Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a service that lets you buy increasingly expensive packs that reward you with valuable cards or cheap, basic Pokémon cards that you can either add to your vault or sell back to the company—sounds a lot like GameStop’s Power Packs, right? Well, I’m actually talking about Crown Cards, an iOS and Android app that, at the time of writing, has become the #1 free ‘game’ on the UK App Store.
As the Pokémon TCG has spiked in recent years, it’s not been surprising to see some collectors value it as an investment commodity. In fact, my investor feature goes into that in detail. However, services like Power Packs take that to an extreme, with a high-risk, higher-reward system that can see you walk away with thousands more in your pocket. Or, in many cases, thousands less.
Callum Self
Crown Cards is no different. The App Store page for the app has big numbers and low starting prices—you could get up to $100,000 in cards for as little as $1 per pack. It promises real, graded cards at the click of a button (or tap of a screen? I suppose), and a 100% instant buyback system. That means if you win a big chase card, you can sell it back to the company and instantly get your money. Glares at Power Packs.
Neither the description nor the company itself calls the service gambling anywhere; however, it’s been given an 18+ age rating from Apple. Apple’s highest age rating can cover things including gambling, intense violence, and sexual content, none of which appear relevant to Crown Cards. On Google Play, it has a PEGI 18 rating, with “Cash Rewards” and “In-App Purchases (Includes Random Items)” listed as the reasons for that rating.
Unlike Power Packs, this is a service I can actually access. So, I did what any budding collector-turned-journalist would do and downloaded it. Instantly, the hook is obvious. A variety of packs appear in a circle, going from a mere 79p per pack to a colossal £3,782 per pack. As the price increases, so do the rewards, with a max ‘pull’ of £15.10 and £75,510, respectively.
Each pack has odds. For example, the cheapest pack, dubbed the Pokémon Starter Pack, has a 0.6% chance of a Grail card, meaning 99.4% of pulls aren't Grail cards. Those Grail cards are worth between £3.02 and £15.10, so even when you hit that 0.6% chance, there's a huge difference between the minimum and maximum value.
Crown Cards immediately reminded me of my conversation with Dr Leon Xiao, an academic who specialises in gambling law, for my feature on Power Packs. Most importantly, it reminded me of the ‘near-miss effect’, with sparkly animations and bright colours that, even when you’re losing value on your spend, can make it feel like winning. However, Crown Cards also does some other… interesting things.
Like many free apps, there are increasing rewards for completing milestones, a referral system, badges with increased rewards depending on how much you’ve spent, and even events. One I saw was a limited-time event called Dime Time, where five packs are just 40p. The minimum card you could pull is just 1p—the number is greyed out and dull—but the maximum is brightly coloured and slightly larger, with £7,551 as the biggest win.
Crown Cards does not describe its service as gambling. Its Terms of Service say the buyback offer displayed following the experience “is not a refund, reversal, cancellation, prize, wager, gambling payout, redemption of your original purchase, guarantee of value, or right to recover the purchase price of a Pack or Item.”
Callum Self
In my Power Packs feature, I discussed similar services, where Dr Xiao said that, in cases where “the consumer is playing a game of chance for a prize (defined as ‘money or money's worth,’ which these cards would be as they can be easily converted into cash)”, the company would be “breaching UK gambling law”.
After experiencing the app, I reached out to Dr Xiao to ask about Crown Cards specifically. “This is illegal gambling that the Gambling Commission should enforce the law against,” Dr Xiao told me. “The law-breaking is blatant.” While that was specifically regarding the UK, Dr Xiao mentions that “In the US context, in some state jurisdictions, if a [free-to-participate] option is given to people to join the prize draw, the product might be permissible, so we’ve seen some US sites now provide that.” He then mentions that, concerning the UK, there is no “such legal maneuvering” that would make a product like Crown Cards “permissible”.
Dr Xiao also questioned how transparent Crown Cards' probability disclosures are. “Providing probability disclosures is nice, but just doing that does not make the product legal,” he said, adding that “because the probability disclosure is given with value ranges, it’s arguably not sufficiently detailed to be transparent.”
All that to say, it’s strange to see a service like this appear on the UK App Store so openly, offering high-value pulls at prices that make the potential rewards look extremely attractive. Of course, that offer isn’t as simple as putting some pocket change in and coming away rich or with valuable Pokémon cards in your collection. Instead, you have the chance of getting a valuable pull. While Crown Cards doesn’t call itself gambling or state that it provides gambling services, don’t spend money that you would prefer to keep.
I reached out to both Crown Cards’ legal team and the UK Gambling Commission before publication. Neither responded before publication, but I will update this article if either gets back to me.
