Pokémon TCG Pocket: What is flair and how to obtain it

Here's how to give your cards a bit of extra flair in TCG Pocket

The Pokémon Company / GLHF

Pokémon TCG Pocket has hundreds of cards to collect and battle with, and you’ll no doubt collect many multiples of many cards throughout your time with the game. Trading won’t be available for quite some time, but that doesn’t mean your extras are entirely useless, either. 

Pokémon TCG Pocket has an interesting system called flair, which lets you use your extra cards to add fun effects to your cards and give your deck a little extra… well, flair. In this guide we’ll go over what, exactly, flair is, and how to obtain flair in Pokémon TCG Pocket. 

Pokémon TCG Pocket: What is flair? 

Flair is an interesting mechanic that lets you trade in your extra cards for special effects that you can show off in battles. These special effects can range from objects like sparkles and stars to type- or even Pokémon-specific effects like bubbles, dirt, and fire. 

There are two types of flair: battle effects and cosmetic effects. Place effects are activated when placing a card down, and include effects like those mentioned above — sparkles, puffs of dirt, bubbles, and more that burst from the card when placed. Cosmetic effects, on the other hand, give a card an effect on the field, like a sparkle or a symbol that is constantly moving on the card when it’s on the field. 

Flairs have no effect on the power of cards, they’re purely cosmetic in nature and exist solely to show off and make use of your extra cards. 

Pokémon TCG Pocket: How to obtain flair 

Obtaining flair in Pokémon TCG Pocket requires two things: Shinedust and extra copies of a card. Additional copies of a card, as you might expect, can be obtained from opening Pokémon TCG Pocket booster packs, and you need to have more than two copies of a card to get a flair — you also can’t spend cards on a flair if it would take you below two of that card. Different variants of cards, like full arts, are counted separately for flairs. 

Shinedust can be obtained in a number of different ways, such as through obtaining duplicates of a card, completing missions and battles, and through events. Amassing Shinedust is fairly easy, and it won’t be long before you have large amounts of it. Shinedust is, at the time of writing, only used for obtaining flairs, and has no other use. 

Once you have both of these things, navigate to the My Cards menu, then select the card you want to customize. Tap the Obtain Flair button, then select Exchange to trade your additional cards and Shinedust for a flair. 

The Pokémon Company / GLHF

It should be noted, though, that different card types have different rules for flairs. Normal cards will require you to exchange for an initial flair first, usually the Gold Sparkles cosmetic flair. You’ll also need to exchange for additional flairs for those cards to unlock all of the available flairs. 

Full art Pokémon cards work a little bit differently, offering access to all flairs from the get-go, with no initial buy-in. Full arts also typically don’t have cosmetic flairs available, instead only having battle flairs. Full art Trainer cards do not have flairs, but all full art cards can be traded for special shop tickets, too. 

Pokémon TCG Pocket: How to equip flair 

Equipping flair in Pokémon TCG Pocket is thankfully very easy. After obtaining a flair, simply build a new deck, or edit an existing deck that contains the card you want to equip a flair to. In the list of cards added to the deck, a small button will appear on cards that have a flair available. Tap that button, and then select the flair you want to apply to the card. 

The Pokémon Company / GLHF

There are some additional things that are worth nothing, though. If you obtain a flair, you can only use it on one card. For example, if you have a deck that features two Pinsir cards, and you want both of them to have the Gold Sparkles cosmetic flair, you’ll have to exchange for that flair on that specific card twice. You can also apply cosmetic flairs to cards in binders and display boards.