Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket
Image: The Pokémon Company

Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket's hotly-anticipated Trade feature is finally live in the mobile app. Those who have been waiting to swap cards with their pals can now do so, but there's a catch: it's a real headache.

As with everything TCG Pocket, Trading is all about consumable items and currency. We've known for a while that you'll only be able to trade cards with friends, and those trades can only be cards of the same rarity, but a lengthy tutorial when you first open up the new feature explains there are a bunch more rules to keep in mind.

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All trades require an adequate amount of Trade Stamina — a new bar that replenishes over time, much like Wonder Stamina. You'll recover one Trade Stamina 'piece' every 24 hours and you can hold a maximum of five 'pieces' at any one time. Naturally, you can use Trade Hourglasses or Poké Gold to recover Trade Stamina quicker.

Still with us so far? Good. Let's get onto the trading itself. The process is pretty simple for low-rarity cards: choose a friend to trade with, select the card you want to swap, and await their response. There's a 72-hour time limit to get the deal done, but that's to be expected.

High-rarity cards, on the other hand, require another consumable to push the deal through, called Trade Tokens. You'll need 120 tokens for a ◇3 trade, 500 for a ◇4 (ex cards) trade, and 400 for a ☆1 (full art) trade — you can't trade any cards of a higher rarity for the time being.

You can obtain Trade Tokens in select events, though the quicker way of pulling them in is by consuming duplicates of a given card. In the 'My Cards' tab, you can select any card and choose the 'Obtain Items' button to cash it in. Higher-rarity cards provide you with more Trade Tokens, but you'll need to get rid of four ☆1 (full art) cards to amass the required 400 total — each card providing 100 tokens apiece.

It all feels excessively complicated, and we're not best keen on the idea of burning through our duplicate cards just to make a higher-rarity trade happen. But hey, it's Pokémon TCG Pocket, what did we expect?

The Trade feature couldn't have landed at a better time, with the app's next digital expansion, 'Space-Time Smackdown', arriving at 6am local time tomorrow (30th Jan). Expect to see a good number of sweet Gen IV cards on your socials in the coming days.

Have you managed to wrap your head around the TCG Pocket trading yet? Let us know in the comments.