Celestial Guardians countdown, release time and date in Pokémon TCG Pocket

The next big Pokémon TCG Pocket expansion is fast approaching with Pokémon from the Alola region ready to shake up the competitive meta and give casual trainers more cards to add to their collections, including the game’s first trainer immersive rare.

Celestial Guardians is the third major expansion in the game, following Genetic Apex and Space-Time Smackdown, and comes after the release of two smaller sets that have been pretty groundbreaking to the competitive scene. With this set, though, trainers will be able to get cards like Rare Candy and other new strategies that’ll likely give older decks a chance to shine again in ranked play.

If you want to know exactly when this set is launching, though, you’re in the right place.

Pokémon TCG Pocket Celestial Guardians release date and time

The Celestial Guardians set in Pokémon TCG Pocket will be released worldwide on April 30, and the exact timing will depend on your timezone. The launch will be early morning in most places, but in parts of America, it might even launch on the evening of April 29 instead.

With a global release, the set will be available to everyone simultaneously, and it’s expected to follow the same pattern as Space-Time Smackdown did in Jan 2025. The release time is 12am CT/1am ET/6am GMT/4pm AEST. For those in PT, the set releases on April 29th at 10pm.

You can see a precise countdown to the release of Space-Time Smackdown below.

There are no expected changes to the usual launch lineup, but for Premium users of the game who plan to buy a lot of packs, it might be worth waiting a couple of days until May 1 to make the most of the new rewards and missions that drop the start of each month, so you aren’t buying extra packs to get all the goodies.

Outside of that, with two packs to pick from and over 100 cards to find, we can’t wait to see what decks rise from this new expansion set and how the new cards affect older decks. Like we mentioned before, Rare Candy could allow decks like Charizard ex to see a resurgence, so long as there’s a search card in the future to find the Rare Candy and the cards you need.

Rare Candy was a surprise inclusion, considering it’s a TCG-made card that’s popular in the physical game, now moving over to digital. We can only wonder what other physical cards could get the digital treatment moving forward, as the game seems to align more with the physical media.