Pokémon TCG Live: the format you are actually playing, and the log the app hands you

What you are allowed to play, and what is about to leave

Ranked play on Pokémon TCG Live uses the Standard format, the same one official tournaments use. A card is legal if the single letter printed at its bottom left is one of the letters currently allowed: today H, I and J, which comes to 1,963 different cards.

This is the most useful thing to know before you build anything at all. About once a year the oldest letter still allowed stops being allowed, and every card carrying it leaves the format on the same day. Next time it is H, and that takes 864 cards with it — 44% of everything you can play right now.

In practice that means a deck can be excellent in March and unplayable in October without a single one of its cards having changed. On rotation day the client simply stops letting you select a deck that holds an illegal card. Much better to see it coming than to find out by clicking.

So get into the habit now: when you add a card to a deck, read the letter. Between two cards that do the same job, the one with the newer letter buys you an extra season for the same effort. It costs nothing to check, and it saves rebuilding everything.

What you will not find on this page is what a deck costs. We hold no price data of any kind, and a made-up figure here would be believed. What we can count is what makes a deck expire, and that is the paragraph above.

Where the log lives, and the habit worth building

Inside the game itself, in the log tab. Open it, select all of the text, copy it. It is ordinary text on screen, so it copies like any other text, and there is nothing to install or enable first.

Do it before you go back to the menu. That text is not saved anywhere once the game is closed, which means the game you most want to understand — the one you just lost in a way you cannot explain — is exactly the one you are most likely to lose forever. Copy first, be annoyed afterwards.

A long game runs to several hundred lines, and that is fine. The client writes down everything, including a great deal that does not matter. You are not meant to read it. You are meant to keep it.

There is nothing private in there. Screen names and card names, and that is the lot: no password, no email, nothing that would let anybody near your account.

What a battle log actually contains

One line for each thing that happened: a draw, an Energy attached, an evolution, an attack, a damage total, a Pokémon knocked out, a Prize card taken. Both players, in order, from the coin flip to the last Prize.

The most useful part is the damage. Every attack comes with the game’s own working out: the base attack, Weakness, whatever an Energy or a Tool adds, and the total. That is a sum somebody else can redo and compare. When both answers land on the same number, you know the game has been read correctly — and when they do not, you would much rather be told than not.

The most misleading part is the draws. The log says "drew a card" without saying which, because your opponent never saw it. A card that was never revealed stays unknown to everybody, us included. That looks like a gap. It is actually what makes an honest comparison possible: nobody gets to peek.

And then there is what the log does not contain at all — what you were thinking, what you nearly played instead, how long you sat there. A log says what happened, never why. Filling that in is the part a coach does.

Turning a log into something you can act on

Read it line by line, rebuild the board on every turn, then go back to each moment where you had a genuine choice and play that turn out 300 times: once with the move you made, once with each of the others. What comes out the far end is the move that cost you the game.

Step one is putting an exact name to every card. Your log says "Absol", but several different cards are called Absol and they do not do the same thing. So the first job is working out which one was actually in front of you, out of a binder of 1,963 distinct cards counted across 20 Standard-legal sets on 31 August 2026.

Step two is the board. What was Active, who was waiting on the Bench, how much Energy each Pokémon carried, how much damage it had already taken. The damage sums get redone independently and both answers are shown side by side, so none of this rests on trust: on an ordinary game, twenty-five lines out of twenty-six land on exactly the same number, and the twenty-sixth is printed too.

Step three is the slow one. Wherever you had a real decision — attack or retreat, this card or that one — the game gets rewound to that exact point and played out 300 times per option, always with the same cards in hand and the same deck order. Change the shuffle and you are comparing your luck instead of your decision. Over a long game that is tens of thousands of turns played out.

Step four is the only one that matters to you: you walk away with one habit. One precise thing to look at the next time you are standing in that position. Just the one. That is how anybody gets better at this — a habit at a time.

One caveat, and it is not a small one. There are still cards whose text cannot be read yet. When too many of them turn up in a game, no overall score is given: the cards that got in the way are named, and the turns that are certain are still shown. A score worked out around a blind spot is worse than no score, because it teaches you the wrong habit.

Questions people ask

Which cards can I play in ranked on Pokémon TCG Live?

The Standard format ones, exactly as in an official tournament: cards whose regulation mark — the single letter at the bottom left — is one of H, I and J. That comes to 1,963 different cards, counted across 20 sets on 31 August 2026. At the next rotation the H cards go: 864 of them, 44% of the format.

Is Pokémon TCG Live free?

Yes. It gives you decks to start with, and you can play ranked without having spent anything. What a deck built card by card costs you is not something we will answer: we hold no price data, and a figure invented on a page like this one would be taken seriously.

Where is the battle log in Pokémon TCG Live?

In the game itself, in the log tab. There is no export button — open the tab, select all the text and copy it. Do that before returning to the menu, because leaving the game loses the text.

Does poko need access to my Pokémon TCG Live account?

No, never. poko does not talk to the game, does not sign in to anything and cannot touch a game in progress. It reads a piece of text you hand over yourself once the game is finished. That is also why it cannot break anything.

Is there anything sensitive in a battle log?

Screen names and card names. No password, no email address, nothing that gets anybody near your account. In poko it is read inside your browser and does not leave the device until you ask for it to.

Why does the log not say which card I drew?

Because your opponent did not see it. The log records what was shown at the table, so a draw stays "a card" unless some effect revealed it. That is a limit of the text itself rather than of anything reading it, and it applies to both players equally.

Which decks are people actually winning with right now?

That question is answered by tournament lists rather than by the client, which is why poko counts real decklists from tournament results and publishes one page per archetype. The cards in every list, the cards in half of them, and the number of lists behind each figure.

Can I have a game I won looked at?

Yes, and it is often the one that teaches most. A win hides two or three moves that should have cost you the game and did not, because nobody across the table punished them. Those are precisely the ones a stronger player punishes next time.

These pages are about the same corner of the game. If you came away from this one still wondering about something, start with one of them.