2026 Competitive Season Changes and Improvements in Pokémon Trading Card Game Live

TPCi_GlowingMoon · August 22

Quick Summary

We’re excited to announce some improvements to the player experience this Fall:

Ranked Ladder Reset Compression, effective immediately
Expanded Battle Passes (to Level 100) for the Mega Evolution Series
Intentional Quest Design and Double XP

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Hello Trainers!

Congratulations to everyone who competed in the 2025 Play! Pokémon competitive season and to our newly crowned Pokémon Trading Card Game World Champions. We’re honored to play a role in your training, and that is a responsibility we don’t take lightly. We’re also delighted to be getting more feedback through our Community Ambassador Program and the community conversations springing up around that program. We see you, and we hear you. Thank you for your continued contributions to the community!

As we head into the new 2026 Play! Pokémon competitive season, we’re making immediate intentional changes to improve your Pokémon TCG Live experience, and you can expect continued improvements as we go.

Ranked Ladder Reset Changes

We have heard loud and clear that the reset for each Ranked Ladder is too harsh, causing experienced players a lot of pain as they work their way up from Quick League back to Master League. While this was originally well-intentioned to give players a chase and challenge, we have since realized there are more sophisticated ways to do this. We also improved the implementation of our Ranked Ladder earlier this year, giving us greater flexibility.

We are happy to report that, starting immediately with today's July 2025 Ranked Ladder reset, players will now drop a maximum of 8 full ranks when a ladder turns over, as opposed unilaterally returning to Quick League. This more compressed reset better honors players where they land on the ladder and reduces the amount of time expert players spend in the grind to Master League.

We still have room to tune how these settings work, but we have opted to adjust the compression gradually and monitor both player feedback, as well as how it affects the community over the course of a few releases, before making further changes.

Enjoy Study Season with the knowledge that your progress will go further towards future Ranked Ladder rewards! Of course, players who skip a Ranked Ladder will get reset twice and will eventually end up back in Quick League.

Battle Pass Expansion carried forward to Mega Evolution Series

Many players noticed that there were changes made to Trade Credit values in the July release to help balance out the new 10-card boosters. However, we also made a very intentional change to make our Battle Passes both longer and easier to progress through, which should yield better overall access to cards and Trade Credits over the lifetime of each expansion. This was done via a combination of game design changes: we increased the amount of XP awarded per quest, we increased the number of levels in the Battle Pass, and we made each level within the Battle Pass more rewarding. We’re really happy with the new engagement thus far, and we plan on keeping the 100-level Battle Pass design unless player behavior changes in a way that requires further adjustment.

Pokémon TCG Live is designed to provide a great competitive experience for our elite players, but we also want to provide a fun and accessible experience for those new to the game. The Battle Pass is a key part of that accessibility. These recent July changes were our next attempts at improving the experience, and we’re thrilled to see them working. There’s still room for us to improve the Battle Pass experience though– we’re aware that it can be a bit anticlimactic when you complete one early. This is something that’s planned to be addressed in the future, but with no concrete timing just yet. We’ll include details in a future update once we have more to share.

Intentional Quest Design and Double XP

As many of you may have noticed, we’ve been getting more intentional about our quest design, after receiving critical feedback earlier this year (Cassiopeia anyone?). Our intent is to keep the first two Daily Quests casual-friendly and make the third Daily Quest a bit more challenging for players looking to push themselves. We will sometimes run double XP challenges in this third Daily Quest slot, to help players who want to go further in the Battle Pass do so faster. Check out new double XP quests during Study Season from August 28 to September 25, 2025, and complete those last few levels of our final Scarlet & Violet era Battle Pass!

Frequently Asked Questions

Before we go, we also wanted to take this opportunity to address a few common questions we’ve heard from the community:

Why didn’t the Trade Credit changes get announced sooner?

We acknowledge that an important note announcing changes to Trade Credits was unintentionally omitted from the Version 1.28.0 Patch Notes. We are actively evaluating our current tools and processes to ensure that key information is consistently identified and communicated, and we’re committed to improving our internal workflows to prevent similar issues in the future. We remain dedicated to supporting our players with transparent and reliable updates and would like to thank the community for their continued support.

What’s coming next for the competitive experience?

We hear that the current tuning on Overnumbered cards is not hitting everyone’s hopes for the game. While we do believe that initial restrictions honor the spirit of the chase seen in the physical game and increase the joy of those initial pulls, we understand that 6 months can be a long time and there’s probably a happy middle ground somewhere. We are actively reviewing our data to figure out the right path forward here, and further updates on this and other parts of the game will be shared in the coming weeks and months.
We are also working to deploy some server-side changes to improve match stability. These are complex changes, and we want to avoid disruption to major releases, so it is a lengthy process that has already been ongoing for several releases. Improving the stability of gameplay is very much a priority for us, and we’re looking into it on a number of fronts over the next year. We feel strongly that improving match stability is a prerequisite for satisfying player requests for competitive features like leaderboards that rely on underlying match integrity.

What's not coming next for the game economy?

We know that there have been rumors that some recent changes are reflective of pending monetization of in-game features. Pokémon TCG Live remains free to play, and there are no plans to add the ability to make real money purchases in the game at this time. The changes we are making are tied to our desire to make the game function better from a design perspective, and to rebalance the economy in a way that makes it possible for us to give more packs out to players more regularly throughout gameplay.

Let’s Evolve Together!

Thank you for continuing to share your passion for Pokémon TCG Live! We are excited to bring you more updates in the months to come, and the competitive experience isn’t the only part of the game that will see improvements. Casual players will see some fun changes as well; stay tuned for more announcements and great new events. Let’s celebrate the best of the Scarlet & Violet Series together during Study Season, and gear up for an exciting new series this Fall!