I am a parent of two small children who get next to no screen time on smartphones or tablets. Not out of any moral superiority on my part - the majority of my own existence has been “screen time”. They’re simply not that interested (at least for now). But there is one app that we make an allowance for: Pokémon TCG Pocket.
Today, Pokémon is 30 years old, and my oldest daughter is almost the same age as I was when I first crammed the Pokémon Blue cartridge into my original green Game Boy, unaware of the lifetime fixation that would follow.
About a year after Pokémon Red and Blue made it to Australia, the first (local) set of Pokémon cards was released - and promptly banned at every school for obvious reasons. You had to be there. Fast-forward a few decades, and the Pokémon Trading Card Game scene is bigger than ever, but somehow nothing like those early days.
A couple of years ago, my oldest daughter (not not named after the Pokémon, Eevee) became interested in Pokémon cards. The slight enthusiasm was enough for me. We were so back. But it turned out, we’d gotten in at the worst possible time. People my age and older had begun hoarding and scalping Pokémon cards.
They were no longer just Pokémon cards, they were tokens of the fungible variety. The thing I’d loved as a child had become a commodity for grifters to mark up to astronomical prices on eBay in the hopes that some desperate soul would pay ten times the retail price just to rip open a pack.
Then in 2024, the $100 billion dollar media franchise, The Pokémon Company, released a (new) digital version of the card game on smartphones and tablets, Pokémon TCG Pocket.
Pokémon TCG Pocket offers a streamlined version of the actual Pokémon Trading Card Game, and, more importantly, it lets you open two digital blind packs per day. While you can spend real money on in-game gold to open more (and I have, very occasionally), it’s really not necessary.
My Pokémanic daughter has become obsessed with Pokémon TCG Pocket, and I don’t mind, because it has brought us closer together. We open a pack before bed, and one when we wake up.
Nearly every day, I wake up to her pulling on my sleeve or poking my face, asking, “Pokémon cards?” There are worse ways to start the day. Once we’ve opened the pack, she might spend a little more time perusing our digital collection, but there’s never any desire to continue using the smartphone. It’s almost like, to her, my iPhone is a Pokémon-first device with a convenient secondary feature that allows us to call family and friends.
In addition to opening two booster packs a day, you also get a “Wonder Pick,” a mode where you flip a card at random from a selection of five (adding the random card to your collection). When my daughter first tried Wonder Pick, there was a rare full-art card in the mix, but she wasn’t interested in that.
I gritted my teeth, “Wait! Don’t you want to go for the rare one?” She responded confidently, “No, I want to try and get the cute one”. Of course! How could I have been so stupid?
Playing Pokémon TCG Pocket with my daughter reignited my love for Pokémon, but through her eyes, I see it differently. It’s not about what’s rare and what’s not, especially with digital cards that hold no real value. It’s about collecting the Pokémon you like. Admiring the wonderful artworks on each and every card and letting your imagination fill in the gaps. And sometimes, it's just about getting the cutest cards.
Pokémon turns 30 today, and to celebrate, we have some telco-adjacent takes from the ageing millennials in WhistleOut's editorial team. Keep reading by clicking the links below!
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Brodie Fogg
Managing Editor - Streaming
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