“Mega Evolution” Booster Pack Configuration Changed, Includes One Less Junk Card!

By: Water Pokémon Master · Posted Posted onJul 22, 2025 at 5:29 AM · 26 Comments

The fine print on the booster box for Mega Evolution has revealed a change to booster packs: they will no longer include an Energy card and a code card in the same pack. Instead, you'll get one or the other. Presumably this is to reduce waste.

Last week, Pokemon TCG Live updated their in-game booster packs to now provide 10 cards instead of five. Thus, you'll now get double the cards. This means even with half the code cards, you'll still get the same number of digital cards.

Update (Thursday): Surprisingly, October's Mega Latias ex Box and Salamence ex & Reshiram ex Premium Collections make no mention of including code cards. It seems TPCi is reducing them elsewhere as well.

During today's Pokemon Presents, the Mega Evolution advertisement still showed you'll get both, but it was likely copied and pasted from previous ads.

View thread (26 replies)
I don't really get why they wouldn't just cut basic energy outright. The idea that someone is building a deck but doesn't have a single ETB/Structure Deck/Locals Bulk Bin is absurd. There's now a split chance between getting useful resources in TCGL or getting a card that you may genuinely have over 100 copies of depending on how long you've been playing.

Only way this doesn't suck is if they pull an hgss and make the energies you pull from packs actually interesting compared to the extremely boring design we've already seen from the ETBs.
 
kiwiiguts said:
weren’t the code cards weighted?? will this impact weighing packs somehow?
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We dont know how its distributed yet, so it could be that the packs with hits will have energies and the ones without will use weighted codes. (That said, I thought the guaranteed holos in every pack already made weighing ineffective)
 
Last week, Pokemon TCG Live updated their in-game booster packs to now provide 10 cards instead of five. Thus, you'll now get double the cards. This means even with half the code cards, you'll still get the same number of digital cards.
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Worth pointing out that the "missing" cards were just commons and uncommons (the reverse holo and Rare slots were always present, with comparable pull rates to their physical counterparts). That update's reduction in Trade Credits received for duplicate cards more than offsets the increase in cards per pack. If not for the (implied-to-be-temporary) increases in other rewards for the BBWF season, it would actually be harder to get cards in Live now, even without the impending reduction in code cards.

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IIRC, the code card system is still managed by Dire Wolf Digital, the former PTCGO devs. I wonder if this is the start of a phase-out of code cards so they can finish cutting ties.
 
paulitics532 said:
I don't really get why they wouldn't just cut basic energy outright. The idea that someone is building a deck but doesn't have a single ETB/Structure Deck/Locals Bulk Bin is absurd. There's now a split chance between getting useful resources in TCGL or getting a card that you may genuinely have over 100 copies of depending on how long you've been playing.

Only way this doesn't suck is if they pull an hgss and make the energies you pull from packs actually interesting compared to the extremely boring design we've already seen from the ETBs.
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It would make etb's the only way to get energies
 
Anyone not needing codes probably doesn’t care, but this change is detrimental to anyone who does. Can’t say I’m affected, but they really should just go all or nothing with changes like this.

Getting more cards overall from live would be neat if the extra cards you got were worth anything more than bulk. Someone also brought up the change to surplus card redemption, so the changes overall don’t even help Live users unless they just like bulk.
 
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