Hey everyone,
I know a lot of Aussies are traveling to South Korea at the moment. If you (or your kids) are into Pokémon cards, you probably know that tourist traps like Myeongdong are full of resellers charging double for booster packs.
But it gets worse: a lot of these tourist stalls sell "searched packs." For those who don't know, this is a scam where shady resellers weigh or tamper with the booster packs to find the ones containing the rare, valuable holographic cards. They keep the rare ones for themselves and sell the "dead" packs to unsuspecting tourists and kids.
To avoid this, you need to buy from South Korea's official Pokémon TCG vending machines. They sell untampered packs at strict retail cost. The only problem? The official machine database is 100% in Korean and almost impossible for foreigners to navigate.
I got so frustrated trying to track these down that I decided to build a tool to fix it. Full disclosure: I completely "vibe coded" this with AI to solve my own problem (so please forgive any slightly janky code under the hood!), but it works perfectly.
What it does:
It’s an interactive, English-translated map of all 178 official vending machines across South Korea.
You tap "Locate my nearest machine", and it uses your phone's GPS to find the closest one to you.
Tapping "Get Directions" bounces you straight into your native Google/Apple maps for walking directions.
Link: https://www.eoinstanley.com/pokemon
There are zero ads, zero affiliate links, and I'm not making a cent off this. Just a completely free tool built out of spite for scalpers and scammers.
If you're heading to Seoul soon and want to grab some cheap, legitimate Korean booster packs without getting ripped off, bookmark it. Hope it helps a fellow Aussie out! Cheers.
Note to self, don’t get kids into Pokémon cards.