Pokemon TCG Pocket players are looking for glitches or bugs that’ll give them free packs. Plenty of people claim they know exploits to get free cards, but are they real? We examine the claims below.
Are there any free Pokemon TCG Pocket pack glitches or bugs?
If anyone is promoting Pokemon TCG Pocket glitches, it’s almost certainly a scam. You’ll find videos on YouTube claiming to reveal bugs or exploits to get free cards and even people trying to sell info on them for money. However, because of the way the game works, there’s very little chance of finding glitches, and if there are any, then any cards you gain can be rolled back.
To put it (very) simply, there are two ways that a game client can interact with a server:
- The game client (the application on your phone, console, or PC) calculates the data needed (player position, items obtained, health and damage info) and sends it to the server. This method has the advantage of having lower server overhead and saving developers money, but it leaves a game wide open to exploits.
- The game client makes a request to the server to perform an action or requests data. The server then validates the request, performs the necessary calculations, then sends the results to the client.
While Pokemon TCG Pocket hasn’t been reverse-engineered to tell us exactly what goes on behind the scenes, we do know it uses server-side validation for its data. That means the calculation happens remotely when you open a pack of cards. The server checks if you have the correct amount of currency, subtracts it from your account, generates the pack, and then sends the data back to your app. Since all the data generation and validation is handled server-side, there are very few ways for a glitch or exploit to occur.
A Pokemon TCG Pocket free pack glitch isn’t entirely out of the question. However, unlike with client-side validation, which allows you to inject or manipulate data before it’s sent to the server, any exploit would require specific timing and actions and would be almost immediately patched. It’s highly likely that those who used the glitch would also have the cards obtained from the bug removed or, in severe cases, have their accounts banned.
