Pokémon TCG Live

I was beyond excited for TCG Live when it was announced. Modernizing the official Pokémon Trading Card Game client, easing access to competitive cards, and finally bringing it to mobile checked all of my boxes! I wasn't able to join the beta immediately, but eventually caved and started playing via VPN. At the start, I really enjoyed it! It was no longer the same chore it was in TCGO to try and get the deck you want, and the battle pass provided a lot of incentive to keep playing. Unfortunately, the cracks started to show pretty quickly, and after only a few weeks, I couldn't convince myself to keep playing. I actually wanted to wait for the official release before I wrote my review, because I know there's a game I want to play in there somewhere. However, after waiting for almost a year, I couldn't keep it in anymore.

The Pokémon TCG Live client is The Pokemon Company International's attempt to translate the physical Pokémon Trading Card Game for online play via an internal development studio. The existing client, Pokémon TCG Online was produced by an external studio, giving TPCi less control over how it is designed and maintained. On paper, PTCGL brings all kinds of improvements to the table that would make PTCGO completely obsolete. Unfortunately, a myriad of technical issues and a lack of sufficient communication from the developers really put a damper on what should have been an exciting new way to play the most popular card game in the world. The saddest part for me was that, even though I wanted to look past the bugs and give the game a fair shot for what it did right, the server issues made even that impossible.

Two of the biggest complaints I see online for this game are that its aesthetic is bland or generic, and that certain cards behave incorrectly. While these complaints are valid, as a developer, I recognize that both of these are exactly the kind of thing you use a beta release to discover so you can correct it before the official release. Plus, the Pokémon TCG can be incredibly complex, so I would never expect anyone to get all of the interactions between every card programmed correctly right off the bat. These are both things that I can deal with just fine, as long as I can still play the game. Unfortunately, even that became increasingly difficult. When I initially started playing, I was completing the daily quests every day without fail. I loved working my way through the battle pass and earning new cards to expand my collection, but it started to get very difficult to find a match to play in the first place. Despite knowing for a fact that there were plenty of other people playing at the same time, I would regularly experience wait times between 2-5 minutes each, with a few searches going up to 20 minutes before I just quit for the day. Compared to the 2-5 seconds it takes to find a match in PTCGO, these times were unacceptable, and ultimately the reason I stopped playing.

I had hope that these issues would be fixed eventually, so I waited months for the official release. Now that I have given up waiting and started writing my review, there is a rumor that the game will actually release worldwide this month, but it's too late to bite my tongue now. I know there's a fantastic client somewhere in PTCGL, and I hope that's what we see with the worldwide release. The thought of just crafting the new cards I want instead of trying to track their value on the trade market remains very enticing, but not if I can never actually use any of them. For now though, we thankfully still have PTCGO.

The game is available for PC and Mac here (as of 11/5/22): https://tcg.pokemon.com/en-us/tcgl/
The game is available for Android here (as of 11/5/22): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pokemon.pokemontcgl&hl=en_US&gl=US
The game is available for iOS here (as of 11/5/22): https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/pok%C3%A9mon-tcg-live/id1557962344

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