How to use Flairs in Pokemon TCG Pocket

As the first member of TheGamer team to get their hands on this beautiful, immersive rare Mew card, I’m officially the top Pokémon collector on the team. Or the one who spent most of his time fighting boring PvP battles in Pokemon TCG Pocket, you decide.

My collection currently stands at an impressive 221/226, with only five cards left to complete Genetic Apex. I’ve given myself a time limit of until the next set comes out to complete this one, and it seems doable. Additionally, I have 30 cards of star rarity or higher that do not count toward your set completion total. I think this is exactly half of the complete art and alternative art collection, but I don’t feel like I’ll be collecting the rest of it before the next set comes out; I don’t want to go bankrupt with digital trading cards.

Although I own 251 different cards, the actual number of cards I have, including dupes, is 1,521. On average I have six of each card. In reality, I only own one or two of the rarest cards and dozens of the common cards. If this were a physical collection I would give it to my daughter or to a charity shop. But that’s not possible in Pokemon TCG Pocket. I could take a screenshot of it and send the image to a friend via WhatsApp, like a blockchain-less NFT, but that wouldn’t reduce my holdings. So why would I do this with Petilil when I could do it with Mew?

What is the point of Flairs in Pokemon TCG Pocket?

Pokemon TCG Pocket’s mechanical answer to this is Flairs. I have 23 Petilil, 23 Swoobat, 21 Clobbopus, 20 Slowpoke and 18 Psyduck. I can reduce this by half by making flairs. These cost Shinedust, a currency I’m comfortable with since I never make Flairs, and a few copies of the card in question.

There are two types of flair: cosmetic and combat. Cosmetic accents are small sparkles, hearts, or font-adjacent animations that can be added to cards in folders to make them stand out. Psyduck, for example, offers three cosmetic flair options.

Combat flairs are cosmetic effects, sparks or clouds of dust that fly off the map when played in a battle, for example. Psyduck has a fighting flair. The problem is that I don’t want any flair on Psyduck.

How to use Flairs in Pokemon TCG Pocket

A little tip for you: After purchasing the Flairs in your collection, you will need to go to either your folder or your deck (depending on whether you are applying a cosmetic flair or a combat flair) to actually add the flair to your card to apply.

I’d like to get the little smoke cloud battle flair for my Weezing alt in my Team Rocket theme deck. I’ll be saving my duplicates to craft Flairs instead of trading them for currency. But for regular cards, anything with diamonds or below? Not only do you have to unlock the better flairs by crafting them one at a time, but I also have no use for a beefed up Psyente.

I generally don’t use Water-type decks (I love Lightning-type decks, in case you didn’t know), so all of my duplicates remain. I’m not going to spend money upgrading pointless cards, especially when rare cards like Mew cost up to 18,000 Bright Dust to get a feel for it. I can afford that, but not for long if I waste my money on Psyduck and Slowpoke.

Some of the flairs look great. If I find a third immersive rare Charizard ex, I’ll probably spend 18,000 Bright Dust on that fiery boss flair and build a deck around it to show off. I hoard duplicates of cards that I like and use in battle to add flavor.

But the commons? Why should I bother? They just artificially increase the number of cards I own, are a strong reminder of how many packs I’ve opened, and are a waste of resources on upgrades when I’ll never see the benefits of those unlocked Flairs. I don’t know why I picked Psyduck for this particular rant, but it’s indicative of the problem. I never use the card, its flavor is generic and I have more important cards to spend my shine on. I don’t need a meaningful grind for my 18 Psyduck, let me just throw away the 16 I can’t use.

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