Pokémon TCG Pocket Beginner's Guide: Your First Week Done Right

New accounts get exactly the same pack economy as everyone else: 2 free packs a day, each one on its own 12-hour cooldown, and each pack deals 5 cards. The first three cards in any pack are always a Common — the actual pull only happens on card 4 and card 5, the two slots where a Double Rare, Art Rare, Super Rare, Immersive, or Crown Rare can land. There's a separate, much rarer outcome called a Rare Pack (nicknamed the God Pack), where all five cards are ★ or higher — but it shows up on only 0.05% of pack opens, roughly 1 in 2,000. That's not something to plan your first week around.

Your actual job in week one is simpler: open every pack the second its timer hits zero, don't let a finished pack sit unopened, and don't sweat a run of Commons and Uncommons. Every single pack you open — hit or miss — pays you back in a currency that never depends on luck.

Every pack you open, regardless of what comes out of it, banks 5 Pack Points toward the specific set that pack belongs to. Pack Points are a straight-up currency you can spend to redeem a card of your choice from that set once you've saved enough — no luck involved. A Common costs 35, an Uncommon 70, a Rare 150, and a Double Rare 500. That means 500 points, or exactly 100 packs from the set you're farming, guarantees you a specific Double Rare card even if you never pull one naturally. Treat that number as your ceiling, not your target — plenty of players get there earlier from normal pulls, but 100 packs is the worst-case number you can actually plan around.

Because Pack Points are tracked separately per set, don't split your early opening across three different sets hoping to get lucky in all of them — you'll be starting three separate savings accounts from zero instead of filling one.

Every deck in Pokémon TCG Pocket follows the same three hard rules: exactly 20 cards, a maximum of 2 copies of any single named card, and zero Energy cards — instead, an Energy Zone generates one Energy automatically every turn, and you just pick 1 to 3 Energy types for your deck to draw from. Matches are won at 3 points: knocking out a regular Pokémon scores 1 point, knocking out a Pokémon ex scores 2, so a single ex knockout is nearly two-thirds of the way to a win on its own.

For your very first build, stick to a single Energy type so the Zone never hands you power you can't use, and lean on whatever Basic Pokémon and ex cards you've actually pulled rather than chasing a specific archetype you've seen online. You only have 3 bench slots and no way to search your deck for a missing card, so a deck full of cards you don't own on paper is worse than a rough deck built from what's really in your collection.

Wonder Pick — picking 1 of the cards shown from a pack someone else just opened — costs Wonder Stamina, which caps at 5 and refills slowly. It's a tool for sniping a specific card you've already identified, not a free-for-all way to open extra packs, so there's no rush to spend it blind in your first days. Trading works only between confirmed in-game friends and needs matching rarities plus Shinedust, which you won't have built up yet from duplicates — it's a late-game cleanup tool, not a week-one fix. And don't burn any Hourglasses you're handed from early missions just to see a pack open a few hours sooner; save them for when a specific set's Pack Point count is close enough that a handful of extra packs actually closes the gap.

Here's what your first 500 Pack Points actually redeem, since this is the number worth planning your first week's opening around: