McDonald’s Japan Only Prepared Under 1.5 Million Booster Packs For Pokemon TCG Campaign

Following the chaotic McDonald’s Japan Pokemon TCG campaign that resulted in food waste, fighting, and mass scalping, Asahi Shimbun has reported on some new details on the campaign.

A person connected to the campaign told Asahi Shimbun that McDonald’s Japan had only prepared under 3 million Pokemon TCG cards. Each booster pack contained a McDonald’s exclusive Pikachu card and a random McDonald’s exclusive Pokemon TCG card (there are 5 random cards to collect).

This would mean that there are up to 1.5 million Pikachu cards and up to 300,000 of each random card. One booster pack was given out with every Happy Meal purchase, and there was a 5-set limit per customer.

The person that Asahi Shimbun had spoke to said that they were perplexed by the situation, stating that “we couldn’t understand why it became a target of scalping as the cards were not rare”. This may indicate that McDonald’s Japan genuinely believes that they made enough booster packs for the entire country, and didn’t account for the massive popularity of the Pokemon TCG, as well as the possibility that collectors will purchase 5 sets in order to complete the collection.

Asahi Shimbun noted that the campaign was supposed to run for 3 days, but many locations ran out of cards on the first day of the campaign. NintendoSoup can also confirm, through user reports on Japanese social media, that some locations even ran out of cards in the morning as there were people waiting in line as early as 4am.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments.