Collectors looking to find the rarest cards available now in Pokemon TCG Pocket may end up spending more time or money than expected.
Pokemon TCG Pocket debuted exclusively on mobile with over 280 cards that players could pull at launch. Similar to the original TCG, cards come in varying degrees of rarity and depend on the pack players choose to open. These can range from the common one-diamond Oddish or Vulpix all the way up to the three hardest-to-find cards in the game.
Out of the currently available sets of cards, here are the rarest cards featured in Pokemon TCG Pocket.
Which cards are the rarest in Pokemon TCG Pocket?
The rarest cards in Pokemon TCG Pocket are the gold crown Charizard ex, Mewtwo ex, and Pikachu ex.
In any given pack, players have a 0.2% chance of pulling one of the three gold crown cards. Both the Charizard ex and Mewtwo ex are especially powerful. In addition to being aesthetically pleasing, they’re also part of popular meta decks for battling.
Notably, all ex cards for a Pokemon have the same moves, HP, and retreat cost. From a battling perspective, they’re effectively the same cards as their more common counterparts. For instance, a four-diamond Mewtwo ex and a gold-crown Mewtwo ex will both know Psydrive, have 150 HP, and so on.
The main difference comes in the art style and assigned rarity. For players who care solely about battling, gold crowns won’t be a make or break for their strategy. For collectors, however, the exclusivity of the card means everything.
Other kinds of rare cards include immersive art rares and two star full art ex cards. Even one immersive art rare, however, is less rare than all three of the gold crown cards combined.
How to get rare gold crown cards
There’s no trick to getting gold crown cards in Pokemon TCG Pocket, other than getting lucky or saving up pack points for months.
The three gold crown cards can be found in all three of the Genetic Apex packs. As stated above, however, players have 0.2% chance of pulling one of them as either the fourth or fifth card in the opened pack. This means players have about a 1:500 chance of getting one of Pokemon TCG Pocket’s rarest cards.
In comparison, any basic one-diamond card has a 2% chance of appearing as one of the first three cards in a pack. The odds go up if a player pulls a “god pack.” The chances of that happening, however, are even lower than pulling a gold crown card from a regular pack.
Players could also craft a gold crown card if they desire, and have enough time. For each pack opened, the game grants five pack points that could be used to craft any card from the set. A gold crown card costs 2,500 points, which is the equivalent of opening 500 packs. At two free packs a day and a limited number of pack hourglasses, this will take players up to half a year to save up.
Those who really want to up their chances of pulling one of the rarest cards in Pokemon TCG Pocket should look into paying for premium. The subscription costs $9.99 per month and offers an additional pack per day. Even with that, the best players can do right now is cross their fingers and hope for a lucky pull.