Pokémon TCG Live App Review

I started pokemonTCGLive 40 days ago, and I wanted to talk about my experience with the game and write up what I think about it. I’ve played exclusively on a phone, so if the PC version is drastically different, then I’m not the one to ask about it.

My first experience with the Pokémon TCG was collecting the first gen sets as a kid, just collecting them, not playing. I remember my dad taking us to Toys R Us and there being a big bin of cards. I believe at this point the Fossil and Jungle sets were out, and my younger sisters picked up a couple packs of each. I on the other hand, for whatever reason, picked up the Muk structure deck and I was devastated when I opened it up and discovered I had so many copies of the same cards while my sisters got many different Pokémon. The Team Rocket set was the last set I had bought packs for, and I still vividly remember opening the packs in the back of my dad’s car and getting Dark Dragonite and Dark Jolteon, two amazing looking cards even by today’s standards. For some reason after that, I stopped getting new cards, though I kept up with the video games for some time after.

A decade or so ago I had my first experience with the TCG when I played an emulator of the original Gameboy tcg game. It was fun. I wanted more, but i didn’t know about or there wasn’t a translated version of the Japanese exclusive sequel, and the first iteration of the mobile app was IOS exclusive, which I was Android at the time. When I did get access to an IOS device, Pokémon TCG had fallen off my radar.

Moving on to other TCG I’ve dabbled with, Yu-Gi-Oh was the main focus of my life after I quit playing Final Fantasy 11. I’ve played Yu-Gi-Oh competitively at locals and a few tournaments, Ive played MTG very casually, played Hearthstone for a good chunk of time until it turned into an even heavier RNG simulator, and both Yu-Gi-Oh mobile games, Master Duel and Duel Links, with Duel Links being my main game still playing to this day, though it’s stagnated pretty heavy the last month as Konami forces Rush Duels into the game.  I even played the Dragon Ball Z card game for a short stint. I actually still have the gold foil saiyan saga character promos for that, actually. With all that tcg experience, I can’t say I came into Pokémon TCG Live completely fresh. Each game taught me skills and gave me experience that gave me a leg up in Pokémon, as well as having a passing knowledge of the game itself through general osmosis over the years.

Before I get into my experience with Pokémon TCG Live, I have to get the worst out of the way, because it’s the most prominent, unavoidable, damning thing about the game; Pokémon TCG Live runs terribly. Glitches, inefficient, bare bones. On the phone, the app devours battery life and for absolutely no reason. There’s no cool animations, amazing soundtracks, or cutscenes. The game does nothing special, nothing more than the absolute minimum. If I didn’t think it was the developers just not giving a damn or being lazy because they think the Pokémon name will carry them, I’d have assumed they were running a dozen insidious background apps while I played, or were using my device to farm cryptocurrency.

I can’t play a single game on my lunch break without coming out of it with 25% less battery. It’s laughable how badly the game performs and that alone stops me from suggesting the game to other people. No matter how good the game can be, there is no excuse for it. If you’re looking for just any game to play to fill time, look elsewhere. This game does not deserve your download click. However… if you’re looking for the official Pokémon TCG experience, then you really don’t have any other option, and the following part of my review will presume you’re a part of the latter group.

Starting out: the game doesn’t really tell you much of anything. Gameplay you can figure out through playing easily enough, especially if you search up some simple tutorials. The game itself is easy to get into while getting a grasp of the finer details takes further study. Digital card games are pretty lenient in that they often show you what moves you can make and absolutely don’t allow you to do things you can’t. However, it’s everything else about the game that needs a tutorial. What’s the difference between purple gems, gold coins, and tokens? How do you use tokens? How do you get tokens? Can I really not buy gems? How do I find my cards? There’s a lot of questions left unanswered and the majority of them are related to the app itself, not the card game.

Gems are what you use to buy new cards. There are a lot of packs and a lot of cards, and  there is absolutely no good way to look through them all, but that’s ok. It’s incredibly stupid to actually buy packs with gems. The game does not want you buying packs. Don’t even look at what’s in packs. Don’t check the store, or sort through all the different packs. You’ll be wasting your time. Aside from the battle pass, and perhaps a specific structure deck for a deck you have in mind, there is only one product you should spend your gems on and that’s the Shadow Rider Calyrex VMAX battle deck. It’s an incredible investment for something that probably won’t net you what you want at first, but once you’ve bought your second  and especially your 3rd, you’ll be rolling in tokens, which should be the only way you get new cards. True, if you’re in it for pulling cards from packs you get none of that, but there are so many cards in a set and gems are a premium and packs are horrible expensive! I have opened over 70 packs of Obsidian Flames, which are given out for free as you climb the battle pass ranks, and I was still occasionally pulled non-holo common cards I didn’t have- granted, the game separates holo and basic versions of the same card separately.

Gems take a good bit of patience to gather, after you run through your initial start-up gems, BUT the game, at least when I started up, gives you really good start into a really decent meta-ready deck. Just a few minor changes and you can dominate the early ranks. After playing the other card games I have, to me it’s just insane that the game gives you as much as it did. But when you look at the purpose behind the app is, it starts making a lot of sense.

The game is not used to make money, which is likely why they’ve barely put any effort into updating and fixing and keeping the thing running. You can’t pay real money for gems, even.  No, this game seems to solely exist to promote the physical card game. It gives you these great decks that could potentially cost you hundreds of dollars to build- thousands if you acquire all your cards through packs. The physical card game even gives away a free tcglive pack with every purchase. And to be honest, it worked a little on me. I hadn’t realized how amazing some of the artwork was on some of the cards- cards I’d likely never pull from a pack in real life. But I don’t have any urge to try and pick up the game and play it irl. I’m too old with too little time to try and find the time to play the game on a table with people. Maybe when my kids get a little older, we’ll dive a little deeper, but I’ll still buy a pack every so often just to see what I get. It’s still baffling that they don’t try to profit from the game, though. But since when does anything the Pokémon Company does makes sense?

The game itself is easy enough to understand. The rules are simple, the effects and attacks are stated clearly. It’s deceptively simple. Anyone can pick up a deck and claim a few prizes, but it’s not the first few prizes you claim that wins the game, it’s the last, and that last prize can take a lot of thought and skill and experience and luck to claim. A lot of wins come from knowing what your opponent’s deck does. That’s true of any TCG. A new player will lack that knowledge off the bat, and a game that has you claiming four of your opponents prizes can swiftly turn into your loss because you didn’t prioritize taking out their specific set-up pieces. And I’ve claimed quite a few wins from an opponent on my first turn with my United Wings deck because they were probably used to facing decks that don’t attack on their first turn so they set one active Pokémon, no benched, and pass, only for me to manage a 100+ damage attack on turn 2 and claim a victory (or they just were unlucky enough to not have another to play)

Luck is a massive requirement in the game, but it’s something you also have to plan for when building a deck. Sure, you can Believe In The Heart of the Cards and hope you open with all your combo pieces- and hope they don’t use the Iono trainer card that shuffles it all back into your deck- or you can build your deck with one important word in mind, a word that’s the end all be all: Consistency. Sure, your deck could pull off an amazing win if you draw all the right cards, but how often do you do that? One out of five times? One out of ten? You want a deck that can pull off what you need it to as close to 100% of the time as you can.  This is where my United Wings deck stumbles. Sure, I can sometimes end my first turn with my Pokémon doing 150+ damage, but often times I’m left with cards that can’t even knock out a 60hp starter.

Knocking out your opponent’s Pokémon with your own Mon’s attack is how you claim prizes, but Pokémon attacks are only partly how you win. You’ll need to rely on trainer cards to really pull your weight around. Cards that can refresh your hand or disrupt your opponent’s hand are essential, and items such as the pokeball cards will allow you to grab the cards you need to build your bench up. Boss’s Orders is a trainer card that allows you to forcibly switch your opponent’s active Pokémon with one of their benches Pokémon - your choice. It’s in my newbie opinion, one of the strongest cards in the game. Your opponent might have a charmander on the bench and a rare candy and Charizard in his hand, so all you have to do is Boss’s Order his Charmander and knock it out, stopping your opponent from playing the powerful Charizard EX for at least another turn.

Consistency and Disruption. Those are your two paths to victory. It’s not enough just to overpower them (most of the time), the best way to victory is to stop your opponent from playing the game. Putting it that way, that makes the game sound not fun at all, and indeed, you don’t have to look farther than Yu-Gi-Oh tcg to see the extreme of that, where an opponent will spend minutes setting up an unbreakable board full of cards that will negate any effects you try to play, with your only recourse being to negate his effects before they can negate yours. It’s the reason I moved away from Yugioh TCG and went to Duel Links, but don’t worry, Pokemon players, this game is far far far from those days, and likely never will reach that stage thanks to the rotating sets that see old cards pushed out for new ones.

Rotating sets is one of the factors that kept me from getting into Pokémon. You mean these cards I spent money and time obtaining will eventually be worthless? In a competitive setting, yes. And while I can’t speak on how that makes me feel with the physical card game, I’m ok with it for the digital game, since the game does make it incredibly easy to get new cards, and it really does keep the game fresher and more fun to play over the long term.

So what did I start the game with? To no one’s surprise who’s played the game since Obsidian Flame’s release, I started with the Charizard EX deck and made improvements to it. It was a great deck that got me a lot of wins, but on top of using it a lot, I saw it a lot- the price of being an easily accessible deck- so I quickly wanted to try something else. I spent the rest of my tokens to make a Giratina Lost Box deck. This one also netted me wins, but I really didn’t like the play style so I quickly abandoned it. I wanted a fun deck, but one that still had the ability to win, so I moved to United Wings. This took a little bit to complete, because I was low on tokens, but eventually I got it. I love United Wings deck and I’m still tweaking it every now and again to maximize its potential, but the deck I’ve had the absolute most fun with is a Dialga deck with Magnezone engine, which the game had already supplied me some cards for, and my own upgrades to the Charizard deck had given me most of the others. Most people won’t build as many decks as I have, especially so early in the game, but deck building has always been the thing I have the most fun doing, and this game does allow for easy access to the cards to do so- I’ve just had to do a tremendous amount of research online because the tools in the game that would allow me to do so are all non-existent.

Just a few days ago, I got my first new set release in the 151 expansion. It was a small set, but it still had a few cards I wanted, and the game’s crafting system allowed me to easily pick up the few cards that I needed to upgrade my already existing decks, though I did have to wait a week to farm enough gems to buy another structure deck to allow me to gain enough tokens to craft another brand new deck that focused around the new Alakazam EX card. I haven’t played it much, and I’m still fine tuning it, but it doesn’t seem like a meta-contender. But that’s okay for me, as it is a fun deck (for me. My opponents likely have far less fun since it’s got a bit of a stall engine), and I’m not using it for ranked.

Speaking of Ranked, when iI first started the game, the current ranked ladder was just a week away from resetting, but even playing very casually, I managed to climb from the bottom up to Great League, where I stopped because I knew I wasn’t going to get to the next tier before the reset. After that, I found myself in a full cycle, and still only found myself getting to Great League before I stopped. It’s not that I couldn’t get enough victories, I absolutely could, it’s just that I wasn’t having much fun doing so. This is where the ease of access to Meta-decks backfires for me. When everyone can run high-powered meta decks, even the lowest tiers are full of them. In yugioh, the mid-tiers are where I hover, because that’s where I can play fun, experimental decks and the penalty for losing is so inconsequential, a loss doesn’t mean much. But in this game, once you get to the second teir, one win nets you 20 points, but a loss takes away 10. That is way too harsh for such an early rank, and it means I’m typically playing my more fun decks in unranked. But hey, that’s just my personal preference. I know plenty of people that just winning is fun, so for you, this game has set you up nicely.

To wrap everything up, if you’re just looking for a digital tcg to get into, stay away from Pokémon TCG Live. If you’re looking to play Pokémon TCG in a digital format, then aside from fanmade stuff, it’s your only choice. And that’s really all I can say on the matter.