Pokémon TCG Live: what the app records about your games, and how to read it
You lost, you are fairly sure you played it right, and you have no idea what went wrong. The app wrote all of it down while you were playing — every draw, every Energy, every attack and every damage number. Almost nobody opens that tab. It is the most useful thing in the client.
- The battle log is plain text sitting in a tab inside the game. Open it, select everything, copy. There is no export button and you do not need one.
- It records both players, turn by turn, and it includes the game’s own damage maths for every attack. Anything neither player saw — a face-down draw, the order of a deck — is not in there either.
- Copy it before you leave the game. Go back to the menu and the text is gone for good, along with the game you wanted to understand.
- Because it is text, it can be read back. That is the whole basis of what poko does: rebuild the board turn by turn, replay the moments where you had a real choice, and tell you which one cost you.
Where the log lives, and the habit worth building
Inside the game itself, in the log tab. Open it, select all of the text, copy it. It is ordinary text on screen, so it copies like any other text, and there is nothing to install or enable first.
Do it before you go back to the menu. That text is not saved anywhere once the game is closed, which means the game you most want to understand — the one you just lost in a way you cannot explain — is exactly the one you are most likely to lose forever. Copy first, be annoyed afterwards.
A long game runs to several hundred lines, and that is fine. The client writes down everything, including a great deal that does not matter. You are not meant to read it. You are meant to keep it.
There is nothing private in there. Screen names and card names, and that is the lot: no password, no email, nothing that would let anybody near your account.
What a battle log actually contains
One line for each thing that happened: a draw, an Energy attached, an evolution, an attack, a damage total, a Pokémon knocked out, a Prize card taken. Both players, in order, from the coin flip to the last Prize.
The most useful part is the damage. Every attack comes with the game’s own working out: the base attack, Weakness, whatever an Energy or a Tool adds, and the total. That is a sum somebody else can redo and compare. When both answers land on the same number, you know the game has been read correctly — and when they do not, you would much rather be told than not.
The most misleading part is the draws. The log says "drew a card" without saying which, because your opponent never saw it. A card that was never revealed stays unknown to everybody, us included. That looks like a gap. It is actually what makes an honest comparison possible: nobody gets to peek.
And then there is what the log does not contain at all — what you were thinking, what you nearly played instead, how long you sat there. A log says what happened, never why. Filling that in is the part a coach does.
Turning a log into something you can act on
Read it line by line, rebuild the board on every turn, then go back to each moment where you had a genuine choice and play that turn out 300 times: once with the move you made, once with each of the others. What comes out the far end is the move that cost you the game.
Step one is putting an exact name to every card. Your log says "Absol", but several different cards are called Absol and they do not do the same thing. So the first job is working out which one was actually in front of you, out of a binder of 1951 distinct cards counted across 20 Standard-legal sets on 11 August 2026.
Step two is the board. What was Active, who was waiting on the Bench, how much Energy each Pokémon carried, how much damage it had already taken. The damage sums get redone independently and both answers are shown side by side, so none of this rests on trust: on an ordinary game, twenty-five lines out of twenty-six land on exactly the same number, and the twenty-sixth is printed too.
Step three is the slow one. Wherever you had a real decision — attack or retreat, this card or that one — the game gets rewound to that exact point and played out 300 times per option, always with the same cards in hand and the same deck order. Change the shuffle and you are comparing your luck instead of your decision. Over a long game that is tens of thousands of turns played out.
Step four is the only one that matters to you: you walk away with one habit. One precise thing to look at the next time you are standing in that position. Just the one. That is how anybody gets better at this — a habit at a time.
One caveat, and it is not a small one. There are still cards whose text cannot be read yet. When too many of them turn up in a game, no overall score is given: the cards that got in the way are named, and the turns that are certain are still shown. A score worked out around a blind spot is worse than no score, because it teaches you the wrong habit.
Questions people ask
- Where is the battle log in Pokémon TCG Live?
- In the game itself, in the log tab. There is no export button — open the tab, select all the text and copy it. Do that before returning to the menu, because leaving the game loses the text.
- Does poko need access to my Pokémon TCG Live account?
- No, never. poko does not talk to the game, does not sign in to anything and cannot touch a game in progress. It reads a piece of text you hand over yourself once the game is finished. That is also why it cannot break anything.
- Is there anything sensitive in a battle log?
- Screen names and card names. No password, no email address, nothing that gets anybody near your account. In poko it is read inside your browser and does not leave the device until you ask for it to.
- Why does the log not say which card I drew?
- Because your opponent did not see it. The log records what was shown at the table, so a draw stays "a card" unless some effect revealed it. That is a limit of the text itself rather than of anything reading it, and it applies to both players equally.
- Which decks are people actually winning with right now?
- That question is answered by tournament lists rather than by the client, which is why poko counts real decklists from tournament results and publishes one page per archetype. The cards in every list, the cards in half of them, and the number of lists behind each figure.
- Can I have a game I won looked at?
- Yes, and it is often the one that teaches most. A win hides two or three moves that should have cost you the game and did not, because nobody across the table punished them. Those are precisely the ones a stronger player punishes next time.
Where all of this comes from
Card names, HP, Energy costs and rules text come from poko's own binder: 1951 distinct cards, recounted across 20 Standard-legal sets on 11 August 2026. The number of replays behind each decision (300) is the engine's own constant, not a rounded figure. What a battle log contains is described from the real logs read to validate that reading, not from any publisher documentation.
These pages are about the same corner of the game. If you came away from this one still wondering about something, start with one of them.