McDonald’s is bringing back its wildly popular Pokémon Happy Meals to the United States.
2022 Pokémon Happy Meals
Starting today, August 16th, McDonald’s customers across the country will be able to buy Pokémon-themed Happy Meals that contain four Pokémon trading cards, a spinner, and a gold coin.
According to PokéBeach, the Happy Meal promotion called Pokémon Match Battle has a total of 15 trading cards to collect, with six of them being rare holographic collectibles. One of the four trading cards in each Happy Meal is guaranteed to be a holographic collectible. Below is a list of all the trading cards that collectors will be able to get from the 2022 Happy Meal campaign.
- Bewear
- Chinchou
- Cutiefly
- Drampa
- Flaaffy
- Ledyba
- Pangoro
- Lapras
- Tynamo
- Gossifleur (Holographic Foil)
- Growlithe (Holographic Foil)
- Pikachu (Holographic Foil)
- Rowlet (Holographic Foil)
- Smeargle (Holographic Foil)
- Victini (Holographic Foil)
McDonald’s Pokémon Match Battle is designed to help teach new and casual Pokémon fans how to play the Pokémon Trading Card Game, which debuted worldwide back in 1999. McDonald’s Happy Meals that contain Pokémon trading cards were first added to the fast-food chain’s menu in 2011. Since then, the restaurant has been releasing Pokémon Happy Meals every year except in 2020.
Though Pokémon trading cards have been around since the earliest days of the franchise, there has been an apparent surge of increased interest in the cards in the past few years, especially on secondary markets like eBay. In fact, the craze over the cards had caused chaos to McDonald’s Pokémon Happy Meal promotion last year.
2021 Pokémon Happy Meals
Last year’s Pokémon Happy Meal promotion was such a huge mess when it kicked off in the U.S. In order to buy up as many trading cards as they could, resellers camped outside McDonald’s restaurants across the country to cut through the crowds. And once they had purchased several Happy Meals, many of them just discarded the foods that came with their orders and left for home with just the cards. Unsealed boxes of the trading cards also found their way on eBay, which suggests that the cards didn’t even get into McDonald’s locations where they were supposed to be sold.
@McDonalds @Pokemon I sure hope you do some form of inventory control for your promo Pokémon cards as some of your stock is being sold in sealed boxes which means they’re not even making it to your stores 😳 Though same thing happened with Tim Hortons Hockey too. Retail $1.99 😳 pic.twitter.com/kX8qZyRX2V
— redphoenixsportscards (@redphoenixcards) February 9, 2021
To avoid such disorder and cut down on potential resellers this year, McDonald’s locations in the country may restrict the number of Pokémon Happy Meals a customer can buy per transaction.