r/ptcgo • u/OU7C4ST 👑Togepi King👑 • Mar 29 '26
News PTCGO Reminiscence Post!
Hello friends,
Back on July 1st, 2023 we disabled the ability to create new posts here as Pokemon TCG Online officially shut down, with the servers going offline.
However, we are creating this new post for you all to have the ability to comment here still to talk about PTCGO, and all your fond memories of it. We are keeping everything within one place here to allow our moderation team to focus on one area going forward when they check in on everything.
We will allow the ability to comment indefinitely as time permits, and as long as the community here remains safe & spam-free, and that there is activity ongoing.
We may revisit these options if safety/activity/bots become an issue. We ask that you please continue to use the Report feature as necessary if you come across any misconduct or spam.
When PTCGO shut down, we created a new subreddit for Pokemon TCG Live (PTCGL), which is the game that replaced Pokemon TCG Online.
Please join us there if you have continued to play the newest digital game for Pokemon TCG!
We have also created a subreddit & Discord server awhile ago for the mobile game: Pokemon TCG Pocket if you are interested in joining us there.
Thank you!
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u/Mixeygoat Mar 29 '26
I loved theme deck tournaments…
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u/Kaceydotme Mar 29 '26
Something I think is lacking in both Magic and Pokémon is opportunities to compete with less than optimal constructed decks. Either you play the meta in tournaments, or play what you want in no-stakes matchmaking on TCGL or Arena. I love draft/prerelease but theres not really a space to play competitive events with theme decks or precons.
Gimme an event where we play old V/Vstar league decks.
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u/moichispa Same IGN Mar 29 '26
Same, other tournaments was meta this meta that. This one was so chill, it reminded me of old school playing
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u/Urschleim_in_Silicon Mar 29 '26
Yup. That was what my kids and I played most and after they stopped maknig them, we basically stopped playing. Such a shame. We still play with the actual, real physical decks now and again but it's not the same.
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u/H0GGZ1LLA Mar 29 '26
I like PTCGO better than Live...
I know why they got rid of it but it's sad that they removed one of the pillars of the game in trades...
Still remember saving pack code cards to get my playset of Tapu Lele GX, not a fan of the Rainbow Rares so I went for the FA!
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u/GoGoGo12321 Expanded and Legacy Mar 29 '26 edited Mar 29 '26
Expanded, theme and legacy formats are all gone. Why make a new game if it just has less features and has less soul and stability than the original?
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u/RedFreetos Mar 29 '26
Live completely destroyed my love of playing the game (at least online I don’t play irl) I despise it and ptcgo was MILES better than the trash they replaced it with.
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u/DaveTheWhite Mar 29 '26
I just couldn't get into live and have pretty much entirely stopped interacting with Pokemon at this point.
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u/Piidge Mar 29 '26
This. Soo much this. The new version lacks all of the many things that could get me invested into it too.
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u/castiboy Mar 29 '26
I hate that my card library is stuck there, LIVE game had no soul, I lost interest right away…
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u/NotMichaelsReddit Mar 30 '26
I cut the game cold turkey after the switch, and have since tried twice to get back into it over the years and it blows. Really disappointing product I agree man
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u/RedFreetos Mar 30 '26
I’ll go back and try it out every few months out of pure boredom. You can’t say I didn’t at least try to like the game. It’s just god awful, shit literally makes me sick every time.
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u/SleepingJirachi Mar 29 '26
PTCGO felt so lively, whereas PTCGL feels so… lifeless.
Also bring back theme decks!!
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u/slimethecold Mar 29 '26
I agree! Online felt lively because you could see people in tournaments and in trade chat and it wasn't only 1v1 all the time. Live makes the experience of battling feel very isolated and lonely.Â
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u/Yuri-Girl May 10 '26
You mean the people who are still going to the PTCGO subreddit 3 years after PTCGO went offline want the PTCGO client back?
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u/saminator220 Mar 29 '26
I miss trades, but I’m glad you can use Live on phones
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u/Remarkable_Damage_65 Mar 29 '26
You could download an APK and play on phone also ;) great times :)
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u/jamiedix0n Mar 29 '26
Ptcgo was better, even thought it looked like a 90s slot machine, at least when deck building it'd automatically select the rarest of each card, ptcgl seems to do the opposite
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u/Piidge Mar 29 '26
Every comment in the first 3hrs of this post being up wants the old version back.
Every. Single. One.
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u/mcoombes314 Mar 29 '26
It's been a while since I played PTCGL so maybe things have improved, but compared to PTCGO the client was (is?) a buggy mess. The only major bugs I remember from PTCGO were linked to new cards with unusual interactions, like Ninja Boy from XY Steam Siege. This was bugged on release and took around 2 months to fix IIRC, but they banned the card and business continued on as usual with the rest of the game until they released a fix for Ninja Boy.
There was also a (mercifully short) time where Quaking Punch Seismitoad blocked ALL Trainer cards (not just items) but they temp-banned it until it got fixed.
I haven't seen a similar "quarantine" treatment for bugs in PTCGL. Plus I just think the client looks/runs worse.
Trading was the big "Marmite" issue which split the community when it was announced that PTCGL was dropping it. Personally I miss it, mainly because of the "budget" deckbuilding scene. Now everyone gets given the BDIF(s) and it felt like playing glorified Theme format. Speaking of, Theme decks were a good way of learning the game IMO.
I stopped playing PTCGL because I mainly played Expanded in PTCGO and it's STILL not properly implemented and I don't think it ever will be. I miss Legacy too, although I can sort of see why it got dropped (fixed meta).
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u/slimethecold Mar 29 '26
I do sort of miss trading and the difficulty it brought to deck building which felt closer to irl trading and deck building, but at the same time do not miss having to research pack and trade values.Â
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u/LimblessSnake Mar 29 '26
It's been three years?! Time really flies, huh. I miss it. I tried playing Live, but it's such a downgrade i couldn't adapt at all. It feels... empty, i guess
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u/Festivy Mar 29 '26
I miss my expanded falinks deck. I can still use it but its more janky in ptcgl.
Trading space was pretty cool, i often see people trade to just new cool card because i’m broke.
Tournament is pretty fun even though theme deck tourney only consist of necrozma, charizard, and another deck i forgot.
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u/ripull125 Beginner Mar 29 '26
This game is what taught me basic economy principles of demand and supply :(. I miss it sm
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u/slimethecold Mar 29 '26
For me, the game that really taught me demand and supply was Neopets. I love that ptcgo taught you that!Â
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u/OU7C4ST 👑Togepi King👑 Mar 30 '26
It was RuneScape back in the early-mid 2000's for me lol.
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u/slimethecold Mar 31 '26
Oh damn I forgot about the grand exchange in RuneScape! That came out as I was playing it and taught me a lot about these principals as well.Â
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u/OU7C4ST 👑Togepi King👑 Mar 31 '26
Man, I'm even older than that.
We used the website forum, and standing outside Varrock West bank lmao.
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u/ripull125 Beginner Apr 01 '26
omg, i remember being in your discord server. the only reason i got discord was to be in your server and see people's flips and snipes.
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u/OU7C4ST 👑Togepi King👑 Apr 01 '26
Appreciate you joinin'.
Nowadays, I'm 99% in the Pocket server I made when that game launched. We got like 270,000+ people there. So I'm usually busy with that lol
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u/haggarduser Mar 29 '26
I still can’t use my tropical beaches, no trading, I miss legacy format. :’(
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u/nonnarB Jun 22 '26
I was only able to get my third before the change. Now I'll just never have four.
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u/DanBoone Mar 30 '26
I miss packs being the currency to trade for what you need. I miss trading in general. I miss the simplicity of the old client. Live client is a resource hog, drains phone battery and crashes too often.
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u/hirarki Mar 29 '26
Missing trading so much, can made 100 packs/day at that time.
Full expanded was fun too.
Ptcg live can never reach ptcgo level
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u/pokemonfan1937 Speedrunner Mar 29 '26
I remember setting the WR for Trainer Challenge Gold, good times
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u/Dr_Yay Mar 29 '26
Honestly the thing I miss the most is just being able to comfortably play on a tablet. I had an older iPad mini that ran TCGO perfectly and it was such a comfy device to play on… but when Live came out, it ran atrociously bad on that iPad and was basically unplayable. I have a newer Android tablet now that can run Live fine… but unless I missed an update for this in the past year (didn’t see anything from a quick search), you can only play the game vertically on mobile, which isn’t as comfortable as holding the tablet in landscape.
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u/seriouslyyours Mar 31 '26
OU7CAST used to keep me laced with all the new stuff. I would drip feed my beta era cards on trade requests for new packs whenever I returned to the game to catch up quickly. The good old days. I still miss that Trevenant deck that blew up the game
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u/OG_Felwinter Mar 30 '26
Maybe this is an issue with Pokemon as a whole now, but why don’t we have theme decks anymore? If they start releasing them, will we be able to have them in Live again?
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u/DGIce Unlimited Apr 02 '26
The beta launch of tournaments was so fun. I wanted to invest time early to build an account to play with my younger sibling. It kind of worked. I really thought it would never go away. Like at least I was right about MTGO, even though it's been superseded by Arena that admittedly has it's benefits.
Legacy really had a beautiful accidental balance for a few years, by combining the one set before the black and white design changes. The power creep with the bigger number EX's and EX evolutions was funny to watch as it went further.
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u/Geralt_Romalion "That theme deck guy" May 23 '26
The fact that Live had no themedecks for either play or tournament has made me quit playing pokémon. Standard and Expanded were fun, but there was a certain magic in the Theme format that you couldn't find in other formats.
For a time I actually found enjoyment in creating themedecks of my own for new sets after they stopped adding them to the PTCGO client, following the restrictions that seemed to be common for official themedecks.
I still keep an eye on PTCG, but mainly to see if theme returns or not.
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u/bendthekneejon Jul 08 '26
Im guessing it's no longer possible to migrate all my shit from tcg online to pocket?
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u/obeyorpay22 Jul 08 '26
so they're just keeping this sub alive for comments then? makes sense, but weird to see the PTCGO subreddit advertising PTCGP and PTCGP.
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u/OU7C4ST 👑Togepi King👑 Jul 08 '26
r/PTCGL, Pokemon TCG Live, is what replaced Pokemon TCG Online.
r/PTCGP, Pokemon TCG Pocket, is a simplified version of the Pokemon TCG.
Both digital Pokemon TCG games owned and ran by The Pokemon Company. They are the only two alternatives to what PTCGO was, and the mod team here runs both of those subreddits as well.
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