While Pokemon TGC Pocket’s tutorial holds the player’s hand in teaching them how to open packs and use wonder picks, it kind of leaves you on your own to figure out everything else in the game. To be fair, there is a “tips” section in the options menu which contains descriptions of various game mechanics, but not only is it easily missed by many players, but those many of those tips are honestly very vague and unhelpful. One subject I’ve seen a lot of people in the community confused about is the card flair system, so here I’ve written up an in-depth explanation on how it works.

First of all, what ARE card flairs?

Simply put, flairs are cosmetic visual effects you can add to your cards. For the most part they require duplicate copies to unlock, so they’re a good way to show off to other players that a specific card is your favorite… or just that you’ve happened to collect a lot of one specific card by coincidence.

There are 2 types of flairs, labeled in-game as “cosmetic” and “battle”. “Cosmetic” flairs are overlaid on top of the card. They are visible in community showcase items while “battle” flairs are not. They’re also shown briefly to your opponent in a duel when you place one on the bench and when it attacks, although they are not visible when the card’s just sitting in play.

“Battle” flairs are small animations that play when you place a card down in a duel. They also play when you switch the card from the bench into the active slot. Since they are exclusive to battles, they don’t show up in community showcase items.

Unlocking Flairs

To start, find a card you like in your collection and tap it to bring up its summary page. The “Obtain flair” button is easy to spot.

The first point of confusion for many players is that it seems like, at first, every card only has the generic “gold sparkles” flair. But you’ve seen already that there are a wide variety of flairs in the game, where are all the others?

Well, the game doesn’t tell you this, but you need to unlock the first flair to see the rest. Every card with a diamond rarity has 3 possible flairs beyond the generic gold sparkles, usually some combination of battle and cosmetic flairs (except for trainer cards, they have no battle flairs since you don’t actually place them on the board).

For example, this is Charmander’s flair list:

As you can see, I’ve only obtained the gold sparkles, and must get the other two as well before I can unlock the one on the far right. You also can obtain multiple copies of a flair, in case you want a matching pair for your deck. Keep in mind that any one flair can be used between as many decks as you want, so there is (almost) no reason to obtain more than 2 of the same flair! The only purpose of collecting 3 or more is if you really wanted to fill a community display binder with a bunch of the same card with the same flair for some reason. Otherwise, don’t waste your resources!

Speaking of resources, I should probably mention the cost of getting a flair. First of all, you need duplicates of the card. 1-diamond rarity cards cost 3 per flair, 2-diamonds cost 2, and every other kind of card requires 1. However, the game will not let you spend your cards to get a flair unless you’ll have at least 2 left over afterwards. Presumably this is so that players can’t accidentally screw themselves out of being able to use cards in their deck. This means that for 1-diamonds, you actually need 5 cards to get a flair (although only 3 are used up), 4 for 2-diamonds, and 3 for everything else.

The other thing you need is a currency called “Shinedust”. It’s obtained in a variety of ways, like opening packs, completing missions, and just generally playing the game. As you can see in the above picture, each of Charmander’s flairs costs increasingly more Shinedust as you go along. The second flair is 1.5x the first flair’s cost, the third is 3x, and the fourth is 4.5x. As you could probably guess, rarer cards have higher Shinedust costs. That being said, Shinedust is plentiful and easy to come by, so chances are that unless you just happen to draw 3 of a very rare card early on, you will have more than enough shinedust to buy whatever flairs you want. The the duplicates are usually the real limiting factor. Many in the community are speculating that Shinedust will later be a required currency for trading, but as of now this is purely just that, speculation.

As a side note, some of you reading this may have unlocked some of Charmander’s flairs as well, and noticed that the order of said flairs are different than in my screenshot. No, the flair order is not random! Strangely enough it is determined by, of all things, which of the three Genetic Apex packs you opened first.

Star-rarity cards

1-star and rarer cards (including crown rares) work a bit different. For starters, all four of their flairs are unlocked from the start (thank Arceus). They also exclusively use battle flairs, never cosmetic ones. This is because they are all “full art” cards, and having random sparkles or bubbles or leaves or whatever all over the card would just get in the way of the artwork. You’ll also notice they have something else in their flair list too:

You could, instead of trading in duplicates for a flair, trade them in for “Special Shop Tickets”. Like with flairs, you can only do this if you have at least 3 of the card in question. These tickets are used to buy the game’s rarest and most prestigious cosmetics- the coin alone is worth 12 one-star cards! If you see someone rocking any of those cosmetics, you know you’re dealing with a hardcore player. Predictably, rarer cards are worth more tickets: 1-star cards are worth 1, 2-stars are worth 5, 3-star immersives are 12, and crown rares are worth a whopping 64… IF you can manage to get 3 of the same crown rare of course. As you can see in the picture, you’ll still need to spend Shinedust.

You may be asking, if trainer cards don’t have battle flairs, but star-rarity cards don’t have cosmetic flairs, then what about the 2-star trainer cards? The answer is that they just don’t have any flairs. You can only exchange them for special shop tickets.

Promo cards

Most promo cards cost 1 duplicate to get a flair, and otherwise work the same way as diamond-rarity cards. In case you didn’t know, you can buy duplicates of the trainer promo cards (Pokeball, X-speed, ect.) from the shop for super cheap, so those are some easy flairs to obtain!

By the way, promos that you can only ever obtain one of, such as the subscription service cards, don’t require any duplicates- only Shinedust.

Something you may be wondering is if there is a database of which cards have which flairs. Game8.co has one here.

Equipping Flairs

The most common point of confusion I’ve seen among players is in actually using the flairs you’ve collected. When building/editing your deck, you want to find the card in question on the top of your screen. If you have any flairs for that card, there should be a little icon in the corner.

Tap it and you’ll be able to choose which flair to equip. It works similarly when you want to use a flair in a community showcase item, although you’ll have to tap on the individual card before the flair-equip icon appears.

As one final note, there are sometimes event-specific limited time flairs. At the time of me writing this, there was recently an event in which Arcanine EX temporarily had a fifth flair to unlock.

And that’s pretty much everything there is to say about the flair system at this point in the game! If you’re a particularly big fan of a specific card or Pokemon, you might want to consider pursuing a couple duplicates so you can show off your flair to other players!