Fair Warning: this post is about 3.3 years old, so some of the information might be a bit dated. On the other hand, this post was last modified about 3.2 years ago, so maybe it's up-to-date after all. In any case, please keep all this in mind while reading. Thanks for understanding!
A Quick Diversion:

Late night update: I’ve finally added the McDonald’s Promos page over on the sidebar under “Report”. You can also just click here to visit the page; this has more info on top of what I cover in the post below. Enjoy!

 

The Actual News:

When I get home I’ll make a more detailed page about all this, but in the mean time, I’m here to share with you that McDonald’s officially began their “Pokémon 25” Happy Meal promotion today! Or maybe it was yesterday? Either way, your’s truly went over to his local Mickey D’s to get in in the action, and discovered a few interesting tidbits:

  • Most important of all: McDonald’s is making sure that there are enough Happy Meal cards for the children it was intended for, so they are NOT allowing adults to simply buy the packs in bulk. You can ONLY get them in a Happy Meal.
    • At least, that’s how it worked at my local restaurant… I guess that’s also how I was able to get any cards to begin with, seeing as other McDonald’s had apparently ran out of packs almost right away.
    • Also fortunately too, they at least didn’t outright require adult guests to have children with them in order to buy the Happy Meals. I mean, I suppose that would be a fair act of last resort to make sure they have enough to go around, but the fact that they still had plenty today hopefully means they won’t need to go THAT far.
  • The Happy Meal—which is shaped like Pikachu—contains a few items, which you can see in the picture above. No toys however, unlike previous McDonald’s Pokémon promos. These include:
    • A folded sticker sheet with two different images of either Gen 1-4 starters or Gen 5-8 starters, plus Pikachu
    • A double-sided blank environment so you can put the stickers on them
    • A pack of 4 Pokémon TCG cards
    • A lightly sealed cardboard holder for everything, which includes a coloring page printed on the backside
  • The pack itself contains the following:
    • Four cards, one of which is holofoil
    • The holofoil card is added in separately from the other three normal cards, meaning it’s possible to get a holofoil version of a normal card in the same pack
    • The cards themselves make up a 25-card set; this set is made up of all three starters from all eight generations (so 3 × 8 = 24), plus Pikachu.
    • The cards are ordered first by type then by Gen. So Grass Starters are #1-8, Fire Starters are #9-16 and Water Starters are #17-24. Then Pikachu is #25.
    • Oh, and for some reason, the cards use “BW/XY”, “Sun & Moon” AND “Sword/Shield” card styles. I don’t know why, unless they were all reprints and the designers were just too lazy to update all the cards to the current “Sword & Shield” format (of which only the Gen 8 Pokémon use).

That’s about it! I think it’s a really cute promotion, maybe a bit better than previous McDonald’s Pokémon promos, which only included ONE card per toy. Four cards definitely helps make the cards a bit easier to collect, but even then I was able to at least collect all of the very first McDonald’s Pokémon promo cards… which I seem to have misplaced somewhere. Errrmmm….

Anyways, if you want to see what everything looks like in greater detail, I will be making some high quality scans of everything as soon as I can. In the meantime, check out the Twitter videos I made of what I got:

One other plan of mine is to scan in the “Pokémon 25” logo so you can make your own 25th Anniversary fakes! How ’bout that??

Okey-dokey, that’s all I have to share right now. See you next time!