The Current State Of Pokemon TCG Live

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Reasonably Effective podcast. I'm Penn Topps as always, Joe, my uncommon fossil. Well, glad to be here and looking forward to today's discussion. Yu-Gi-Oh and today we're talking about something that, you know, I imagine most people who watch this are somewhat familiar with. I'm somewhat familiar with. I think you're even more familiar with than I am. And that's Pokemon THD Live. There is some new information to talk about, some interesting new stuff. Nothing, you know, crazy, but we also just want to talk about of State of the Game, because I think it's. I just definitely have some thoughts on it. And I think you do as well. You know, a bit more about the history of it. And I also think there are some misconceptions about Live as well. Some things. I guess I'll start with the biggest thing that people. Or the two things that people get wrong about it. So the first one is this is actually. And this is weird, I don't know all the details, but it is made by the Pokemon company International, right. Tpci. And they are not the ones who make the car or who, like, you know, design the cars. Not the ones who, I mean, they are not the. They're international outside of Japan there. They don't make like Beckett So they are separate. There are two different things. They aren't the same, and people sometimes get that wrong. And then also I was just, you know, browsing through forums, and some people still call Live Pokemon TC Online, which admittedly Pokemon TC Live and Pokemon TC Online are like, not very descriptive names. Well, they are descriptive, I guess, but they're not very different or unique names. So that can be a little confusing. And even Beckett right. Pokemon is short for Beckett Monsters. So the different things like that are weird. Well, Yu-Gi-Oh And Beckett is Pokemon Trading Card Game Beckett Right. I think, Yu-Gi-Oh So the Pokemon Trading Card Game also includes Beckett The naming is weird. And then, you know, we can also, you know, you can rant about how they keep utilizing names like exs in different variations just to, you know, they don't really seem to worry about the confusion that these things cause. But in terms of. Yes, I mean, ptc, Pokemon TCG Live essentially replaced ptcgo. So they're kind of interchangeable, unlike something which I don't think we'll really be referencing. But like, just. I'm referencing now briefly, but like with Magic the Gathering, their. Their original was also Magic the Gathering Online, similar Pokemon Trading Card Game Online, and then they have Metric arena, the new one, but they both exist to this day. So therefore there are two different things that you do need to be careful of here. If you say ptcgo, everyone's going to understand what you're talking about. Right? Because you haven't had. No. Well, I don't know. Sometimes people. So one thing and we're going to be talking about this some, I think during the podcast. Sometimes people reference Pokemon DC Online in the past. Some people say, and I would say and this is what we're going to kind of talk about that some people like kind of wish that Pokemon DC Online was like still around instead of Pokemon TG Live for a while. I think Pokemon DC Online was clearly better than Pokemon THD Live despite the fact that obviously it was older. Right. It came before it. So I think that's definitely something that is a lot. I mean it's certainly, I would not say that Pokemon THG Live is clearly worse than Pokemon TCG Online was when it, when it ended or like right before it ended. But Yu-Gi-Oh you want to start with the letter or do you want to talk about history stuff first? I'll give like a few, a few things of a brief timeline point. So just going back looking at stuff. So it was in August of 2021. That's when live was first announced. So going back several years then it wasn't till February of 2022 then that live, the beta launched officially that was in, in Canada only if you were around or remember back to that. So we didn't have access to it then and their servers weren't prepared. So just partly just going to hit a few difficulties they've had along the ways too. You know, I guess it's good that there was good demand but they weren't prepared for took them until November of 2022. So February to November before the beta became globally available. It kind of was a thing that was pieced out slowly. I'm not going to talk about that that period of the beta before it was global because right now, because I wasn't involved with it, neither was 10 Topps and but it had a lot of problems. There was a lot of problems and the user base just kept dropping over that time period. I think partly why they had to keep expanding countries. They wanted just to keep enough users in it to engage it honestly because I think people played it and it didn't work. November it came out. Shortly after it came out. I, um, I, I, I, I have something in where I, I had a video that I released December 8th. So like three weeks after the global beta that Live breaks. And I believe that was the Elisa Sparkle problem. I could be wrong, but I know that was one of them. If you played Elisa Sparkle, which accelerates your fuse and strike energy, then the game would freeze up and the. The person that would. That played Elisa Sparkle would get the one-of-one and the other person would just sit there until eventually they had to say, concede for the loss. So and. And that went on. And MEW was a couple things. They. I think they gave out the deck and the battle pass at one point. They. It was the best. One of the best decks around at the time. And it just became a known glitch. And also unfortunately, which gets in the player base too. A lot of people were then were just building decks to take advantage of this and they would just play just to get these cheap wins, which was very unfortunate as well. So. So that was a negative there. Any comments about. About this, by the way? Yu-Gi-Oh so I think the first thing. Sorry, what was the. Oh, the first thing you mentioned was with Pokemon, you know, DC Live being announced. Right. And that was something that people were legitimately excited about. Pokemon DC Online was mediocre at best. It wasn't terrible. It was. Oh, it was like. It had some issues in terms of, you know, we'll kind of talk about. I don't know if we'll talk about this too much, but Pokemon DC Live doesn't run Zebra well in terms of. It can like run hot. I will say I've been playing some Magic, the Gathering arena that runs even hotter than Live. But Live has improved some and Magic also has more stuff going on. But Pokemon T SH Online would run pretty rough. We're not going to talk. We'll talk some about the trading system in Pokemon T SH Online, maybe that ran horribly. Most of Pokemon T SH Online ran better than Pokemon T Live, but. But not the. The trading was very slow. Right. It was an awkward system. We'll. We'll talk economy some. Yu-Gi-Oh it might have had some pluses, but Yu-Gi-Oh also if you remember the trading thing, like loading up the. The trays in the server. Oh, it's kind of painful, especially at times when it was busy because it would take like five minutes or so, maybe more, to load up all the trades. You clicked on a trade, it was way more than that. It could be like an hour. Okay. For me it may be 10 or 15 minutes. And then if you clicked on a trade and you wanted to do it, it had already been executed, it would crash and then you'd have to like restart it all. It Was it was. It was rough. Yu-Gi-Oh Maybe it wasn't that. I don't know. Maybe it just felt like that. But Yu-Gi-Oh And then also regarding, you know, the glitches, obviously part of it, you know, the player. I think that is bad. And people did this because of the way obviously the people who are using glitch are gonna have like, faster matches. So it seems like slightly a worse problem than it is, but it's disappointing when people are, you know, just abusing a glitch. You know, I think there are some glitches like, that are more like if you, you know, ultimately it's a game. If you want to have fun, you should, like, it's a game, right. And it doesn't really matter. You shouldn't do things that actively make your opponent have less fun, but if there's things that make you have more fun that, you know, make your opponent have less fun, you know, you can think of like, certain decks that people don't like playing against and everyone has different opinions. You know, it's. It's part of the game. And again, it was part of the game, but like, you don't do anything. Right. Like, and in later on there was a glitch where literally you just start the game and then your opponent Goldin do anything and then you'd one-of-one Um, and you don't like, really get anything. Your rating points kind of go up. But. Or like your, Your. The. The. Yu-Gi-Oh your competitive. Whatever the rank ladder. Yu-Gi-Oh Which I. That's something I'm not a huge fan of. I've kind of complained about. But most people like it. I'm. I'm in the very small minority there of like, disliking it. But, you know, it is something that also, Pokemon hasn't like, done anything about other games. You kind of enforce, you know, in some sense, like, cheat. I do hear some people talk about, like, cheating. I think they're wrong. Imagine you've seen forum posts about it, like, from time to time. I, I do. And I, I'm not, you know, I don't really think it's much of a thing. I think people are suspecting it when it's not, not, not, not there most of the time one-of-one Yu-Gi-Oh But Yu-Gi-Oh Pokemon, I've, like, literally, I'm sure someone's cheated at some point in. In live. In addition to, like, abusing bugs to a level that is. I'd say, you know, there's some arguable amount, but I think that it's far, far beyond that. And so. But Pokemon you know, doesn't really do anything about it. Sometimes they, you know, I mean, we're taking a look at a letter today from the. From Pokemon. Sometimes for a while the letters were like, oh, this is not going well. Right. But now their letters are more just, you know, announcements and stuff, which is. Is fine and cool. But Pokemon hasn't really done more than that. They haven't, like, I don't think they've given out like, like, you know, sometimes you can see a company like give out something because they, they make a mistake or like, or apologize or whatever. Pokemon hasn't really done that. If anything, they've given out stuff except the time they give out the palafin. But that's. Yu-Gi-Oh Without that. By the way, that crashed the game. You. You'd play. They gave it a free deck. That crashed the game. So. Yu-Gi-Oh Yu-Gi-Oh there are issues, I'd say recently though, like, I haven't had major issues much. Actually. I hadn't had major issues for a while and then I like play. And then we were like, oh, let's do this podcast. Because it was gonna be like, Yu-Gi-Oh Live is like working perfectly. And then I played Norrin and it like didn't work. Which is also in the build and battle kit also. I don't know. I think this is still an issue that's like regular with the like essentially the matching hand size stuff. But Yu-Gi-Oh that's. That's annoying. Yu-Gi-Oh And you love that, that hand size kind of stuff. So. Yu-Gi-Oh the fact that doesn't work and it's a big. It's. Yu-Gi-Oh And it hasn't worked since like the cards come out or like years ago or whatever. Yu-Gi-Oh I mean, they're dressing of glitches isn't good. Too many glitches. Er, is not. Not fixing it even. I forgot to mention when the Global beta came out that that day was at the maintenance day and so the servers were down for maintenance. Said here's Global. Global beta. It's going to launch at whatever time on this day that in that time hits. I installed it and then it got up servers down for maintenance. You got to wait six hours. So, you know, there's a lack of coordination very apparent there. They also had just quickly during this is before pt, before the official launch of Live, during the beta period, a rotation came like a day early. And if you remember back that was, you had a period of like 16 hours where you Goldin search for basic Pokemon essentially because Quick Ball had rotated. But the new cards hadn't. Weren't released yet. So. So no Quick Ball and Nest Ball wasn't. Wasn't out yet either. So some awkwardness there. And like you said, there's the Palafin Ex. There's. We'll probably talk some more. There's the card selection glitch that's improved, but it's still not gone because I, I have. I've had that recently, you know, every. Every week. I. I probably have it like once a game a week or so. It's very unfortunate there. We hadn't. It was In June of 2023, by the way, that Pokemon TCGO finally ended. And I guess that's the point at which Live went out of beta. They never really made a big deal. I think there's something like Live went out of beta at some date, but there wasn't even an update with it. So it was a very odd thing. So somewhere, you know, 2023, so three plus years ago is when we. All we've had is Live. So that. That's been the world we've lived in, which has been, you know, a rocky road. But it has its pluses, too. And we'll kind of talk about some of the pluses and as we go on. Yu-Gi-Oh it's definitely. I mean, you know, something. If you haven't played Live, you don't know anything about live. You know, play it like it's something, you know, good. I know new players who've gotten to live who play it, and it definitely does some stuff well, which we will talk about. But then also. Oh, there was some point I was going to make and I. I've forgotten the point. But the. It's like the development cycle is definitely kind of weird and a bit. A bit all over the place. But there, There is some good stuff about Live. But. But yes. Anyways, you want to hop into the letter now. Yu-Gi-Oh So is there anything in the patch notes or. We just wanted to talk about the letter, by the way. I don't remember what's in the patch notes. I mean, there's some stuff in the patch notes is also in the letter. Yu-Gi-Oh I think the important stuff is. Oh, I guess with patch notes, actually on that topic, there's a lot of maintenance in life. Or there was. Now there is not as much, but there's more than I think is, you know, good for the game. Right. I think it's fair to. Okay, well, the game needs it, but like, it's a long time. Yu-Gi-Oh I mean, a couple things. First off, every time there's an update like this, it's down for eight hours and back with PTC Geo. As you said PTC Joe needed to get be replaced. It was showing its age and people were excited about Live. It just unfortunately lives been a disappointment. But when the new sets came out live PTZGO was down for 3 hours. I'm pretty sure live is down at least 8 hours. For 8 hours every time a new sets out and every time they do an update which there's more updates than you know, at least once a month there's probably an update. I would say it's down for eight hours this new update. They're also. They say they're down which is on Tuesdays typically. It's also gonna be down on Wednesday this following week as well for some server maintenance. So they seem to take everything they do just seems to take be. Take longer be less efficient than pretty much everything else in this, in this world we live in today. Unfortunately. Yu-Gi-Oh it definitely feels behind on thing. Ultimately I think it comes down to the development team is too small. Oh I guess I will mention that thing. That's a difference, a big difference between or theoretically a big difference between Pokemon TC Online Pokemon TG Live is. Pokemon TCG Online was developed by another company and Pokemon Tissue Live is developed by Pokemon themselves. So that is worth mentioning. I think the main thing is it allows Pokemon to develop it cheaper which is theoretically you know, good for them. Meaning they can spend more money on other things. I think it's mostly just saving them money though as far as I'm aware. I don't know anything really about that, but that's my guess. Yu-Gi-Oh And we'll talk about monetization in the in game economy at some point. I one-of-one touch on that now. But Yu-Gi-Oh this I think was a money saving thing and just because it was a new team it seemed like they when they started off they just weren't ready to go. So they didn't hire. This was coming out of right the post 2020 world when like like there are a bunch of businesses that were like hiring every like tech worker encoder like in the world even if they didn't have work for them. So it probably was harder to get people but they didn't seem to have a big enough team nor an experienced enough team and they really kind of floundered for that. And it took you know it probably a year or two to two years to kind of just get to the starting point that they probably should have been with their staffing I would guess. Yu-Gi-Oh And that's ultimately I think the quote, biggest disappointing thing. But again, there are some cool things. But anyways, let's talk about this letter here, I suppose. Yes. So I'm not going to just like read the whole thing, but there is some stuff. Again, there's maintenance, which you mentioned. There's a code card redemption website I think you can do it on. I do it in live. Right. That's the simplest way. But I think you can also do it on the Play Pokemon website or something as well. I've never tried to do it. By the way, this is the letter to the community dated August 14, 2026. Yu-Gi-Oh So we're reading at a bit. What day is it? We're recording two days later. Okay. Okay. And then we were posting it the day after, presumably. So Yu-Gi-Oh it's going. Sorry, I've lost my train of thought. So there's some, some downtime and stuff and then these are the changes. So these are not the patch notes, but this stuff is, I believe also in the patch notes. So there's new learning lab special sessions on special conditions. Did you say this isn't new? It's not new. It's been around. There was a. It was. It's been out and they've announced it and I, I've gone through it and it's, it's. It's okay. It's not the learning labs, by the way. I'm glad they have it. They're not. They kind of encourage you to play some. They teach you one thing, but they have. They make you. But they have. You do. Un. Un. You know, suboptimal strategies in other ways which I don't love. But yes, it's been here for several months, I think. I don't remember when. But yes, it's not new. But they're saying it's new here. Okay. I will say with the learning lab as well, I think it is useful for a new player. If you're someone who like doesn't know anything about like how to play the game or anything or like what the cards are, then the learning lab is useful for you. That being said, it's a little hard to find for new players or anyone. It's not like horribly hard to find, but it's easier to find a regular games than it is to find the learning lab, which is. I don't know. I don't know exactly how it directs you at the beginning when you start a new account, but. Right. And then a new study season, regionals in game campaign starting 3rd September, which is just Some theming stuff. Right. Like some probably sleeves and stuff. Yu-Gi-Oh The. The battle board. Right. They call it the study season battleboard. So they're always changing the background of what the. Of what you're. What you're on. Which, which is nice. I wish we probably could have some control over it. The current board, I think is a little. It's harsh visually, I think I will say to my Yu-Gi-Oh but, you know, it's good that they change it. But you know, a little more control would be nice. But I think that's the big thing. They're going to change the board differently. Yu-Gi-Oh That's had issues itself as well at times. Yes. When I say issues, I mean like, not just it doesn't look good, but like it had lag issues as well, which is like not so good. But that being said, I actually, I don't mind the current one too much, but my background on my computer is like bright yellow, so. Yu-Gi-Oh And you don't like that. No, but anyways, so. Or it's. It's a moderately bright yellow. I might make it brighter at some point, but anyways. Then there are some new trainer trial challenges. This is interesting. As well as new build and battle events. I think the trainer trial stuff is interesting. You thought it was really interesting. I think it's also pretty interesting. And then we'll. We'll obviously get to that, though. And there are some bug fixes and these seem Zebra interesting. Oh, one that I have noticed is the. The lighting issue on avatars. That one was a more recent glitch and I have seen that one. Have you noticed that one? No, I didn't notice that one. I gotta say. Okay. They might have fixed it already. Honestly, I don't know. I noticed it for a little while and I kind of stopped noticing it. But one-of-one so there's that. There's some card issues. I don't know any of these. I mean, like, I know you know the cards. Some of these cards are good and I could imagine them happening. But I mean, some of these cards like, aren't really aren't good. They're I guess all standard, I think, but I don't know. You don't. Nothing stands out to you here, right? No, no, you're. Now you're talking about the patch notes, right, with the bug fixes here. Oh, yes. Oh, I'm in the patch notes. I'm not supposed to be in the patch notes. Yes. Yu-Gi-Oh You said you're going to talk about the letter, but you switched. You're talking patch notes. But yes. Yu-Gi-Oh go ahead. I one-of-one do anything. Okay. So back to school stuff. Thank you for pointing that out. I went to the wrong Topps. There's the board and the. It says the store has medium stuff or something. I don't really go into the store, but that's cool, I guess. And then the special condition stuff, the build battle stuff, which is Twilight Masquerade. This is the September 3rd to September 17th. Currently it's journey Together as of recording this. But then it will be Twilight Masquerade. We have had Twilight Masquerade in the past for two days. I will say Twilight Masquerade is probably of all the building battle forms. I played my favorite so far in live. So I'm very excited for that. I think it's pretty fun. But then aside from that, it's interesting to see that they. They're, you know, redoing it. So why do you think they're redoing it? Well, I think. Have they done every. So we. They've done the. The Mega Evolution for. They did those for. And then they've done all. Have they done all the Scarlet and Violet now or not? That's what I'm. They have not done all the Scarlet and Violet. They might have done all the Scarlet and Violet in standard. Let's see. So they did Dustin Rivals. They're obviously doing Journey together. Did they do Surging Sparks? What even were the promos for Surging Sparks? I think they did okay. I'm pretty sure maybe. And then Stellar Crown. Did they do Stellar Crown? I don't think they did. So I don't think they've done all them. I could be wrong. Tell us in the comments, but I don't think they have. Obviously they will run out at some point though. Yu-Gi-Oh I mean, if they've done all the. I don't know how far back they're going to go for these build a battle kits. Obviously the farther they go back the better as far as I'm concerned. But at some point they'll probably at least take a break, I would assume, and do it. Yu-Gi-Oh And maybe at this point because they're working on other stuff they didn't want to have to work on and you know, implement this other build and battle kit. Right. That. That could be. Could be what it is there. Do you. I mean, I do we want to talk about the build and battle format at all or we want to talk about formats later on by way. The, the way. Let's talk. I guess let's talk now. Let's wait A little. Okay. Because Yu-Gi-Oh You had some stuff to say about that. Related. Which I guess, I mean let's talk about. Let's introduce the next format which is the Abidi. So it says best your buddies in the. Oops. In the Bitty Basic Brawl Trainer trial which says it's from you know, September 3rd to the 15th. Then you enjoy this Bitty Basic Brawl train Trial decks are cut down to 30 cards with three Prizm cards and you must contain only Basic Pokemon. It can be multi Prizm Pokemon. So presumably it'll just be like basic box. That's my guess. And I think it's. It's still four cops of a card, right? I think. Yes. Although it's a 30 card deck. So like you, you can't have. I mean I would think you're. It's more of like. I would think I want to probably lean into a basic box with like one or two copies, right? Yu-Gi-Oh But like you can have four copies of like Pokemon Search for example. Oh yes, yes you can. You can. Which is kind of interesting. It kind of reminds me of Beckett now. I think about it with like the three Prizm or three point game or whatever and the essentially half size decks. Yu-Gi-Oh So I, I mean I think it's night. I, I'm looking forward to it. You, you, you were a little skeptical about how good the format will be because when they call it Bitty Basic Brawl then I think of like a single Prizm basic deck. But you're going to be playing probably Ex Basics and even Mega Ex Basics I would think. So that makes it a little less interesting. But Yu-Gi-Oh I, I'm looking. This is very different. So that, that's the nice thing about it there they did. I think why they can do this is they introduced the build and battle into, into the game not that long ago. But that forced them to then have 40 card decks with four prizes the first time not having 60 card decks and six prizes and that they got that to work. So therefore now they can do a 30 card deck with three prizes. So I think the build the battle being successful, the Latin do this and I, I think it's just, it's a nice little, it's a nice change within. In the game to have this alternative. Yu-Gi-Oh And I think, I think it will be fun or I, I don't know, I think like conceptually it's fun. I don't know if in practice it'll actually be Zebra fun. Obviously as you said, I'm a little skeptical of the format but Yu-Gi-Oh I think, I think it could be cool. And I think the smaller decks as well are kind of interesting. And this goes back to the build and battle and the Force as a whole. Right. I think that the. Was it the format of like the trainer trials? I really. Sorry. The build and battle with the 40 card decks and you know, choosing like creating your deck I think is interesting. Obviously most of the. Or I guess all of the other trainer trials have been limits on deck construction. Yu-Gi-Oh And that's interesting having to do different things in deck construction. And I think the idea of having a more limited environment where you can only build from a very specific selection of cards that changes that. You know, that being the. What is it? The cards that are. The card pool. Yu-Gi-Oh Or sorry the card pool. But then like cards that you open up. Oh, it's interesting. I recently made a video on draft which is a pretty interesting format and cube draft and I think you know something like that would be Zebra sick. I don't expect that. But you know, I really do like the more you know, the limited format or the pre constructed decks or whatever we had theme in Pokemon digital line. I think building battle replaces that pretty well. I don't know if you'd agree with that, but I, I'm liking it. I do like the, the Scarlet Violet era ones encourage more deck building versus the Mega era ones are stronger decks and more consistent decks. Yu-Gi-Oh no, no, I would, I would agree. Let's talk about the two formats for a minute since you brought it up. Is that okay? Yu-Gi-Oh So I was really excited. Trader trials came out first. I was very excited about it. I think you were too. And a lot of people were and there was a decent amount of play. What's unfortunately happened, I think with that is a lot of the trainer trials it seemed like they were changing them up and it seemed like they would keep the ones that were less interesting and, and get rid of the more interesting ones. Honestly that was kind of my sense. I'll give the exception of GLC because I think GLC is good and they kept that around a fair amount too. So. But of the non GLC formats they kind of kept like the boring, more boring ones, which was unfortunate. And then I also think the, the user base in the trainer trials just really fell off over time to a lot. That. That's kind of my sense. I know I kind of stopped being interested as well. But I think the just the general user base for the trainer trials fell off pretty hard. Is that kind of your sense too? Yu-Gi-Oh that's what I like. What I'VE kind of seen it's sometimes hard to find matches. I'd say it's not been hard to find matches at all in the. The build and battle format. Yu-Gi-Oh And you found that true, right? Yu-Gi-Oh And I'm really excited. I like that. And I am finding the build and battle to be really fun. I like. You know, you spend a little bit of time putting together the deck and you are finding users. I hope it continues to have a good user base. I am a little. I am. I do have some level concern that over time people are going to fall away from that as well. Right. Are they people just going to migrate to standard over time? Maybe. Don't know. But in terms of the formats like you mentioned, the Megas build a battle decks, if you haven't done it definitely you should definitely give it a try. Both whether for the Megas Evolution and the. The older Scarlet and Violet ones. The. The Mega Evolution is a 40 card preconstruct constructed deck. You get one of four decks and they're designed better than. Than the early ones. They function better. But the earlier ones you kind of get. There's four rather than four 40 card decks. You get one of. There's four 20 card half decks. It's not exactly 20 cards and they kind of fill it in with certain other things ones but essentially it's two. You get two 20 card half decks put them together. Which is more interesting because now you often get two different Topps of energies, two Topps of car of two Topps in it and so. So it makes you can build it better with the other cards from the packs you pull. I find you have more creativity for deck building. The current one is it the current one which has the trainers Pokemon. That one I gotta say I don't like so much because we have half of you have two 20 card trainer Pokemon decks. They. That doesn't synergize very well. But you know in general I do like the two half decks better. Yu-Gi-Oh On a counterpoint to that the current one with the Trans Pokemon they don't really synergize anyways. So like they're not Zebra synergy heavy. There's some synergies there but like ends dramatic doesn't really. I mean there's what like NCP up Lily's Pearl Hops, Snorlax I think is actually one of the promos and you know you do have synergies there whether you'd like to use that you probably don't end up using. But overall I still think they're. They're fine within basin two together. The L1 in particular I think is really like. It's just not good. It doesn't make that much sense to me either. But it is still a pretty. A pretty cool format and I like the deck building. I will say also this kind of highlights the aspect of. Well, there's a few things but pulling evolutions, they're often pretty hard to use. Pulling basics are a lot easier to slot into your decks. And the probably masquerade one actually like it has the Loyal three, the Monkey Dory, the Okidogi and Pheasant if you. I think Pheasant if or sorry not Phys Nifty. I think Monkey Dory is showcased perfectly within this. I think you know, obviously Monkey Dori is figured very highly. I feel like this is like shows exactly how good Monkey Door is as a card. It's nice, it's good but it's not like broken. It can't be your full builder on but it can be very good at times as well. Obviously it's going to be probably more focused on its attack than it would be in standard play, but it is still. I think, I think it's really interesting there with the newer sets, the, you know, the, the new Mega era sets essentially all but the Mega Evolution expansion itself. These sets are going to have smaller. They're smaller sets. Right. So they allow you to play more Evolution lines, which is kind of interesting. Traditionally a pack draft from sets, if you're not familiar with it, don't worry about it too much. But traditionally that was something that you Goldin really do. But I'm wondering if that is more viable with the smaller sets. I think that's in my opinion the really only main advantage to smaller sets. The, the accessibility of cards is increased with the smaller sets. But I think or theoretically there could be other things as well. If the sets were better but the sets are not stronger or they're not more concentrated with good stuff, they are probably more concentrated with bad stuff. So. But I think you are able to play Evolution lines more so in the newer or Evolution lines you pull in the newer packs. Yu-Gi-Oh Although with the Mega Evolutions because you have a 40 card deck that's a little. That's. That's pretty functional. You, you. You need more upside from the cards like to add them. Right. You're more. I, I find I'm more picky about what cards I'll add because the deck functions better. Right. Some of the older style build and battle kits from the two half sometimes you have some cards that you look at your 40 card deck, you're like I don't want this card and I don't want this card in the deck one-of-one because I'm not getting much value. So. So you'll replace it with something you know of not, not a lot of value. So that changes. So the new games, the decks are more consistent with the, with the newer decks, the Scarlet and Violet, they're less consistent but I think it's a little more fun just in terms of the deck building and also what you see in your opponents too. Right. Because with the Mega Evolutions you're seeing one of four decks every time to play against. You have a number of different possible configurations with the older ones. So that makes it more fun too seeing more variety of your opponents opponent's decks as well. Yu-Gi-Oh And regarding both those things, the consistency in what you're playing, your opponents are playing, the Mega AR feels more like standard which can be good to get people into the game and things like that. I think it actually works better for pre release, like the actual pre release events, but worse for live format where people are taking it much faster. If you don't set up, you just move along to the next game. It's not a huge deal. If you go to a previous event you don't set up, that really sucks. It feels pretty bad. That's you know, a bunch of your day. It's some actual money you're kind of almost wasting in that sense. So you know, I see reasons for both there. But then I will, I guess. Are you ready to talk about trantrials a little more now? Yu-Gi-Oh a couple. Let me just say on the build and battle one I, well I forgot the first thing but one-of-one I, they have the token system now for build and battle, right. You get one token with every new set and if a set's around for multiple weeks, you get one token a week. And then if you get three wins out of the five games you, you get, you get another token and you can buy tokens in the store. I, I, oh by the way, it, it, you can buy, it gives you a cap of 99 tokens if you looked at it in the in game store. But if you buy it every so often it re and then it counts down and I guess if you got to zero you Goldin buy more. But that it does refresh to 99 again. It resets periodically, I've noticed. So I don't know if that's always going to happen. But one-of-one getting tokens isn't isn't that bad getting to three wins. I can get it pretty most of the time and you get some free tokens. So my token collection is slowly growing. But do you like having this other currency of tokens for the build and battle? I'll say no. I don't think it's. This is something that Beckett has. Beckett has too many currencies. It's manageable, but it has too many currencies. I would definitely say it almost feels like a kind of mobile game thing that almost feels kind of cheap in some ways. And I think you might mention this. It kind of points to potential monetization. You alluded to this earlier, but Live doesn't have monetization. And so that is, you know, I think, something that I'm in some ways happy about. But ultimately with the currencies, there's two other currencies, but I don't think it's. I don't think you need the two other currencies. I think the game could just have one currency and it would be fine enough. It's relatively easy to access stuff, so the currencies don't matter too much outside of. For newer players. And so I think, you know, you just want to help new players. Right. That's just a good thing to do. And then other than that, the currencies don't matter too much. So I would say, you know, less currencies is a little simpler. Less stuff for the live team to worry about as well. Could be good. So. Yu-Gi-Oh I mean, it's not really. I don't think it's actively particularly bad, but it's not actually particularly good either. Yu-Gi-Oh look, first, I think the two current. The two main currents I think is fine. The ones to buy things in the store, the ones to craft cards. I think it makes sense they're being different. They had a. They had an older currency for like a year or so ago in live that they got rid of to buy cosmetics, only they ditched that currency. So I think that was a good move there. But then they did add this third currency for build and Battle. Does. Do they need it? I. Yu-Gi-Oh the answer probably is. Is. Is no. I would agree. I guess the only place like. And again, I think I'm finding getting my three wins pretty. Pretty consistent. I think you're getting your three wins pretty consistent. The people that it would hurt, obviously not everyone's getting three wins all the time. So there's newer and less experienced players that are going in that are probably struggling to get like. Like one or two, you know, 012 wins a time. So they're the ones that. It's the weaker players that are what? The ones that aren't going to be able to get more tokens. They're not gonna be able to play play the build a battle format as much. So you know, I don't think you want to punish the. Punish people that aren't as good by not letting them play the game I guess is what I'm trying to get at. Yu-Gi-Oh no, I completely agree with that. And especially when this one theoretically is aimed more at newer players as well. Obviously of casual like casual standard I think is, is aimed at newer players. But like Yu-Gi-Oh this definitely feels a little weird. I don't know if weird like but it feels when you think about it more it feels a little, you know, backwards in that kind of way. But I don't think it like hurts the game too much actually in practice. But also it's a little weird that's only used for the build and battle. Like it's not used for trainer trials, trade trials. You could just do whatever. Which I think is like good. I mean every other form you can just do whatever. So. Oh, I guess this is like huh. Well the reason for it is, is because you do get cards from playing this right? So that's the reason they want a currency for it. Which I guess makes sense that that's true. That that's fair. I suppose I kind of forget about that because you know you can access the cards pretty easily. You can also craft the pre release promos. It's not like the only way to get them is by playing this. So Yu-Gi-Oh it is definitely that makes sense there. I will say it kind of reminds me of the events in Pokemon TCG Online which I would say I definitely do not miss. They had some problems and the problems weren't like. I wouldn't say huge problems but in practice they weren't that fun really. They. They were Yu-Gi-Oh They were kind of nothing kind of say. I don't know. I mean okay, so they're important to the economy but right. Other than that playing them wasn't like Zebra interesting. What first if you, if you, if you didn't play ptcgo, what they were is you. They call, they use tickets I think was the name of the currency to enter the event and you then played it was eight players within a bracket system. Right. Within. Within it. So and then depending on how you placed in that, depending on the rewards you got and it was a big part because not Going to get into details, but it wasn't. It was a trading system. There is what it was. And this was a way to get tradable packs, the only way as a budget player to get tradable cards. So it was a huge part if you. If you didn't want to spend actual money within the in game economy. So Yu-Gi-Oh it was different. It was kind of. I. I kind of liked it, but it. It was very different and very weird too. So. Yu-Gi-Oh Yu-Gi-Oh like there are things I kind of liked about it, I guess. But also regarding the trading thing, the trading is something that people complained about early on that it wasn't in. I mean, it's just Pokemon. The trading card game is something people said a lot. That being said, I think it's pretty clear to me at this point that it doesn't really work. Right. Like trading didn't work on Pokemon D's general line. It was abused some. And it was also. It was complicated. It was. It didn't work very well, as we said earlier. And then we also saw training Pokemon TG Beckett that also. At least early on, I don't play Beckett but it was rough. I think it's still complicated, as far as I'm aware. I think it's done. Probably it's done better in Beckett than it was in Pokemon TC Online, but it was done pretty terribly in Pokemon TG Online. And the economy is better than live. Should we talk about the economy now or do you want to talk about other stuff? Well, one. One other thing in terms of. With the build and battle and the trainer trials, you can't invite friends, you can't do. What's the other thing? It's not ranked, which I think is correct. I think ranked would be really weird and kind of broken there. But you can't invite friends, which I kind of. Which I will say I wish you could. It'd be nice to be able to sit down and do a build and battle with a friend. Right? Or a trainer trial. Yu-Gi-Oh Okay. So a few things to say about that. One is, Yu-Gi-Oh you can't do the train trials with friends build and battle. Or sorry, you can't do build battle with friends. Well, you could do like in person, but obviously that's not what we're talking about with trainer trials. Most of them are within standards. You can actually do most of them. That's true. Yu-Gi-Oh But obviously then it's not as special or whatever. Then two is. There's expanded. Right. That's like the thing. One of the bigger talking points we Might talk about at the end as well. Some. But expanded is live has. It's limited. Expanded. It's a beta. It says it's in beta. And that is definitely. I don't know, it's just weird. Obviously expanded in live isn't. Isn't all the stuff. Right. But playing it is okay. People don't really take it seriously at all. Occasionally you'll see some like, interesting decks. You might see some videos on some interesting decks from time to time. But when playing it, certainly I don't see what I describe expanded decks. I'd see maybe old standard decks or current standard dax, maybe with a few changes. But. And you get, you know, you can build legitimately good and interesting decks in the format. Most of them. I just don't see that. Or somebody who sees like legitimately terrible horrendous decks as well. Right. You've probably seen some of those. Yu-Gi-Oh Yu-Gi-Oh It's a weird thing with the truncated expanded. I know. It is a common complaint to me. The format's not bad. The problem is the reason it's truncated is I think their lack of competence. That's, that's, that's the big negative. Right. It's not like they made an intentional decision to do this format. This is just as many cards as they could implement without too many bugs, I would say. So that, that part's not good. You can't invite friends. I, I guess part of why they limit these friends is once you, once they allowed in to play with friends, then you will have online tournaments run through limitless, I would assume. And then people are gonna get more upset about the glitches of that things are caused. So that's kind of. I, I think the reasoning. But it's unfortunate an expanded would get more play. I think if, if, if it had a ranked format. I know you kind of don't like that, but I think right now in expanding stuff, you just. It's kind of. I think you get matched up pretty randomly is what I would say too. So with a ranked format, ideally you would match into people that are more comparable. Right. With, you know, if somebody wants to play these random decks, they'll. They'll be playing other people with random decks. And if you want to have a good expanded deck, you want to play against other good expanded deck players. Yu-Gi-Oh I will say with matchmaking with. The number one reason I heard for people wanting ranked was that they play against people of a similar skill level, like have better matches, but you don't need a public ranking like a ranked format. To do that you should most. You should have a hidden matchmaking system. I know Pokemon GC Online did, but I don't know if live does. In the formats that aren't ranked. You know, the train trials. It doesn't. Or sorry build battle. It doesn't matter too much. Train trials. It matters a little bit in something like expanded or like. Yu-Gi-Oh like expanded. I mean it's something we'll talk about. I guess now that the quality of, you know, opponents obviously you'll see people who are just newer place which is. Which is cool and stuff but with some pretty bad decks, you know, like decks that are worse than the free decks you start with. The free decks you start with are actually pretty good. Yu-Gi-Oh But to you know, like draw three supporters. This is kind of a classic example. So some random exs. Way too many Topps for no reason, you know or just like cards that are just. I know random cards that don't have any synergy. You know, you can do like weird wacky rogue decks and that's cool and stuff. But these aren't, you know, these aren't that you'll see decks that are just don't make any sense and they're not like interesting. They're just. They're just not good. It's somewhat subjective but like, you know what I'm talking about. You've probably seen some of them and then also you do see, you know, newer players. I guess I'll get to this as well. This is something that can be honestly kind of frustrating at times. It can be frustrating because it can be like if you're losing but you know, players who are just making some. You'll see some worse misplays in live than you will see in person generally. I mean a misplay in person that's really bad would be like. I know once I like attached a dreepy to a drippy or something like that which is like not allowed. Obviously that was kind of awkward. But you know, you'll see like in person usually you probably one-of-one make too many misplays because the games are longer. Each game matters more. In live you're able to play lots of games quickly. I have a quick list here. There was someone, you know precious trolley for they got me out the X. That was presumably not what they meant to do there they also someone turn one going first attached TM Evolution. That's not good. So by the way, I guess I'll explain why these aren't good. So Yu-Gi-Oh with ex obviously searching for support on play. It's only from your hand, so it doesn't work with precious trolley there and essentially does nothing. And then turn going first. Technical Machine evolution is a card that you attach as a tool. It lets you use an attack, but it falls off at the end of your turn. So. And then you can't use the attack as you're going first. So it just does nothing. You just kind of waste it and then. Yu-Gi-Oh Another thing that I also find annoying is I kind of. Again, I complain in here. Normally I don't like to heal playing too much or I don't. I don't complain too much. I don't know if I don't like to or if I just don't do it. But sometimes people like evo spamming can be annoying. It's not a huge issue. And you can mute people as well. I think that that is a nice feature. I think the emotes are bad. The emos are kind of bizarre and creepy. You describe them that way, right? Yu-Gi-Oh the emote spamming was more of an issue in ptgo. I will say I don't run into it very often in life, fortunately. Yu-Gi-Oh I'd say the emotion online were potentially more toxic. The emotes in live are just very strange. They're these like, emotion things that are, like, kind of off. And then also people like playing slowly. Obviously, you know, if you're new to playing, you got to figure things out. That's. That's all good. It can be annoying, but you do what you do. But then. Or sometimes it's just like really complicated, but, like, you know, very slow. I mean, for example, taking your Prizm cards, it literally doesn't matter. So that's like one. And then also just timing out being so slow, you just like time out. Or people just like randomly going AFK halfway through the game sometimes. Okay, so you ran into people who do it intentionally, it seems like. Right. Yu-Gi-Oh I guess it hasn't happened as much lately. But Yu-Gi-Oh a number of games where there's a pace of play going along, then somewhere middle of the game or say all of a sudden I take. I do something and it becomes my advantage, clearly, for the game. And then also in their pace of play, you know, drastically changes where they're slowing down, delaying as much as possible between every action. So, Yu-Gi-Oh I run into that, unfortunately. Yu-Gi-Oh And you seem to run to it like a bunch. I don't. I run into. Sometimes it's the opposite for me. I'm like, losing. And I'm like, oh, no, I'm gonna lose. This deck, it's like not good. And then they quit or they don't quit. They afk and then I one-of-one because they. The timeout or whatever. So that's annoying. And, you know, these are things that wouldn't happen in person. There's not too much you can do about it. But this is like, annoying. And something would be better if it, like, wasn't in the game. Maybe if. I mean, you know, as that I've been playing some magic arena. Magic Arena's timer is not really any better than Pokey. Well, it might be a little bit better if you need to take long turns, but I think they're both fine enough. And you do sometimes see people still playing arena magic, supposedly. I haven't really seen it happen, but it can happen. Um, and Yu-Gi-Oh I think it's. It's not like Zebra terrible. There have been times when it's been kind of rough, though, as you mentioned earlier, with like some of the glitch abuse. I don't think it's too many people, but it is some people and it can be rough at times. Yu-Gi-Oh I mean, you need to give people enough play the time to make decisions, especially newer players. So now as a new player, I think if you feel a little rushed as a new player, that's probably appropriate because it shouldn't. The timer shouldn't be such that a new player can think everything through fully because that's. That takes a lot of time. Right. If I play a TCG online of any TCG that I haven't played much, I expect to be. I'm going to be rushed on my turns, I would expect, and that. That's kind of normal, but then you adjust to it, so. But learn all the cards and stuff. Yu-Gi-Oh And you just don't know all the situations. Well, you can't, like, you know, when it's your turn, you can't think through every possibility of line from scratch completely. Right. You have to let them. As you play the game, you have a lot of kind of automatic things that you get built in. So you just build that up over time. I think the timing is okay, you know. Yu-Gi-Oh it's a tough one to police. You touched on it briefly, so I'll say it here. Unfortunately, one of the big issues with Live is the disconnection issue. Just, it's gotten better, but it's still a thing. And look, I have a good computer. I have good Internet service. I have a. It's hardwired to the Yu-Gi-Oh fi. It's not even wireless and it still happens occasionally. Not a lot, but it still happens to me. And you know, it just. It shouldn't be an issue. And I don't have the issue with anything else either. That which is a big part too. It happens in Live occasionally. It happens everywhere else. Like never. Yu-Gi-Oh I've had it occasionally happen with other things. I was playing Magic and there was like a. I. I think it was a glitch actually that kind of caused me to like freeze. I have had disconnection issues with some different things. I was actually playing on chess.com that is, you know, on my phone or Chess chest on that. On the Chess app. And it keeps like disconnecting for like a little bit. It's not a huge deal. I mean it's not great. But you know, I think it's gotten to a point where it's passable and live but not good. As far as can you reconnect? You can, right? I think, I think in theory you can, but I don't know that you do. They in the forum comments, they talk about it, but it seems like once you disconnect, that's it with other games. Right. When you disconnect, you can, you know, it will reconnect usually and pick up. But live. I know somehow live just seems to struggle with it more than other games. I think unfortunately, that their fundamental decisions with. From day one with life probably weren't optimized is my sense. Yu-Gi-Oh Also regarding it, you don't know if your opponent disconnects. They could be still playing or they could be like they could just disconnect. Right. And. Or like just we're just playing or whatever. They're like different things that we happening or they can be you or it could be them and you don't really know. And it gets. It can get frustrating. It can depend on weird things as well. Like live has had some weird glitches. Oh, this is one thing I meant to say earlier. The worst live glitch is the one that I know Amber power had a YouTuber as well, some other people. It wasn't a common glitch, but it locked you out of the game. Like, that's horrendous. You know, like if you just can't play the game, you know, like. And this was for like. Like was it a year something. It went on for a long time. Yu-Gi-Oh And I know, like, Yu-Gi-Oh with empower. He was trying to talk. He was talking to the support people and just wasn't getting anywhere. And I guess eventually it sort itself out. But Yu-Gi-Oh that Was bad with that. Yu-Gi-Oh I mean. And then go ahead. So I don't. With the support. The support. So there's like the forums, which we're currently on looking at, and when people report or say something, there's like, I think it's an automated, like, response that's like, oh, you should submit a support ticket. Like, we'll help fix that. And sometimes it's. I mean, this was. This was an issue for a while when Live was buggier. People were assuming things that weren't bugs were bugs, just like game attractions. And like, then you get this post like, oh, Yu-Gi-Oh we'll look into that. Submit a support ticket. It's like, no, like, you, you know, you just made a mistake that. Mistakes happen. I have made mistakes in videos that I don't realize that we're like, Yu-Gi-Oh no, you did that wrong. So those things happen. But then the support tickets, like, or the, Then the, the moderators are like. Or the, the community, the official community people are like, Yu-Gi-Oh like, submit a support ticket. Like, no, don't submit a support ticket. Just. You made. It's fine. You made a mistake and that's it. So, Yu-Gi-Oh that's kind of unfortunate then. And the support tickets are, like, hard to find and the community's forms are relatively easily defined and I guess not. I don't even know their purpose. Well, exactly, because. Because. And Yu-Gi-Oh well, one-of-one I was gonna. I don't want to go off track too far, but, like, there is. One of the main sections is Pokemon TCG Live Bugs and Feedback, a section that they set up just for bugs and feedback, which I guess they kind of look at some. But then they. But you're supposed to do a support ticket as well for an issue. So it's like, what's the point of the forums? And what. What value does it make? It seems like it's just a place for us to vent our frustrations to one another as users, but that's not really helpful. So, you know, it's. It is. The set structure of the purpose of the forum, especially in terms of bugs, is very unclear. And I don't think Pokemon ever really clarified that. Yu-Gi-Oh and that's disappointing. It was especially disappointing or was disappointing during the beta. During a beta, a game is not expected to be perfect. It will have bugs, and that's. Any game will have bugs. It is what it is. And sometimes they'll end up with really unfortunate bugs. Life has been worse than maybe it should be at points. But ultimately having a way to submit. Talk about Bugs, that's the point of a beta. And be able to report them clearly is important. And that. Yu-Gi-Oh that's kind of the point of it. And if you can't do that, then, like, what's the point? I mean, it's just a game at that point, which is fine, I guess, but it's fine for the players, but it's not so fine for the. The creators of the game. Yu-Gi-Oh Yu-Gi-Oh no, Yu-Gi-Oh Yu-Gi-Oh It's again, it's just the lack of kind of coordination, communication, you know, it's apparent in things, including the forums as well, is what. What is what I'll say. Yu-Gi-Oh So anyways, I guess we can continue in the letter or do you have something else to say? Yu-Gi-Oh no, no, go ahead. So they're adding accessibility settings. This is cool. I. I don't, you know, have. Haven't had any issues with that personally, but obviously, you know, there are people with those. What. Well, what they're doing. What they're doing there is. They're letting you turn off effects, I think, is what they say, which is good, which you could do. That's one of those things that you could do in ptcgo that's only taken them three and a half years to get it into live. So. So good. So good. But it had some effects. You can reduce, I think, right? No, yes, they. They did, but I think they're adding more. And, you know, we talked about some of the visual updates. At times there was like at least one or two visual updates that they used to have, like a lot of motion, which I'm glad they reduced because they. At one time, I. I'm sensitive to motion making me nauseous, and there were times looking live was making me nauseous, I will say, because things are kind of swirling around on screen in the background. Yu-Gi-Oh I will say sometimes the background can be a little distracting. You know, I'm someone who likes to be able to engage more with something like a magic arena. You can, like click on stuff and it does stuff, which is kind of funny, but ultimately, Yu-Gi-Oh it can be a little. You can do it on live too. You can click on the Checkerboard and that certainly. I'm sorry to everyone that bothers my videos. I. I do click on it a lot, but that's a Checkerboard, hexagon board or whatever, so. Oh, by the way, side note, obviously we're getting a little distracted, but it's a podcast, so that's how these things go or something like that. But Yu-Gi-Oh live steaming has been Hexagons. I don't know why. It's because of the. The bees, which are bugs. That's just. All right. That's a rough one, but okay. All right. Yu-Gi-Oh one-of-one so, Yu-Gi-Oh accessibility settings. That's cool. I don't think this is a huge thing, but, you know, it could be. It could be big for some people. Yu-Gi-Oh And then they are doing it says the 2027 championship series is. And more are fast approaching. So this is kind of weird because. And this has to do with kind of how the forms are arranged that they used to have live and in person separate. There was bizarrely a section for. It was like bugs and feedback for like in person, which, like, it wasn't in person bug. Like, just like an actual bee. Like. But one-of-one so it's. It's kind of. So they've like bizarrely kind of grouped these things together. I mean, they are related. They are both tpci, but that's it. Like, are they both. The Pokemon tcg? But, like, you don't do live to do actual, like, competitive events. Right? They had. Right. They haven't done anything like that. Right. They did it for Pokemon Teacher Online a little. Yu-Gi-Oh Yu-Gi-Oh Yu-Gi-Oh They did the. Yu-Gi-Oh I forget. Whatever they're called, they haven't done any. The Players cup, which was okay, I guess, had some issues, but was kind. It was fine enough. And then the team challenge, which was not fine. I did that one and you did that one. That was horrendous. But Yu-Gi-Oh Anyways, I thought the Player cup was fun. I wish. I will say I wish they would do something like that in live, where you can do something competitive at a bigger scale. You know, once or twice a year, I think would be a nice little addition to help promote Live. But it also gets down to the whole, what's the point of live? Which I guess we have to talk about before we're done too. Yu-Gi-Oh I mean, ultimately, obviously, with live, it is a game that is. I'm a game. Right. It's a game people like. It's a way to play the Pokemon dcd. If you play in person and you want to play it online, it's a way to do that. You can play games faster. So some people talk about testing. I think that can be useful. I think if you actually want to legitimately test for a serious competitive event, play on a simulator. They allow you to, like, I'm a big fan of P2G sim, but they allow you to actually test better. They have a slightly higher barrier to entry in terms of complexity. But that's kind of the point, right? You're trying to do something that you know, you want to be able to control more things, you can test more things. And yes, being able to play against random people is useful. You can do that. But in terms of actually like testing, seriously use a simulator for that. People sometimes complain about like glitches and they complain about glitches and they say not the reason is that the game isn't working, but the issue is that they are. Okay, another complaint, this is me complaining again. But sometimes, sometimes people say that the reason a glitch is bad is because they're losing the game. I mean it's frustrating but like the reason the glitch is bad is because the game's not like working right. And it's making it less fun. If you want. Like I've never heard someone. I know there was a while where people were like, this is bad and I lost. But anyways, that's just me complaining, I suppose. But in terms of actual stuff, people, you know, people have linked live to like in person competitive stuff in terms of like that's its purpose for why it exists. And I don't, I don't like think that really makes that much sense. I mean it makes some sense, I guess. It's not like it can't be used for that. But it is a game. It's a game. It's a game that people play. It's a game that's independent from in person play to some extent. And that's, that's, that's what it is, I think. Right. Well, let me just say it get to the question of what's the purpose of live to the Pokemon company or more specifically the Pokemon company International. Right, because. And we haven't talked about the economy in game economy, which you know, we're getting towards, towards the end. And there's a couple good. I'll say there's two good things about live. I will. First, one of the bad things we didn't really mention it's gotten better, but it's that card selection glitch. To me I think that's yes, the fact that you can't log in the game, that's the bigger one. But in terms of once you log in, the card selection glitch has been the biggest one. It's common, relatively common. Yu-Gi-Oh it's gotten better, but it's still not, still not eliminated. I will say I've. I still have it periodically in different weird ways. So I'm not sure with that but the good thing first the game is visually more modern. We I, I will make fun of it how they do updates too often. I think they do. But you know, compared to PTZ Joe, it was looking really old. Live looks maybe it's not the nicest looking around, but it looks, it looks pretty good. I think so. Better. Better one-of-one Right. You. You agree about that? Yu-Gi-Oh I'd say that's kind of interesting. I'd say relative to their time they're probably equal which is fine because Live is newer. So. Yu-Gi-Oh And then the other thing is, is the, the in game economy. Right. The first which gets to the question of what's Pokemon intention behind Live? I guess it's to. Because at some point their business they should do. They do things to make money. So I guess this is just helping promote Pokemon show that more people are doing it but they're not making lives only cost the money. They don't actually make money from it. So which is why they want to keep the cost down. But the nice thing is because they're not making money, they don't need to make access to cards difficult, which they don't. They have a very generous in game economy at times I think it might be a little overly generous. I think the. A little bit of work to get the cards I think would be better not. The main focus is to play the cards, get the cards and build your decks. Play what you want. But a little bit of effort to get the cards isn't bad. Getting the rarer cards is a little bit of work. But even that, well they changed it so you can't get the high rarity, you can't craft them right away. But I think that's fine for people. I'm sure. You know, you can let us know if you think that's a problem in the comments there. But the good is you have access to the cards under PTCG with the trading system. If you, if you. It really was tough to get cards as a budget player. You could maybe out of the top 10 decks after to play, having played for a decent amount of time. I could maybe have two of the top ten decks at any one time. And I Goldin have the newest decks, you know, within like the first month or so. That was always inaccessible. So it's nice having access to the cards. That is the big plus in Live you can get the cut the cards. You can build whatever deck you want, which is really nice. Yu-Gi-Oh I think that's honestly like with the economy to me it's Pretty simple. So you can get stuff. There could be some tweaks and changes they could make to it. But I, I like it. I think the economy Live is really good. Yu-Gi-Oh Quite simply that's, that's that to me and you know it is something that gets people into the game. I've seen it get people into the game or at least help people along that path. People who and also I think it bridges the gap between collectors and players to some extent as well. Being easy way a relatively easy way to get into the game. I know people who love opening up Pokemon TCG packs who don't really play the game, who then learn a little about the game, said, oh maybe this is something I want to try. How do I do this? Yu-Gi-Oh there's life. Live is solid. Same thing with Beckett I think Beckett in some ways bridges the gap, but then Live bridges even further. Live and Beckett I mean Beckett is a game with more care in it. I think Beckett in a pretty good spot. There was a time which it was in a. Not like when it first came out and earlier on it wasn't in a Zebra good spot. A lot of people stopped playing. I stopped playing. But I think it's improved a lot since then. And well Beckett and Live or not by the same like quote company, they are heavily related and I think it is, it is good. And this like whole. I think the Pokemon TC is getting better identity other than just being this big like collector thing. Collecting is obviously a big part of it. But I'm happy with Live and I think its purpose is fine. I think his purpose is good. I think Pokemon, what they're able to get out of it is, is fine there. Was there another big thing we were going to talk about or is there this stuff to end to kind of wrap it up? No, I mean look, I'll just quickly the big complaints I get I see online and you can comment on or just ignore one. There's a lot of people complain about randomization, that it's not adequate. I don't really see that as an issue. But one-of-one that's common. The lack of full expanded implementation. People complain about a lot. And then the card selection glitch. Right. Those are like three of the big issues that still kind of go on. I, I, you know. But again I don't think they're, they're game breaking things. Yu-Gi-Oh Regarding those things, the, the card selection, I mean that can be kind of game breaking, right? Yes, it can. Yu-Gi-Oh You can lose that one is. Yu-Gi-Oh it can be. It can be annoying. It can be. It can be. It can be rough. But it's not Zebra common, I don't think. But it depends a person and the glitches seem to kind of depend on person as well, which is very bizarre. And then also there is the. Was it the other two things you said the expanded. People complain about it a lot. I think it's something kind of like with the rank ladder. People complained about that non existing implementation online. It's existed. I've heard no, literally no praises of it. I've heard some complaints and no praises. So I think it's one of these things that people just complain because they like to complain for the most part. I think there are legitimate complaints for it, but I don't really hear those. I mostly hear people just saying like oh, it's not in the game and that's why it should be in the game. And it's like that's not really a reason. Expand is interesting. There's stuff to say about it and there's good, there's bad, there's all sorts of different things. But expanded is. People don't say those things. And then the third one of the randomization is usually as far as I'm worth this like not true at all. And I think it sometimes has to do with people like it's like oh, sometimes it's like all my opponents always get so much better luck than me and they. They're like, Yu-Gi-Oh I like my opponents are playing like all these supporters and I'm like not. And so like sometimes I think a lot of the times it comes down to deck construction. Yu-Gi-Oh It did often newer plays as well. Right. Who just you know, aren't very experienced with building decks and then sometimes get like annoyed. So. Yu-Gi-Oh Yu-Gi-Oh I think, Yu-Gi-Oh Debt construction is issue and also our bias of what our mem. What things we. What things we notice. What things we remember. Right. That we're all. We have our biases on that. That as well. Yu-Gi-Oh that's true. But anyways we have this last thing which is potentially the biggest thing. Not the so reading last thing. It's relating to the in person play. That's not. I mean I guess that is big. But that's not a big live thing. Yu-Gi-Oh But then it says in the meantime, before the next season, mark your calendars because on September 15th we launch one of our biggest updates yet. Someone actually left this in the comment section. I'm sorry, I don't remember who it was but they left it. So thank you because I missed this. And you missed this, right? Yes. Yu-Gi-Oh it was just a little thing at the end that talked about IRL play and stuff and I was done reading. Honestly, I just skipped that sentence. Yu-Gi-Oh So, Yu-Gi-Oh it says we are launching one of our biggest updates yet. So what does this mean? In the past, big updates have been what, Build battle and train trials. Right? That they did. They did the game log. Right. That was, I would say, a big update because that was the first major new thing, theoretically. But in terms of gameplay change, it doesn't like actually really do much. But. But they say call it an update though. Right. So that would be a big update. And also they did the. The deck editor update. I think they would classify that as a big update as, well, Pokemon would. Yu-Gi-Oh So I think there's. There's only one thing that crosses my mind. I don't actually think it's this, but there's one thing that crosses my mind. Is it the same thing that crosses your mind? Is it expanded? Because they did say they were gonna. Yu-Gi-Oh now they said they would start implementing more expanded cards this year and obviously we're getting to. Towards the end of the year. So now I don't think they're. Unless they're gonna surprise and do full expanded. I don't think they will, but I. Maybe they'll start implementing more sets and expanded. Yu-Gi-Oh and that would be really big. A side note because again, you said they're doing it this year. There was, I think it was like two years ago that Pokemon was like, Yu-Gi-Oh we're gonna do something by the end of the year, we'll give you an update. And then you and I were prepared, preparing for the podcast and we were like, Yu-Gi-Oh they didn't do anything. And then like two days before the end of the year, they were like. Or something like that. They were like, oops, sorry, here's our thing. Yu-Gi-Oh Yu-Gi-Oh So they. They do, I guess, hold to their promises, but it could be related to expanded, which would be interesting, worth noting, very meaningful. But also, I don't. I don't know, it could be like anything. It could be like different background art or something. Right now, the thing. It's not going to be. It's not going to be some new announcement for the TCG as a whole. Because remember, this is tcgi, not the. Not tpc. Right. So it's not going to be like the new mechanic that they're introducing next year. That's not that. It can't be that. No, I mean, it could be like that is like the same time. But it can't be that they're like, that's not what they're announcing. Yu-Gi-Oh so. Yu-Gi-Oh so looking forward to it. Whatever this is. Hopefully it doesn't break the game. A year or two ago I would have been more afraid than looking forward to it, but I think at this point they started to get things going, so it probably one-of-one cause major trouble. And do let us know in the comments below what you what you think this big update might be that we're getting in a few weeks. Weeks? Yu-Gi-Oh But we hope you all enjoyed the episode today. Check us out on our channels 10 Topps and Uncommon Fossil on YouTube and you can comment there if you have any other. If you want to listen to us on podcasting platforms, you can do that. But please comment on our YouTube channels. Unfortunately we can't see the comments on the podcasting platforms because they're weird. But Yu-Gi-Oh you can like like us there, leave a review or whatever. And then we obviously hope you enjoyed. Make sure you like and subscribe on our channels. And as always, we're excited to see you in the next episode. Take care.