If you’ve been playing Pokémon TCG Pocket over the weekend, you might have heard about an unusual trick floating around social media that appears to give you guaranteed rare cards.
The trick ties to bent corners of packs you can select in the main menu. When you flip the pack around and check the top left and right corners, some packs have an unusual bend or crease that distinguishes them from others.
The theory, and what people have claimed, is that these cards have higher chances of having rare cards inside of them than others. As you can imagine, this has led trainers to try to pick out these packs to see if they are true—to varying success.
So, does it work? Well, I spent my entire weekend opening 100 packs using the method to get to the bottom of this. Here are my findings.
Do packs with bent corners have rare cards in Pokémon TCG Pocket?
To test the bent corner theory, I bought enough Poké Gold in Pokémon TCG Pocket to open a total of 100 packs. I then spent a few hours manually going into the pack select screen and trying to find a pack with a bent corner. I opened 33 Mewtwo packs, 33 Charizard packs, and 34 Pikachu packs to keep the odds fair.
To keep the test consistent, I cycled through each different pack type one at a time, starting and ending with Pikachu. It wasn’t a guarantee that a bent corner pack would appear, and in total, I found 67 packs with creased corners to open out of the 100 packs I opened. When opening those 67 packs, only 31 contained rare cards ranging from holo cards, one-star rarity cards, and a singular three-star rarity card. I also never got a godpack or anything remarkable.
That represents a one in three chance of getting a rare card using this supposed trick, far from the “guaranteed” odds many claim online. What was amusing was that the 33 packs that didn’t have bent corners gave me 11 rare cards, one of which was a Mewtwo Illustration Rare.
So, when asking if the bent corner trick works, I can see with utmost confidence that it doesn’t really do anything, and most packs you open are down to RNG. There is no guarantee you’ll get a rare card doing any method, but it’s fun to see the community coming up with schoolyard-type rumors for the game to keep people invested when trying to complete their collections.
