I was wrong about Pokémon TCG Live economy

Back in the day, when Pokémon TCG Live was announced in 2021, I was worried that the economy would make it hard to keep building decks. In the older client, PTCG Online, you could trade cards but that was removed in Live and replaced with a much anticipated crafting where you can exchange in-game currency to purchase cards you wanted.

My main worry was that you could not (and still can’t) decide to dust a card, ie. turn any card you want into credits to purchase other cards. You could only get the credits through in-game awards or when you added a fifth card into your collection. Anything beyond 4 cards gets dusted and turned into credits on a ratio that’s not great.

5 years later, I’m ready to admit I was completely wrong. To be fair, I play a lot but I stopped converting code cards from boosters into the game years ago.

I’m currently at 314k of the purple currency (used for buying packs) and 433k in yellow currency (used to craft cards) and I have pretty much complete collections of all sets that have been published since the game came out. I can play whatever decks I want.

I don’t know what the numbers look like for a super casual player or someone who starts from the scratch. I got quite a good start by converting my old Online collection to Live and making smart moves up front. My main worry was that because of the low rate for dusting, it would eventually fizzle out. It clearly didn’t. I asked around in my local gaming group on the numbers were somewhat similar: ie. at least tens of thousands of credits.

Having enough of credits to purchase the cards I need has been very helpful in playing fun custom formats. We played a fun Progression Series through live with Scarlet and Violet sets and recently I’ve been trying to get my friends to play a tournament with random Start Deck 100 decks. Spending a couple of thousand credits at max to get a new silly deck makes it possible to play more than just one or two decks and experience the game in a way that is most fun.