OPEN LETTER - FAO Who ever is responsible for the ptcg:

Foreword I concede that natural obsalescence is a thing; and it is indeed to some degree acceptably 'Natural' but - There's a blatant strategy in the design of Pokemon sets which rolls over around every 18 months. RetCon-Based Limited formats are a cop out for bad design - Wizards are Lazy, so are the Pokemon Company.

With great dismay and horror I have to write this review; I am a VERY BIG POKEMON FAN - I've actually studied and played it a lot in my spare time, recently the TCG, both online and in real life. I am not impressed. The game is actually a lot worse than when it began. The problems that the faced the game in the beginning (that were being adressed before WOTC/TPC made some more careless backroom decisions) had seemed to grow in a completely new direction.

Introduction It's already hard enough to find people to play with in person. Why are CCG/TCG Companies doing this to themselves? PTCG is holofoil toilet roll - why are people even still shilling this game?

The Pokemon Trading Card Game is sadly like a production line of deliberately and malicilously foil packaged stillborn babies covered in glitter in a bid to trick an impending media investigation. Every 9-12 months the whackjobs present a dissapointing mass of factory made or seemingly rejected material bringing forth news that make the last year worse than the last scraped from the cutting room floor - Truly a sad flopping corpse of the remains of a good game. A tear comes to my eye while a tribe of fat nerds and autitstic tweens maw and start gobbing at the end of Mario's Toilet Pipe greedily slurping at the mess that which is the current state of PTCGs artwork, smoothness, technicality and overall gameplay.

Useless and overly nominal cards compared to double and triple-strength EX/GX cards severly choke options for deck-building while mechanics or whole playstyles are phased in and out creating a chaotic environment of deliberate pressure where players are playing against the game itself, the game's rules, environment or even the whims of the Development Team or Booster Box more than the actual opponent. The promotional cards are flashily designed hiding the fact they are usually relatively weak and a lot of starter kits are not even worth buying. Players are probably better off buying the cards they need from someone else than buying boosters.

Supporter cards have also consistently yanked the game's speed back and forth since their inception with fettered distribution of once per turn card effects in each set; usually an oviously sloppy attempt to mitigate mistakes from the last retcon, but without fail, in each rotation predominantly supporter cards are released in a gimmicky fashion that gives a large advantage to who plays that card first or by that card synergising with a very limited pool of cards which again severely limits the amount of viable cards in an already choked format by forcing players to play to or around that card or their strategies.

Expanded formats are also plagued with overlapping cards, reprints and sometimes overlapping mechanics. Expanded Formats usually ends up with a banlist quickly exposing their lack of cohesivness by blatant lack of forward thinking in their design.

Overall the game has lost its sense of finesse entirely as the game focusses more on flash than style or substance by devolving into what is now a turn-based fighting game that you can play without thinking about with a maximum of 5 potential decks or "characters" - which actually means for the 6 months at the end of the roatation. In competitive play; Tournaments usually only consist of one deck, one counter and whoever can't access those.

This kind of gameplay does actually reward teching cards, but oh no there's no format that uses a side-deck online.

PTCGO's art style is awful and cheap, the cards also float at an annoying speed; it's deliberately time consuming. What the hell is that music. The player interaction, especially the trading and online chat are unintuitive and badly synchronised. It also takes too long to load for such a low-spec game. It's free and it's still bad.

Ending Wizards can't be trusted with anything to do with numbers and a table, they just bloat, shill, bloat, shill etc TPC can't be trusted, they're probably puppets now; I worry about Sword and Shield. You're both becoming creepy like Nintendo. - Give the liscence to someone else please.

I'm gonna wipe your arses and do an audit of every set taking them to pre-TPC-era scale - Call it a Fan-Game.

PTCGAudit