The game appears to operate more on the fundamental idea that it's an advertising system to get folks to go out and buy the real cards, since you can plug decks and booster packs in digitally to enhance your collection.īut even without the 'MTX', TCG Live has incorporated a modern Battle Pass akin to what you'd see in games as thematically different as Call of Duty and several popular MOBAs. We also love that TCG Online lacked microtransactions, which is why we're thrilled that Pokemon TCG Live also has zero microtransactions. You climb a Reward Ladder every week that starts with mediocre prizes, but by the tail end, really pays off. You earn points (of various currency-based nomenclatures) from battling players, which makes sense. Considering the app's been around for nearly a decade, it's actually pretty good. There's nothing wrong with how Pokemon TCG Online handled rewarding players for sticking with the game, per se.

Once that's been squared away, though, we'll have a snappier interface that simulates real-world Pokemon TCG duels better than TCG Online ever could.

Once they're in, Expanded will feel more, well, expansive. Per The Pokemon Company's resource pages, we know that X & Y and Black & White cards will be added into Live's framework later, but as of this writing, they're out. That is to say, Expanded currently encompasses only as far back as the Sun & Moon sets. It keeps more competitive matches from blurring into a billion dicey strategic propositions.Įxpanded is effectively the option to ignore that and request those billion ideas, though you should know in advance it's more like a million. Every year, some of the oldest expansions are removed from the Standard Rotation, generally maintaining meta-wide equilibrium and centering things on the current era. Standard operates identically to TCG Online, as it is indeed a universal concept. What we have now is Standard and Expanded, the bread and butter of the Pokemon Trading Card Game. It's not our place! But we don't miss them.

If you miss these formats, we do apologize we don't mean to sound like we're passing judgment. What's worse, the existence of Legacy contributed to Pokemon TCG Online's somewhat overlong early-play phase, in which fresh players are stuck with a collection of weak cards that don't exactly raise the pulse in the middle of the action. It was a balancing act of sorts, forcing veteran players to leave their powerful Pokemon off to the side to give newer fans a fighting chance. The novelty of going head-to-head with below-average cards wore off fast, or at least, it did for us. Theme, on the other hand, reduced the playing field to the pre-made starter decks from TCG Online, and to be frank, they weren't great. There was fun to be had, but it was essentially little more than a time machine to a very specific era. At first blush, that makes it sound like a net win for the old and a net loss for the new, but let's hone in on what's gone: Legacy and Theme, the former of which tasked players with tapping into only older cards, and then only from the HeartGold & SoulSilver and Black & White generations. Pokemon TCG Online had a wider array of battle formats.

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