McDonalds has Pokemon TCG card packs, if you're lucky

Just in case you're not sure if you've celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Pokemon franchise enough, there's more. McDonalds and the Pokemon Company announced this week that they're ready to roll with packs of cards. McDonald's Happy Meals will include one 25th Anniversary Special Edition McDonald's booster pack of Pokemon Trading Card Game cards each.

If you want to Catch Em All, prepare yourself for a nightmare of fast food proportions. Each pack has 4 cards. There are 24 "first partner Pokemon" from each of the different regions in the Pokemon universe, plus one Pikachu. Each of the 25 cards can be found in standard and foil iterations.

So there are a total of 50 cards available in this set, and you get 4 cards per Happy Meal pack. You're going to need to buy at least 13 Happy Meals to get the whole set, and that's only if you've got the most fantastic luck, and only THEN if the packs include no repeats and 12.5 different combinations of cards.

Basically the situation suggests that you're not going to Catch Em' All without trading and/or buying cards from eBay. One might want to take a peek at the prices of similar cards that've been released by McDonalds in collaboration with The Pokemon Company in the past to... decide on your path from here.

It's also quite likely that McDonalds locations across the United States will run through the cards in relatively quick fashion. They run out of some of the most nonsense toys by the end of the month on a normal month – this might well be a heck of a mess. Cross your fingers and don't get your hopes up too high right out the gate!