Pokémon TCG Pocket Confirms Changes to Much-Loathed Trading System Are Coming... Eventually

The developers of Pokémon TCG Pocket have finally offered specific details on major improvements coming to the game's much-loathed trading function, which has been an absolute mess since launch. And the improvements sound genuinely great, but it's going to take forever for them to be implemented.

In a post to the Pokémon community forums, the developers explained the upcoming changes. We're listing them here as written:

The biggest change here is that TCG Pocket will remove the currency that's currently being used for trading: Trade Tokens. Trade Tokens were added to the game specifically to be used with trading, and frankly, they suck. They're absolutely necessary in order to trade at all, but the only way to get them is by effectively vaporizing cards you already own.

We explained it in more detail here, but the tl;dr is that as things currently stand, if you want to trade one ex Pokémon for a friend's ex Pokémon, you need to throw five other ex cards in the bin first to get enough trade tokens to trade the one you want. And your friend has to do the same. While there have been a few other ways to get bonus trade tokens since then, the system overall has remained extremely discouraging for anyone who actually wants to use it.

The new system, on paper, is much better. Shinedust is a currency that already exists in game and is currently used to purchase "flairs" for cards — little animations to make them sparkle in specific ways when you use them in matches. You collect shinedust automatically whenever you get duplicates of cards you already have, and more shinedust is available from events and other methods. Unless you're big on flairs, you probably have a lot of it just sitting around already, and the TCG Pocket devs say they're looking into ways to give you even more to ensure trades can happen.

And for what it's worth, it is important for TCG Pocket to impose some cost to trading. Otherwise players could game the system by making tons of new accounts, opening the numerous packs handed out to players early in the game, and just trade all their new rares to their main accounts. Then rinse and repeat. Imposing a cost ensures that people are trading thoughtfully — the trade token system was just way, way too expensive for your average player to ever bother.

There's one more big change listed here that will make a massive difference: the feature that will allow players to share cards they're interested in trading. As things currently stand, you can put a card up for trade, but there's no way to tell anyone what cards you might want for it unless you call up your friends outside of the game and tell them. Everyone else just has to guess. As a result, most players aren't even bothering to try and trade with strangers. But if we can offer some clue as to what an acceptable trade would be, players can make reasonable offers and actually use the system.

All in all, the community seems pretty happy with these changes, and early responses are positive. There is one massive drawback, which is that players have already thrown away tons of rare cards just to collect the existing trading currency, and there's really no way to get that back. Even though existing trade tokens will be converting to shinedust, the cards are still gone.

And there's one other issue: we're going to have to wait months before any of this takes effect. The blog post suggests these changes won't be implemented until fall of this year. In the meantime, it's likely that trading will grind to a total halt, since the current system is terrible and no one is going to want to nuke their rare cards to do it if a better solution is on the way. We're likely to go through several more expansions before the "trading" in "Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket" really takes off.

Save that shinedust, I guess!

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.