I wasn't going to play Pokemon TCG Pocket for long, but then I got the rarest card in my first few hours – and now I can't put it down

It should've been so simple. When Pokemon TCG Pocket came out, the latest in a string of attempts to translate the Pokemon card game to mobile gaming, I picked it up  as a rubbernecker, a window shopper, a self-confessed casual observer. But a week later, I'm researching the meta, working out the optimized time to open packs around my sleep schedule, cursing every time the staring coin flip forces me to go first in a battle, and desperately trying to convince my editors to let me write about the game so I can write up the micropayments as a business expense.

But I wasn't supposed to get hooked. It's all gone horribly wrong somewhere, and it's due to the fact that I had a moment of uncharacteristic good luck on my very first day playing… and managed to get the rarest card in the game out of nowhere.

Pokemon, gold version

Of all the rarest cards in Pokemon TCG Pocket, the joint rarest are gold foil variants of the three mascots for the current Genetic Apex packs: Charizard, Pikachu and Mewtwo. And just hours after I'd downloaded TCGP, a gold "Mewtwo ex" suddenly materialized in my hand as part of one of the game's special rare packs, as seen above. For context, when you open a pack you have a 0.053% chance of getting the same card.

Suddenly, I couldn't walk away. I'd been given an undeserved leg-up the likes of which most players would bitterly envy. Maybe it's the old gambler's fallacy, or maybe I should've just put the phone down and run to buy a fistful of lottery tickets while my luck still held out, but I tell you now – it's far easier to walk away from something when you're losing.

I've seen other variants of that Mewtwo ex in a lot of matches since then (it's a card that's pretty prevalent in the meta) but out of the dozens of battles I've played, I've yet to see more than one or two people rocking the gold model. Sounds like a brag, but I'd probably be more proud if I'd actually done anything to deserve it in the first place. Still, I always find it reassuring when good things happen to bad people.

Pack tactics

Even past that lucky start, I do think Pocket is a pretty fun game – though it's been pretty unnerving to see the pavlovian way it trains the audience to wait for new packs. Still, it's accessible in design, presented well enough, the nostalgia isn't excessive and the obsessive realism in the pack-opening feels somehow both endearing and a little bit intense, like somebody who's really, really into model trains.

It's also been interesting seeing how the battles differ from those in the core games. Here there's much more of an emphasis on tactically swapping Pokemon around, dragging a critter back the moment you realize it's doomed so you can tag in an eager and raring Machoke off the bench. When victory eventually comes for one player or another, it's usually pretty fast how the match can go from zero-all to a sudden upset. It's less dominos falling and more seeing whose house of cards will suddenly collapse first.

Whether it will hold attention long-term – both mine and other people's – is probably largely down to the developers at this point. The fact that the meta seems to have already formed so tightly into four or five of what are commonly recognized as the best decks in Pokemon TCG Pocket suggests that a broader pool of cards will do a lot to help longevity, and I do wonder how long the appeal of hungrily watching a timer slow tick down to the next pack can actually last. 

Still, for now, it's a pretty solid experience, even if it's offering itself out in dribs and drabs a little too much for my liking. Not to mention I've yet to have any moment quite as fortunate as that first-day draw. If I get another gold card over the weekend though, my first response will be to go sprinting towards the local casino, life savings in hand. I can take a hint.

It's been promised both in and out of the game, but Pokemon TCG Pocket still has yet to add its most revolutionary feature.