Pokemon Trading Card Pocket has barely been out a week, but players are already looking for anything to give them the edge they need to find the mobile game’s rarest cards, no matter how unlikely. The latest Pokemon TCG Pocket rumblings are from a very-likely made up conspiracy theory, and that still hasn’t deterred players from trying to use it to get results.
Part of the game mimics the experience of opening a booster pack of trading cards by giving players the chance to choose which one they want to open as part of their daily allotment. The theory holds that there’s a greater chance of getting the hard-to-find cards by looking for the trading card packages with wrinkles, bent corners, or any imperfections when examining them prior to opening. Kotaku notes that the theory seems to have originated with Japanese X user Jedis_tm, and taken off from there.
The game’s subreddit is filled with players who at the very least tried to put the theory into action. Some players say that it didn’t improve their odds, while others claim otherwise. Regardless, the practice of closely checking each pack for imperfections seems to have caught on, even though there’s no proof that any of the rare-item odds changed because of the in-game package.
In a way, it speaks to the ongoing popularity of the Pokemon franchise that such theory could take hold among the fanbase so quickly. All’s fair in love and Pokemon. As big as Pokemon TCG Pocket is on mobile, the franchise is even bigger on Switch with 99 million copies of Pokemon games sold to date. The next console game, Pokemon Legends Z-A, will be released on Switch next year.