Pokémon TCG Pocket Trading Has Spurred a Strange Black Market for High Rarity Cards

Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket has a strange black market where players are buying and selling the digital cards online via its controversial trading mechanic.

Myriad listings for Pokémon TCG Pocket cards have appeared on eBay, with players charging $5 to $10 per card. This is only possible through the game’s recently introduced trading mechanic, as these sellers are simply asking to exchange friend codes with the buyers and then sending a card over.

One $5.99 listing for a Starmie ex, for example, asks buyers to ensure they have 500 Trade Tokens, one Trade Stamina, and most importantly, an “unwanted Pokémon ex” to exchange for the card they actually want.

This is where things get a bit strange. While it’s already a blatant breach of the Pokémon TCG Pocket terms of service — as “buying or selling virtual contents or data on the service” is not allowed — the seller in these situations essentially loses nothing.

The buyer gives up a card they don’t need for a card they do, which is a regular trade beyond the price tag, but the buyer doesn’t lose stock. Per the restrictions on trading, only cards of the same rarity can be traded, meaning the seller gains an ex Pokémon when they sell one and can therefore just sell it again.

Myriad listings for ex Pokémon and 1 Star, alternate art cards, the two rarest available to trade, are listed on eBay, each with varying price tags. Entire accounts are on sale too, offering the likes of Pack Hourglasses and rare cards within them, though this is a fairly common for online games, breach of service or not.

Trading in Pokémon TCG Pocket proved controversial upon its release last week, though this trading online isn’t directly related to the complaints.

Alongside the standard mechanic that restricts players from opening packs or Wonder Picking or, now, trading too much without spending real world money, the feature was also introduced with an extra restriction called Trade Tokens. Players criticized the high cost of obtaining these, as they essentially had to delete from their collections five cards before trading one of the same rarity.

This black market would have spawned even if trading had been released with absolutely no restrictions, however. The only relation to what players have complained about so far is in how bare bones the mechanic is, as there is no way to trade without being friends with another player.

This is because some players, like siraquakip on Reddit, were hoping for “a pretty safe way for the community to connect more.” Players have called for the ability to put cards up for trade publicly within the app, alleviating the need for using external websites like Reddit and Discord, and now eBay, to find the cards they need.

Developer Creatures Inc. has already warned players against buying and selling cards using real world money and other methods of cheating, telling players before trading launched that “if we confirm that a player has engaged in behavior that violates the Terms of Use, we will warn them, suspend their account, or take other action.”

The irony is that Creatures Inc. deployed the hated Trade Tokens mechanic in order to stop exploiting the system in ways exactly like these eBay sellers are doing. It’s therefore clearly not worked, but has turned much of the community against the developer.

It’s currently “actively investigating ways to improve” the trading feature but hasn’t released any specifics on how it will do so despite complaints starting three weeks ago when it first unveiled the feature.

Fans have claimed trading is being implemented as a means of increasing revenue for Pokémon TCG Pocket, which is estimated to have made half a billion dollars in less than three months, before trading was possible.

This is also evidenced by the inability to trade cards of 2 Star rarity or higher, as if players could immediately trade for their missing cards, they wouldn’t need to spend $10 or $100 or more for a random chance of getting them. It cost one player around $1,500 just to complete the first set, for example, and the third in three months arrived last week.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.