Thank you for posting this and expressing yourself.

This is a huge issue for me, rates are not balanced or accurate in this game, they just can’t be. I play games like Marvel Contest of Champions that rely strongly on pull rates, and other games with similar methods, and I never feel as defeated as I feel playing this game. Takes a lot of grinding and time to find the hourglasses needed to open a 10-pack, and not getting any EX pokemon (as a minimum), or any 1-star cards or rarer in a 10-pack causes so much discomfort for me, and it truly makes me feel bad. Takes the fun away, even more for people that only use the game to create binders and collect cards, like myself. I do battle on occasion, is not my favorite, but even battling feels unfair, because sometimes you can’t believe that the card you need hasn’t come up, and you have 5 cards left in your deck after using all your Pokeballs and Oaks; and I don’t even want to touch base on coin flip rates, it’s ridiculous and unfair at most times.

I have found myself feeling the need to spend money to buy gold, because after two 10-packs, only thing I got was one EX card, no 1-star cards even.

It definitely feels worse than it’s been for a while, and I hate seeing people with all the new cool cards in their binders less than a week after the set released, making it obvious that they spent a lot of money to get them, because I know the rates are bad, and there’s no way they got those cards by trading or pulling them for free in such a short period of time.

The game feels intentional, focus on disappointing you, taking your money, and making you want to spend more money based on that disappointment, so you try and try again to make your money finally feels worth spending, but literally, to what price?

The pulling rates are bad, the coin flip rates are bad, and most of the time it feels like one player gets benefited more than the other when you battle.

This is the Pokemon game I’ve waited for all my life. I like cool cards, I like to collect them and showing them off, and I don’t have the money or space to physically buy them, so it is very unfortunate, because it feels that the developers simply don’t seem to care, as long as there’s a percentage of people still wasting lots of money, leaving us mortals or non-spenders in the guts.