Beginers Info

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Welcome New Trainer!
Welcome to the world of Pokémon Trading Card Game Online, or Pokémon TCGO for short.

In order to play the game, you must sign up for a Trainer account and download the client at http://www.pokemontcg.com/download.

Please check some common FAQs  brought to you by the PTCGO staff.

This wiki page was made to help introduce you on accessing various functions through the client being used at this time! So let's get started!

Yu my bi wüńttërng whit tu du fahirrrstdtt. It is understandable that you are confused when you first play on PTCGO. Should you go off and battle? Make a deck? Trade? Well, let's go through some of the items:

Trainer Challenge
This is where you challenge NPCs (NPC is the same thing as AI). Some bonuses in completing the trainer challenges includes obtaining free booster packs!

Selecting a League (and earning booster packs)
There are three leagues present: sliver league, gold league and the city championship. You can select the difficulty of the NPCs in these leagues from either Beginner, Intermediate, Hard, or Expert. The harder the difficulty, the more points you earn through battling an opponent.

Why is this information important? If you get at least 30,000 points against a trainer (4 stars on the "Total Trainer Score" bar), you unlock a free random booster pack. Completing the trainer score challenge in each league will get you 3 additional packs per league. As with all free in-game giveaway, the cards you get are locked.

Unlocking the Deck
As you may see, these initial decks are not initially present when you are making a custom deck. In order to unlock these decks, which you can use the cards to make your own custom deck, you must beat a certain number of NPCs - typically 12 unique opponents - with that specific deck.

Each time you beat a unique opponent with a "locked" deck, the deck will swap out a card. Once you get the reach the maximum unlock value (typically 11), these deck will now be available in the Deck Management section (which is mentioned later).

Versus Mode
Select the difficulty as either novice or expert and you will face another player who chose the same option! You get 11 Trainer Tokens as a daily bonus when you face someone, but only once per day.

Tournament Mode
In this mode you may take part in different tournaments. They are broken down by format and entry fee. Currently there are two types of entry fees: Poké coins and Tickets. Poké coins can be used to enter Expanded tournaments only. Tickets are used for all other modes; Theme; Standard; Legacy.

Making a Deck
Click the Deck Manager as shown.

You can either create a deck from scratch or clone an existing one.

Theme Decks
Once you fully unlock one of the starter decks from the Trainer Challenge, that deck will appear in the Deck Manager for you to use!

Other ways to obtain a deck is by redeeming codes or buying a theme deck through the shop or have the deck be given to you as a reward (such as the Basic Yellow deck which was given to beta players back in the old web-client version).

Making a Trade
Click the Trade button and pick whatever suits you.

The first thing you may see at the beginning are public trades nearly ending where you have an unlocked card that the person wanted.

Untradable Cards
Please note that the card must be tradable in order to trade.

Free cards you obtain through the daily bonus, Trainer Challenge, and some redeemable codes are untradable. This can be seen through the lock icon next to the amount of that card you have.

For example, this image to the left shows you that 17 of that Pikachu are untradable (locked); only 2 of it are tradable!

The Pikachu card to the right, however, is not tradable - all of it is locked!

Trading Terminology
In the chatroom, you may see people stating acronyms and wonder what they mean. Here is a list of some common terms:

Making a Binder
A binder is a list of cards you are interested in trading. To make your binder, go to your Collection (left of the Deck Manager) and view all the cards that you have. Select the card you are interested in and click the option at the bottom as Tag for Trade (which can be seen in the above picture).

The card now should have a small icon. Note that I set the center Pikachu for trade and the one on the right as both wanted and review (you can use these tags to help get to your favorite cards faster).

Viewing a Binder
To view a binder, you must:
 * 1) Go to the Trade section
 * 2) Click on the 'New Private Trade' tab
 * 3) Often you will need to look a person up so click the "Public" tab under the 'Select your Partner' and search for the person of interest
 * 4) Click "Add" where it says that "X is Offering Me"
 * 5) Disable the "Show only items I want" so you can see the full cards that X has listed for trade in its binder.
 * 6) You may want to disable the Like for Like trading when adding your cards. If active, you will be trading for the same rarity.

Making Friends
Found somebody you liked talking to on the chat? Or want to battle them? Well, this is what you do:
 * 1) Click the Friends icon as shown above
 * 2) Click on the "Public" tab
 * 3) Type in the person's name
 * 4) Click the Add button (+ sign)