This format is currently partially playable on tcgone with the expanded quickplay ladder, however the ban lists are not compatible which is a significant problem for the formats overall balance. A dedicated ladder would also encourage the format to be played more on tcgone. Something that will be beneficial since it would be a way for people to play quick games rather then needing to wait for a GLC tournament or find an player to create a private match on ptcgo; it would also eliminate people from accidentally joining expanded games that are tagged as GLC with an illegal deck.
For people who don’t know what GLC is, I have an brief explanation here.
Gym Leader Challenge, usually abbreviated to GLC is a custom format made by Tricky Gym. It has gotten fairly popular recently. It’s purpose is to be a balanced single prize format that uses modern cards. It does this with a simple rule list which is. The card pool is BW base on, only one type of pokemon can be played in your deck, only a single copy of each card can be played, expect for basic energy; pokemon with a rule box are banned (the current rule box pokemon are, EX, GX, V, Prism star, Break, Ace Spec and sparkling). Three additional cards are banned on account of them being overpowered, Lysander’s Trump card, Oranguru (Ultra Prism), Forest of green plants.
It has a dedicated website as well, which has more details on the format as well as sample lists. https://gymleaderchallenge.com/
Personally I think it’s pretty rotten 20+Year fans are having to rewrite the game as a backlash to poor, marketing-led design choices at their expense.
Gym Leader Challenge may not be supported in the sense of having a format with strict deck building parameters enforced by the code of the game, but you can still play Gym Leader Challenge games for the BLW-EVS format (the first “expansion” of GLC! A historical format!) using the game’s expanded format, if you find people who are also interested in playing that format. Gym Leader Challenge’s Discord server also has a webcam channel where you can find people to play the format in that way, and, last time I checked, proxies were perfectly legal as long as you used legible scans of official cards, such as those found on the Limitless website.
True, but it’d still be super cool to have a digital platform to play GLC, with matchmaking and all. I’d love to see it, myself. You could probably get away with implementing a subset of relevant cards in the remaining sets since EVS, as well.
Fortunately, it sounds like Cardboard Warriors is developing a match finder for the Gym Leader Challenge format, though this match finder will most likely complement the webcam and, later, PTCGLive platforms.
Unfortunately, even a highlights subset is likely out of Admin’s reach. None of us understand how much time Admin has invested in TCGONE, but the thread below gives us a good example of Admin’s commitment and investment.
Admin has committed to stabilizing the existing card pool before adding new formats. On March 2, Admin announced that there had been 2300 unresolved bug reports a few months before, and that since then Admin had brought the number down to 1700. From my layman’s perspective, that seems impressive indeed, but it also means that Admin probably has over a year, possibly two, of bugs still left to resolve, assuming Admin can resolve 100-200 bugs a month and new bug reports keep being submitted. This, however, is Admin’s number 1 priority on TCGONE–creating a stable gameplay experience for the existing formats.
Gym Leader Challenge has a very strong community, a community that has gone to great lengths to make the format accessible and which will continue to streamline and upgrade the gameplay experience. Groups like Cardboard Warriors will continue support the format even if Trickygym stops pushing the format, as long as the community remains interested. I doubt Gym Leader Challenge needs to rely on TCGONE for stability.
EDIT: the thread linked above credits @Tegull “for great work in card testing and validation.” I wanted to mention this for two reasons: first, to give credit to the other people helping to keep TCGONE running smoothly (since I’ve only been aware of Admin’s recent contributions), and second, because it seems like a role that more of us, myself included, might consider volunteering in.