Image: Nintendo LifeI am a creature of habit, so when The Pokmon Company revealed Pokmon Trading Card Game Pocket and its two-packs-a-day hook system, I knew that I was going to be a sucker for it. And here we are, a little over three months since its launch, and that's exactly what I am.My Pokmon monkey brain (Mankey brain?) has turned to the mobile app every day for the last 100-ish rotations of the sun to tap on a virtual packet, trace a virtual line, and watch as five virtual pictures pop up on my screen while I punch the very real air whenever I get something good.Subscribe to Nintendo Life on YouTube795kWatch on YouTube I love it in the same way that my childhood self loved ripping packs in the early 2000s (I wasn't around for the initial '90s boom, sorry), but it is also giving me the exact same headache that I experienced 20 years ago. Touch, TPC, you've bottled up trading card nostalgia, warts and all.There's a handful of perfectly legitimate grievances you might have with TCG Pocket the gacha, the myriad currencies and the blatant monetisation to name but a few but I'm not particularly talking about these when I refer to my card-induced headaches. Hourglasses, Trade Tokens and Pok Gold weren't all that common in my school playground (crazy, I know), but the app has managed to capture a different selection of substantially shallower quibbles, nonetheless. Things that were a right pain in the Numel *ahem* when I was five and have effortlessly transitioned to the present day.Images: Nintendo LifeWe'll start with the latest addition and biggest offender of them all: Trading. Trading is a nightmare in TCG Pocket. You need two separate currencies to swap, you can only trade with your friends, not all cards are up for grabs, and there's no way of knowing who wants what without sending a private message via another app of your choosing. I was quick to call out the BS of this new feature when it dropped, but after a week of using it, I've come to realise that it's just as stressful as it was trading with me in the playground.Every nitpick lines up perfectly with how I felt back in the day. Swapping cards of the same rarity is a given (I wasn't about to be robbed at age five, and I'm still not today), and I'd only enter a business transaction with my friends if I didn't know where you sourced your cards, how could I trust you'd be bringing the real deal to the table? The rarest of cards are off-limits in the app, just like my prized holos were circa 2003, and opening up WhatsApp or Discord to discuss potential trades is really the modern-day equivalent of whispering to a trusted trader over maths worksheets.At age five, I was putting the 'Don' in Pok-don ('you come to me on the day of my daughter's gym battle?'); today, all of the app's trading quirks align perfectly with how I used to run business back then. Again, Trade Tokens weren't a concern, but if an interested party wanted to throw in a handful of Starburst to sweeten the deal, I'd happily ensure that things were kept off-record.Image: Nintendo LifeThe nostalgia doesn't stop there. Do you remember that rumour from the app's early days that said a pack with a bent corner would be more likely to contain a hit? It was a load of rubbish, obviously, but for a sweet few hours, everyone whipped out their rulers and went holo hunting as if it were gospel. You can't tell me that such theories wouldn't have set the playground collecting scene on fire back in the day.The act of ripping packs in the app now leaves me with the same sense of unmatched anticipation meets crushing disappointment that I experienced in my youth. I'm lucky if I open a pack with fewer than four duplicates in it by this point, but the feeling of getting a hit and knowing you'll be able to brag about it to your friends (on Bluesky rather than at the park, admittedly) is still there.Heck, the app's daily opening limit may as well be a one-for-one recreation of my mum refusing to purchase every pack on display because I was really brave at the dentist something that makes a little more sense to me in my mid-20s than it did in single digits, honestly.Look, it's very easy to sit and pick holes in Pokmon TCG Pocket and for the past three months, I (and others at Nintendo Life) have been doing just that. But when I really think about it, most of the upsets are the same things I have carried with me since I first got into Pokmon.After an 800-word introspection, have I finally realised that I'm the problem here? Nah, it's probably just the Pok Gold.Is Pokmon TCG Pocket taking you back to the old days of card collecting, or is this something new and totally different? Let us know in the comments. "We have received a large number of comments"Gimme a Boost(er)Related GamesSee AlsoShare:00 Jim came to Nintendo Life in 2022 and, despite his insistence that The Minish Cap is the best Zelda game and his unwavering love for the Star Wars prequels (yes, really), he has continued to write news and features on the site ever since. Hold on there, you need to login to post a comment...Related ArticlesPokmon TCG Pocket: Dialga EX Deck GuideChoo Choo! 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