A big change is coming to the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pokemon TCG, as it is finally coming to mobile with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pokemon: Trading Card Game Live. A total refresh of the previous TCG Online, which is shutting down just before launch, it'll feature new character customization, battle passes, and a streamlined interface.
Here are the top five things we want to see when Pokemon: Trading Card Game Live's beta begins later this year.
5 Full Collection Transfers From TCG Online ♊ 👍
Live's predecessor, Online, has been around for a very long time now, having launched back in 2012. With almost ten years of expansion releases since then, players have built up huge collections.
However, The Pokemon Company has announced that from Online to Live will have a few big caveats. Most cards are limited to one playset of four cards, with the rest simply vanishing into the aether. Even if four cards are enough to play with, people cherish their collections, and having cards they may have traded for in Online effectively get deleted in an enforced account migration doesn't feel great.
At the very least, cards over that four should be converted into currency in Live, as it will with unopened packs and cosmetics. There needs to be something to acknowledge people will be losing a lot in the switch, otherwise, players will feel this new version isn't worth getting invested in.
4 Easy Cꦐard Crafting
It's impossible to look at Pokemon TCG Live and not draw comparisons with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Magic the Gathering: Arena. A beginner-friendly digital adaptation with a more limited card pool with mobile support and battle passes, both have a lot in common. One thing Live shouldn't borrow from Arena is its card crafting system. In Arena, packs can sometimes reward you with 'wildcards', that can be used to craft other cards you might need.
The problem with this is that wildcards are fairly hard to come by, especially Rare and Mythic Rare ones. Building a new deck can take dozens of wildcards, and only those who spend large amounts of money each month can hope to keep up. Although it will let you redeem codes from physical booster packs, which makes getting cards a lot easier, Live needs to make crafting more accessible for digital-only players than Arena. It could take inspiration from Hearthstone and allow you to break down cards you don't need, or use the most common of its microtransaction currencies for it like Legends of Runeterra.
3 🌳 Support For The Legacy Format
By far the most controversial part of Live's announcement is the news it won't be supporting the Legacy format, which includes cards from 2012's 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:HeartGold and SoulSilver up to today. Even Expanded support won't be in there at launch, leaving the only format playable the current Standard rotation of cards from Sword & Shield onwards. While this ties in with wanting to keep people's entire collections, the lack of Legacy support is a more serious issue. Pokemon TCG Online was built on Legacy, and many people's collections include HeartGold & SoulSilver cards.
This isn't a case of excess cards being lost, entire expansions will be wiped from people's accounts. HeartGold & SoulSilver, Unleashed, Undaunted, Triumphant and Call of Legends will all be gone. Collections aside, Legacy is still a popular format. Maybe not as much as Standard and Expanded, but it has its own player base, complete with . With Online shutting down before the launch of Live, these players will be left without any way of playing the format they enjoy.
2 Trading
One of the best things about TCG Online was how it allowed players to trade cards. Unfortunately, there are no plans for Live to have a similar feature. TCG Online's trading feature was immensely popular, with an entire secondary market popping up around it to make brewing decks and completing collections more accessible. More importantly, trading is a core element of not only the Trading Card Game, but Pokemon as a brand.
Whether it's trading Pokemon or trading cards, local swap meets, or Surprise Trade, exchanging Pokemon with others has been the entire point of the franchise since the very beginning. While the lack of trading in Live makes sense – people selling Online cards for real money was widespread, despite technically being against the terms of service – its removal coming at the same time as the introduction of heavy microtransactions and battle passes does leave something of a sour taste for many players.
1 ✱ 🤪 A Switch Version
Live is meant to be a new era for the TCG, with a fancy new digital client, ongoing support for new expansions, and new platforms to play on. Why, then, is it not coming to the Nintendo Switch? It is the perfect platform for TCGs, combining the touch screen and portability of a mobile with the processing power and larger screen of a PC. It's not as though Nintendo and The Pokemon Company are opposed to bringing free-to-play games to the Switch either, with the recent launch of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pokemon Unite proving there is a demand for it.
An ongoing problem with the Pokemon TCG is that it feels disconnected from the video games. It hasn't had a digital adaptation on a Nintendo platform outside of Japan since the GameBoy Color game. Having a new TCG game, developed in-house (rather than Online, which was made by Dire Wolf Digital) and freely available on the same platform as the core games would have been an absolute home run.