Pokémon TCG Pocket’s trading feature requires you to sacrifice a bunch of rare cards before you can even trade, disappointing players 

Trading is now live in Pokémon TCG Pocket. The long-awaited feature allows you to trade cards with your friends, rarity for rarity. However, the way trading has been implemented in the game leaves a lot to be desired – players find the new Trade Token system to be unfair and kind of at odds with the concept of trading itself. 

In order to perform trades with other TGC Pocket players, you need to consume Stamina and a trading currency called Trade Tokens. You can obtain these Trade Tokens through events and by permanently discarding cards that are 3 Diamond (Rare) or higher. This mechanic of sacrificing rare card duplicates, as well as the steep rates at which Trade Tokens are consumed, have caused much disappointment. 

As an example, in order to trade a Rare, you need 120 Trade Tokens, but you can obtain only 25 Tokens for each Rare you discard. Similarly, you need 500 Tokens to trade EX cards, but can only obtain 125 Tokens for every EX you sacrifice. As duplicates of rare cards are normally what you’d use in the trades themselves, this system of exchanging cards for currency and, as a result, being left with few duplicates to actually trade with, has not been met with much approval. As one X user puts it, “I want to trade my extra copies, not turn them into a currency to trade the extra copies that I don’t have anymore because I had to turn them into a currency.” 

Players are hoping that future events will allow them to obtain a more substantial amount of Trade Tokens, as many consider the current system to be almost unusable for beginners and only beneficial to players with massive card collections. 

Pokémon TCG Pocket is available for iOS and Android.