from, and more chances of pulling a mythically rare god pack.
What’s more, I think we’d all be happier for it. Not only do we get to see each others’ coolest cards, the best setups combining cool backdrops and thematically appropriate full arts, we get that heartwarming sensation of helping each other out. It’s not the bitter thanks you send after losing to another Celebi, it’s not the eye-roll thanks after you missed your chase card in a wonder pick. It’s celebrating other peoples’ collections, it’s saying, “that’s a cool card,” and it’s helping each other to get more packs without shelling out any extra cash.
Liking showcases is helping each other stay free-to-play. It’s a middle finger to the game’s monetisation. It’s punk. It’s kind. What’s stopping you from joining the revolution?
