The Actual News:
Oh boy, and here I thought I was done with the whole McDonald’s Pokémon 25 promotion!
Ok so if you don’t already know, McDonalds ran a Happy Meal promotion which, well, promoted the whole “Pokémon 25” year-long event. Apparently it was a worldwide event, starting in North America between February 9 and March 9, 2021. Meanwhile our cousins on the other side of the pond in the United Kingdom got their run starting on 19th May 2021, and then our OTHER cousins on the OTHER other side of the OTHER pond in Australia (and probably New Zealand too) between 19th September and 20th October, 2021. Aw man, right around my birthday too!
But yeah, back when the North America promotion ended, I managed to snag the last couple packs I didn’t get in stores for the McDonalds Promo page, and thought I was done with it. Little did I realize that I had missed a couple important tidbits! As it turns out, BiggieJohn on the PA! Discord brought my attention to a bunch of missing tidbits, which I’ll share with you below.
Now as a reminder, at least for the North American release, the “toys” of sorts came in these flat little packs. There were four different prizes in total, stashed away in ten different pack designs. Which prize you got was denoted by the number in the lower-right corner of the pack, and they included:
- #1 — Lt. White, Dk. White and Lt. Black — a 60-card card box for your Pokémon TCG cards
- #2 — Dk. Black and Lt. Blue — small Pokémon paper stickers, plus a double-sized scenic panorama to place the stickers on
- #3 — Dk. Blue, Lt. Red and Dk. Red — large Pokémon vinyl stickers
- #4 — Lt. Green and Dk. Green — Pokémon TCG card frame
Here’s the original McDonalds display, as well as a quick example below that of what you got in each:
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| Pack #1 Prize | Pack #2 Prize | Pack #3 Prize | Pack #4 Prize |
While I tried my best to make sure I recorded everything avaliable, circumstances simply prevented me from realizing that there was more involved that there actually was. For example, I thought that the #1 card box had only one design: the Kanto starters with Pikachu, as I got triples of that and nothing else. The same went with the #2 prize (which I thought only had one panorama design), and the #4 frame (which I literally got like fourteen of the exact same design). Because of all the duplicates I had no reason to believe that there were any other designs. …Yes, and this is despite that the McDonalds display above CLEARLY shows a different design for the Pikachu card frame than the sole example I show above.
So yeah, as far as I was concerned, there was only one card box design, one double-sided panorama card, and one Pikachu card frame design. Easy peasy, right?
Well recently, BiggieJohn just had to crash my house-of-cards party by sharing with everyone on the PA! Discord a super-duper surprise: I actually had left out maybe half of the other possible designs released in the McDonalds Pokémon promotion! Wait, huh? Yeah, take a look!
Is that a SECOND panorama scenery card? A second Pikachu card frame? And seven OTHER TCG card box designs, one for the other Gens beyond the first? Yep! But how could that be?? I bought a ton of Happy Meals and I didn’t have any other designs!!
But alas, I couldn’t deny what BiggieJohn had posted: they were totally missing items. And as it turns out, I actually DID have some of these missing items. I just simply assumed that they were duplicates because… well, I don’t know why! Either way, I ended up scanning the once-missing items that I did own and added them to the McDonalds Promo page; go check it out if you want to see them in a higher resolution. I’m going to work with BiggieJohn to get the rest scanned and FINALLY have a completed review of the McDonalds 2021 “Pokémon 25” run.
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So now that we finally know what we were missing, here’s the updated list of prizes you got:
- #1 — Lt. White, Dk. White and Lt. Black — a 60-card card box for your Pokémon TCG cards
- There are eight different card box designs, one for each Generation of Starters.
- Which box you got had nothing to do with which pack they appeared in.
- #2 — Dk. Black and Lt. Blue — small Pokémon paper stickers, plus a double-sized scenic panorama to place the stickers on
- There are two different sets of 26 stickers, as well as two sets of panoramas to stick them onto.
- Each set contains 2x of all starters from half of the game’s generations plus Pikachu. One set covers Gens 1-4, the other covers Gens 5-8.
- Whether you got the Black or Blue pack made no difference as to which sticker or panorama you got.
- #3 — Dk. Blue, Lt. Red and Dk. Red — large Pokémon vinyl stickers
- There are eight different sets of four stickers; each set contains all three starters from the same gen, plus a Pikachu
- These were inserted randomly between the three different packs.
- #4 — Lt. Green and Dk. Green — Pokémon TCG card frame
- There were only two different card frames, both with Pikachu in them.
- Unlike the other packs, which of the two frames that was inside WAS dependant on which Green pack you got.
I mean, unless it turns out there are actually six scenic panorama cards or eight different TCG card frames or something! But at this point I think THIS is pretty much it.
That’s about it! Can I get a “Good times??” Like I said, this was a quickie post for today, just to fill you guys in on the same surprise I had upon discovering that there were more prize designs that originally thought. So which ones did you get back when they were originally released? What about some of your favorite cards? Swing by the PA! Discord and share some of your favorite McDonalds prizes, or even if maybe if YOUR country’s run of the McDonalds promotion had something different than what we got in North America.