Lapras ex was introduced via Pokémon TCG Pocket’s first battle event, and goes hand-in-hand with Articuno ex. Both cards are basic-stage, so you can play them immediately, and both cards have powerful attacks. Articuno ex’s Blizzard attack deals 80 damage to your opponent’s active Pokémon and 10 damage to any cards on their bench, so you can conceivably knock out any weakened Pokémon on your opponent’s back row. Lapras ex’s attack, Bubble Drain, deals 80 damage to your opponent but heals 20 HP to itself.
Both cards are powerful in a vacuum, but to make the most of this deck, you’ll want to use a Misty trainer card. When you play Misty, you flip a coin repeatedly until you get tails. For however many heads you get, you can attach that amount of water energy to one of your Pokémon. If luck is on your side, you can fully power up Lapras ex or Articuno ex in one turn.
Professor Oak lets you draw two cards, capitalizing on the universal card game theory that suggests, the more cards you draw, the better your chances of victory. Red Card is the opposite: It shuffles your opponent’s hand back into their deck, and then they draw three cards. (It’s best deployed to mess with your opponent after they play a Professor Oak or Poké Ball card, both of which add cards to their hand.)
Meanwhile, Sabrina forces your opponent to swap out their active Pokémon — great for getting out of a pinch. Lastly, X Speed reduces your retreat cost by one for the duration of your turn, allowing you to pull a card with low HP back to your bench in a pinch.
Pokémon TCG Pocket is a free-to-play game, but for those who want a little bit more out of the experience – and are willing to pay for it – there are a few options for premium rewards. Players can spend money on gold, which you can use to open more packs earlier, but for $10 a month you can also subscribe to the Premium Pass.
The Premium Pass is a monthly subscription that offers a few additional things, like extra monthly missions to complete, an extra card pack to open each day to help you build some of the best decks in TCG Pocket, and some fun bonuses in the shop. Missions and shop items rotate in each month, and it seems like each month has a focus on a specific Pokémon, like Mewtwo or Pikachu.
December’s Premium Pass missions, rewards, and items are live now, and offer a Pikachu-themed set of accessories, as well as a free full art Mewtwo card just for logging in. Don't forget, though, that you can always build a winning deck without spending any money, so all of this Premium content is totally optional.
This guide will detail all of the Premium Missions and their rewards for the month of December 2024, as well as the Premium Ticket items in the shop for this month.
Premium subscribers in Pokémon TCG Pocket have a host of Premium Missions available throughout the month, all of which offer some pretty decent rewards, from Premium Tickets for use on the shop to Hourglasses of various types. These missions will last until the end of the month, and are easily completed simply by opening packs and completing Wonder Picks.
There’s also the Wonder Pick feature which lets you see what your friends have got from their boosters and gives you the chance to randomly pick one of those cards for yourself. The game also offers the occasional “God Pack”, which has several of the rarest cards in Pokémon TCG Pocket, but there is a 0.050 per cent of pulling one of those.
With a number of immersive and animated variants on offer, it can be tough to work out which cards are the rarest which is where this guide comes into play.
Below, we’ve listed the rarest cards currently in the game. You can actually find these rarities in-game on the pack selection screen under “Offering Rates”. This guide will continue to be updated over time, as more cards are released.
By far, the rarest cards are the Gold Crown EX variants of Charizard, Pikachu, and Mewtwo. These are not only gold but feature full art and rainbow flair as well, representing the ultimate prize for any Genetic Apex collector. Functionally, these cards are the same as the regular and full-art EX variants.
The next cards are the Immersive cards, specifically Immersive Mewtwo, Charizard, and Pikachu. These cards have unique visual scenes that you can play that are filled with some of the best artwork in the game. Functionally, these cards are the same as the EX forms of the Pokémon.
Following these EX cards, we have the full art EX cards. These are exactly like the regular EX variants, but they have their own unique art and often look drastically better than the regular ones. The Mewtwo pack includes Venusaur EX, Articuno EX, Gengar EX, Mewtwo EX, and Marowak EX.
Next are the full art Trainer cards. These are incredible pieces of art that expand the images the characters are seen in, within the main cards. As with other full art cards, these work the same as the regular Trainer Supporter cards but are much, much prettier.
Finally, we have the Rainbow Full Art EX cards, of which there are few compared to the regular full-art EX cards. But they look stunning and offer some beautiful scenes and artwork.
The rarest cards in Pokemon TCG Pocket are the gold variants of Mewtwo ex, Pikachu ex and Charizard ex, the three main cards representing the current Genetic Apex set. The only cards at a crown rarity level, despite being the most rare cards, these three don't actually function any differently to the regular version of those cards (though considering they're still some of the best cards already, they hardly needed to). Still, if you want to get the rarest cards in Pokemon TCG Pocket, we've laid out all the ways you can do it below, including drop rates, costs in Pack Points, and more besides.
As mentioned, the most rare cards in Pokemon TCG Pocket are the gold versions of Charizard ex, Mewtwo ex, and Pikachu ex. These play the same way as the non-gold versions, they're simply variants, though it's also undeniable that any version of these cards rank highly in the Pokemon TCG Pocket best cards list.
Pokemon OpeningThey're technically classified as "crown" rarity, the only cards that have this prestigious mark. The latter two cards - Pikachu ex and Mewtwo ex - are especially significant, as those cards are at the centre of some of the best decks in Pokemon TCG Pocket.
Draw from packs. These cards have a very small chance to be drawn from the Genetic Apex packs. The odds on this are very, very low: as laid out in the offering rates, getting a gold card has a 0.16% chance every time you draw a pack (which equates to 1 out of 625). Meanwhile, drawing a specific gold card is even less likely, at 0.053% (53 out of 10,000). There are also the special rare packs you can get (a random 1 of every 2000 packs) that each have a 5% chance to drop a gold card. It's more likely that you'll get a lot of duplicates to put towards the Pokemon TCG Pocket flair system before you get one of these.
Wonder Picks. This is just Wonder Picking as normal: if a friend happens to have drawn a gold card, you can do a Wonder Pick and pray you get the 1-in-5 chance of getting the same card as them. Keep an eye on your Wonder Picks for the flash of gold…
Pack Point Exchange. All three cards can be bought from the Pack Point Exchange. They're the most expensive cards in the exchange, costing 2500 Pack Points each. Considering that each pack you open gives you 5 pack points, you'll need to open 500 card packs to get just one of them.
The great tragedy of all this is that not only are these golden crown cards so rare, but it turns out that the rumour circulating about Pokemon TCG Pocket bent packs providing better cards isn't even true, so you can't weigh the odds in your favor.
Of course, not every deck has to be stuffed full of rare cards. One of the reasons that people are trying to create various Pokemon TCG Pocket Dragonite decks is because the Dragonite isn't one of the rarer cards in-game.
There's also one more card that's rare, in its own way: the Pokemon TCG Pocket Mew card. This legendary card can't be drawn from a pack, but is actually the reward for a special challenge that the game keeps secret until you've already completed it, as we'll explain in the attached guide.
I’m not really looking for another hobby or living game in my life right now. Between day-to-day commitments and juggling games like Fortnite and Honkai: Star Rail, it’s hard to fit more games into my schedule. However, Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket has shimmied its way into the ever-shrinking window of time I have to play a video game daily. It’s not an adventurous Pokémon game, nor is it the deepest, but the low commitment has made it a new mainstay in my regular rotation of games.
Developed by DeNA, Creatures Inc., and The Pokémon Company and released on Oct. 30, TCG Pocket is a mobile game where players open card packs to assemble a collection of digital Pokémon cards. Each day, I log on, open a couple packs of cards, and log off. That’s really it. The game features an adapted version of the competitive trading card game, but you can still play the game even if you aren’t looking to battle a ton. Day by day, I gradually assemble a varied collection of digital Pokémon cards that includes anything from stunning full art of classic creatures like Bulbasaur to “immersive cards” that play a video cutscene for the art.
When you start out, the game rains loads of free packs. (TCG Pocket is free to download. I signed up for the free two-week trial of the paid premium pass, allowing me to open one additional pack daily.) I have not spent a single dollar in this game, but I amassed a collection of 400 cards, including duplicates. I’ve been lucky enough to pull six one-star, full-art cards and one two-star full-art Articuno ex. After I collect these digital cards, I sort through them and arrange them in a digital binder. As I drag and drop the cards, I try my best to create a pleasing, and balanced arrangement of all the different colors and art on the page — just like I did as a child.
If I want to look closely at a card, I can tap one and the game pops the card out from the array of cards for me to examine up close. I pull the digital card side to side, I observe the parallax effect on my rare Articuno card — a visual trick made possible by the digital format. It’s not as impressive as holding a physical card in your hand, since I prefer to see the vibrancy of a print in a physical card, but it feels pretty dang nice to see the Pokémon and sparkles pop from the card background behind it with the digital 3D effect.
TCG Pocket emulates the experience of opening booster packs, and with that comes some baggage. Just like with the real-life card game, you never know what you’re going to get, so some online worry that the gacha-like mechanics — or gambling — can be addictive. In my experience, it’s definitely something to be aware of, but I was pleasantly surprised that the free-to-play aspects were enough to keep me playing.
In the large-scale gacha RPGs I’ve played, you need to grind quests and daily tasks to earn the in-game currency you cash in for gacha pulls. But in TCG Pocket, the ability to open a card pack automatically refreshes every 12 hours, so you aren’t forced to grind the game at all to get your two packs a day. Additionally, it’s easier to collect specific cards with features like Wonder Pick, which allows players to pick one card from another pack that a friend or stranger has already opened. The card pull is random, but you can see what the pack contains before you choose.
I played a couple hours the first two days the game came out, but after that, my time spent playing decreased. I can play this game for five minutes, open some packs, and close the app feeling like I got something out of it. That doesn’t make the game necessarily special — I found the sterile UI and soundtrack contrast poorly with the brilliant card art — but the game still has its enjoyable moments. One night, I got dinner with friends, so we all opened our packs together and shared our pulls.
TCG Pocket is not the be-all, end-all way to experience Pokémon. It doesn’t replace the social elements of other mobile games, like Pokémon Go, nor the joy of physical card media. However, for now, TCG Pocket makes sense for my life. It has served both as a much-needed replacement for some social media scrolling time, and a chill activity to start my day as I lay in bed. So for now, I feel perfectly content to jump in and build a new collection of cards one pack at a time — so long as the developers keep up with all the daily freebies.
All the best cards in Pokemon TCG Pocket can make a huge difference in any deck, whether you're building one around them or just out to make a particular splash in a certain type. Often referred to in the community as "chase cards", the best Pokemon TCGP cards aren't necessarily the same thing as the rare ones - there's some overlap, but it's not necessarily one-to-one.
