What were Pokemon Go Postcards for Anyway?

I mentioned the Vivillon event in Pokemon Go the other day.  The primary mechanic of the event is to pin… basically save… postcards.  When a friend sends you a gift you can click the pin button and save the location… all gifts are from the specific location of a Pokestop you’ve spun… which saves it to your postcard collection.

A gift from Taiwan, the pin button next to the open button

The feature has been around for at least a year at this point and seemed like a quaint idea.  I saved a few postcards over time from interesting looking distant Pokestops.

And then the Vivillon event hit, and now I save a postcard from every gift I get.  After a bit you need 15 postcards from a specific region to get another scatterbug to show up.  And since you need 2,250 scatterbug candies and get six from each if you throw the right berry (seven if you have some silver pinap berries around) you end up needing to pin a lot of postcards.

If you go entirely the postcard saving route, I think you need about 5K postcards to get all of the scatterbug candies to evolve all 18 Vivillon types.

And the postcard book holds 350.

So the postcard book has gone, for me, from a quaint little feature to a choke point.  Screw those interesting or exotic postcards!  I need to delete them by the hundreds to make room for my insatiable postcard needs.  Postcards are just now a vehicle that can get me to a specific goal.

So Niantic has managed to blow away that feature by introducing this mechanic without actually beefing it up to be able to handle the obvious through math potential need.  At a minimum it seems like a boost in size and a “delete all” button would be appropriate.

I am sure this is another case of devs not quite understanding how obsessive their customers can be.