Play Limitless - 5 Years On

 On this date, 5 years ago, Play Limitless was launched and a small test tournament was set up to test out features on the site. Little did we know that we were helping to test what would turn out to be the biggest thing to happen for those of us playing Pokémon TCG in online tournaments during the pandemic, which is when in person play was suspended, and for the Pokémon TCG game overall. 

2020. A year not many will look back on fondly as it was the year the Covid pandemic hit and shut the world down, be it work, school, sports or even games. For those of us playing Pokemon TCG, the circuit was cancelled. In memories serves me correctly, the 2020 Toronto Regional was cancelled just days before it happened due to the pandemic, with Perth Regional, Guatemala SPE and Santiago SPE being the last IRL events to happen before the shutdown.

All in-person events were cancelled so for those of us who enjoyed playing the game, well what to do we now? The simple solution was playing online. I was used to it as I had played online events for a few years at that point, mainly the Pokebeach Monthly PTCGO Tournaments. You would be paired with an opponent and given 3-4 days to complete a bo3 series. But it wasn't an on-demand PTCGO event. 

That would soon change with the first Limitless Online Series Qualifier in April ran by the Limitless team and Robin Schulz. This live online event looked to mimic the feel of playing in an IRL event, where you'd play an opponent and say after 30 minutes time, you'd play another round against another opponent and so-on until top cut or the final swiss round. 

The qualifier events were initially a success, the first seeing 900+ players and the next two crossing the 1,000+ player mark. However the biggest issue came from the hosting site, start.gg (initially smash.gg). The hosting site was struggling to deal with the increased numbers of player, especially for the later events. Although the event was a huge success, Robin and the limitless team had plans to do a Limitless Online Series event. But with start.gg having it's issues and questions on whether other online platforms at that time (mostly Battlefy hosting events from the likes of Hegster, PokeX) could host a bigger amount of players, where could the team host such events? Thus the idea of Play Limitless!

"The idea for building the site came up when running the original Limitless Online Series at the beginning of 2020. We used start.gg for tournament operations, but it quickly became obvious that the site just wasn't ideal for our use case. 

We thankfully got help from rk9 for decklist submission, but since the pairings had to be external, there was no way for us to automatically remove people who didn't submit a decklist. We had to close decklist submission an hour or so early, go through the list, and drop people manually. Support for Swiss was also weak, for example records didn't carry over by phase, so we had to add up day 1 and 2 manually in Google Sheets before top cut. 

Overall, there were just a lot of tasks that felt way more difficult than they should be. We knew that if we were ever to run online tournaments again, we'd need a different system.

Since there were no official tournaments at the time, my motivation to work on the regular Limitless website wasn't very high, so I decided to try to solve the problems we ran into myself and started this new project. The initial goal was to create a Swiss-centered pairing system with integrated decklist submission, and it worked out quite well!" - Robin Schulz

And thus on September 2020, Play Limitless went live. But before the first Limitlss Online Series Weekly event could go live, the team held two test events to see how the new hosting site would work, be the checking-in, submitting of scores and pairings. I was one of the lucky few to play in the first test event, and I knew right away, Play Limitless was far superior to any other online hosting site being used, and that was only their first attempt! 

The best part for me was, not just that it was open decklist but we'd have a link to click that would open up your opponent's decklist in a picture form which was far better than many other sites, where you'd have to copy the list and post it on the Limitless tool. It's all done for you here by Limitless themselves which I thought was perfect! Funny little sidenote, but I did somehow actually win that first test event, but sadly it's not on record on the site anymore.

From there on, the first Limitless Online Series Weekly event would go live on the 3rd of October, almost 5 years ago! It was a free-to-enter league cp style tournament, which PTCGO codes given out as prizes. Edward Valencia (USA), a good friend of mine, would end up taking the win with Centiskorch VMAX, beating Henrique Jorge's (BRA) Blacephlaon deck. 165 players would enter the event which was quite a big number comapred to other online events on-going at that time.

It wouldn't be long before the first online event on Play Limitless would cross 200 players, that being the Atlas Collectables Sunday Open event with 210 players, won by JJTcg (ITA) with Pikachu & Zekrom-GX. And before the year ended, we crossed 300 players, Mike Fouchet (USA), again with PikaRom, winning the GGtoor Chill TCG Cup #1 event, with 383 players! 

As more players got word about Play Limitless and with IRL events still postponed, more players would join in on the fun of these online tournaments, with events happening on a daily basis! And it didn't take long for the numbers to continue growing. 

• 400+ Players: Jan 30 2021 - Limitless Online Series Major #1 won by Edwyn Mesman (NED) with Centiskroch VMAX - 490 players!
• 500+ Players: Apr 10 2021 - Limitless Online Series Major #3 won by keropon (JAP) with Mad Party Box - 528 players!
• 600+ Players: Jun 10 2021 - Chill Series #34 won by Stéphane Ivanoff (FRA) with Mewtwo & Mew-GX/Rillaboom - 750 players!
• 800+ Players: Aug 5 2021 - Chill Series #41 won by DiamondKing (TWN) with Shadow Rider Calyrex VMAX - 842 players!

Yup, 842 players in one online event on the 5th of August 2021, 10 months after the launch of Play Limitless. Sure these numbers wouldn't be seen on the regular but events would hit 200+ players more often that people might think. And the number of big events being hosted on Play Limitless have been growing lately. To show that:

• 2020 - 11 200+ Player Events Hosted (obviously a small number)
• 2021 - 86 200+ Player Events Hosted (first full year)
• 2022 - 71 200+ Player Events Hosted (IRL events returns this year)
• 2023 - 58 200+ Player Events Hosted (first full year with IRL events back)
• 2024 - 112 200+ Player Events Hosted (big increase in big events from 2021)
• 2025 - 141 200+ Player Events Hosted (biggest number so far with 3 months still to go)

Side note, if you were interested to see results from these events, I've made an excel sheet for all of the PTCGO/PTCGL online events on Play Limitless that had 200 players or more in it here!

The numbers have been increasing since 2024, and many more online series are starting to see consistently big numbers, compared to 2022-2023 when it was only one online series that would hit these 200+ player cap. Nowadays there's easily 5 or more events hitting 200+ on a regular basis. Players, be it casual or competitive are still using Play Limitless to practice for big events or just wanting the feeling of playing in a big events and just this year, we finally saw the first event to hit the 1,000+ player mark with The Smart Series back in July hitting 1539 players!

"I did not expect the platform to become as big, in fact initially it was only intended for our own use and didn't even have a proper admin panel. However I'm very happy how it evolved over time. I wasn't sure whether online tournaments would slowly fizzle out after the return of official tournaments, but was pleasantly surprised that the scene kept going and is probably as strong as ever today!" - Robin

As the site continue to grows, it's not just the Pokémon TCG players who are enjoying their game being hosted on Play Limitless. Eventually more games would start to get included, including Pokémon VGC, Pokémon GO and games not named Pokémon too (Digimon, One Piece and Lorcana to name a few), and not just online but some host IRL tournaments on Play Limitless as well! And just announced recently, Riftbound and League of Legends TCG will be supported on the site soon.

• Pokémon VGC 
• First event on Jan 20th 2022
• Most Players in an event during 2025: 285
• One Piece Card Game
• First event on March 24th 2023
• Most Players in an event during 2025: 1008
• Digimon Card Game
• First event on August 5th 2021
• Most Players in an event during 2025: 131
• DBS: Fusion World
• First event on February 24th 2024
• Most Players in an event during 2025: 153
• DBS: Masters
• First event on May 14th 2023
• Most Players in an event during 2025: 66
• Battle Spirits Saga
• First event on May 20th 2023
• Most Players in an event during 2025: no events
• Gundam Card Game
• First event on April 10th 2025
• Most Players in an event during 2025: 64
• Disney Lorcana
• First event on October 2nd 2023
• Most Players in an event during 2025: 287
• Star Wars: Unlimited
• First event on March 21th 2024
• Most Players in an event during 2025: 115
• Pokémon TCG Pocket
• First event on October 24th 2024
• Most Players in an event during 2025: 2829
• Pokémon GO
• First event on October 22nd 2024
• Most Players in an event during 2025: 5

With all these games now supported, things can get a bit challenging for the Play Limitless team, especially seeing the numbers Pokémon TCG Pocket have been pulling, with 22 events that have had more than 1000+ players!

"The biggest challenge was probably the addition of Pocket about a year ago. The game suddenly brought a lot of new people to the site and created some wild tournament attendance numbers that the site wasn't originally made to handle. But that's not a bad problem to have!

Also more generally speaking, ever since starting the tournament platform, it became more difficult to prioritize what to work on. Before that, when I wanted to work on Limitless, it was very straightforward, while now there's several projects I need to balance. It's still fun but definitely more challenging." - Robin

Not only has the game of Pokemon TCG grown bigger, but Play Limitless has grown quite big as well, with some card games using the platform to host IRL regional events! There have been talks about needing to input results online for Pokemon TCG and while that is currently only in Asia, could we see it elsewhere around the world and with Play Limitless? 

Whatever the future is, Play Limitless will continue to be a great source for players getting ready for events in the future. Some may not pay much attention to online events that much these days but it still can impact how the meta might shift, the prime example being the emergence of Regidrago VSTAR for Worlds last year. Granted it got a top 16 finish at NAIC but soon more players started to play it in online tournaments. And it won. And it won some more to the point everyone took notice and knew it would be a major player going into Worlds, along with a few new cards added from the Shrouded Fable set.

"Most importantly, I think it would be cool if online tournaments keep being a relevant part of the competitive community, and I'll do my best to maintain the site's position as the best place to host them and play in them. I do have some ideas on additional features it could provide, but it's not a main priority right now compared to the other newer projects like labs or the deck builder. TPCi already has a great partner in RK9 so I don't have any ambitions to ever be involved with official tournaments." - Robin

5 years later and Play Limitless is still a great resource for players to use, be it to play in these events to practice for their upcoming IRL events, or just to see what decks are doing well and try them out themselves. I myself use it often, as some might know, I do enjoy playing in these online events and I use it as practice for the real thing. Then again it's hard to get into events here so it's nice to just play and try to imagine how it would go for the real thing. 

I also use it to look at not just decks but data too. Seeing which decks are the most played in some of these bigger online events to figure out a potential metagame and also, the one I use it for the most, see the matchup data for these decks. I know, it's not the best one to see as some of these players might not be the best pilots for these decks but it's still better than having no resources so I'll take it. 

I'm glad that Robin and the Limitless team gave us this platform and I hope it continues to thrive for the next 5 years! So if you’re ever wanting to play Pokemon TCG from the comfort of your own home, you can always jump on to Play Limitless, there is bound to be an event on any given day. If you’re from North/South America and Europe, you’ll get the most options. And if you’re from Australia or Asia like myself, unfortunately there aren’t many events happening in timezones for our regions. Still, I do find myself getting up early or staying up late just to play because I do like playing the game! And with Play Limitless, it makes things so much easier.

Just wanted to give special thanks to Robin Schulz for answering some of my questions for this piece!

But where's the stats bit you ask? Don't worry, I got you covered! (Results are as of October 31st 2025)

Ever wondered which decks have won the most of these online events? I've gone through 479 online events to look through and this is what we've got for the most winningest decks (on a side note, the results will likely be more favoured to decks played recently as there have been way more events in the last 2 years on Play Limitless), and to keep it short, it's the top 20 winningest decks: 

1. Gardevoir ex - 36 Wins
2. Lugia VSTAR/Archeops - 26 Wins
3. Mew VMAX/Genesect V - 25 Wins
4. Dragapult ex/Dusknoir - 21 Wins
5. Lost Zone Box (Radiant Greninja) - 20 Wins
6. Charizard ex/Pidgeot ex - 18 Wins
7. Pidgeot ex Control - 18 Wins
8. Pikachu & Zekrom-GX - 15 Wins
9. Dragapult ex - 14 Wins
10. Raging Bolt ex/Teal Mask Ogerpon ex - 14 Wins
11. Giratina VSTAR (Lost Zone) - 13 Wins
12. Marnie's Grimmsnarl ex/Froslass - 12 Wins
13. Lost Zone Box (Radiant Charizard) - 11 Wins
14. Shadow Rider Calyrex VMAX - 11 Wins
15. Snorlax Stall - 10 Wins
16. Miraidon ex - 9 Wins
17. Regidrago VSTAR - 9 Wins
18. Origin Forme Palkia VSTAR/Inteleon - 8 Wins
19. Eternatus VMAX - 7 Wins
20. Centiskorch VMAX - 6 Wins

As for players you might ask, it's a bit more difficult as most of these players are playing under nicknames so it's very difficult to know the true answer but I tried my best and got something to work with. As there are so many players who have won these events, I tried to limit to those that have won at least 3 200+ online events on Play Limitless:

1. Alloutblitzle - 12 Wins
2. Gabriel Fernandez - 7 Wins
3. kasazizooka - 6 Wins
4. Joe Maressa - 5 Wins
5. David Hendrickson - 4 Wins
6. Evan Campbell - 4 Wins
7. KingHeracross - 4 Wins
8. Supercellcambo - 4 Wins
9. Adam Kalamat - 3 Wins
10. Aleksander Rutowicz - 3 Wins
11. Andrew Hedrick - 3 Wins
12. Angel Aranibar - 3 Wins
13. Augusto Beringuer - 3 Wins
14. Bart Musser - 3 Wins
15. Chalo Zamorano - 3 Wins
16. kappadocards - 3 Wins
17. Kashvinder Singh Mann - 3 Wins
18. Nathan Osterkatz - 3 Wins
19. TRTs101 - 3 Wins
20. Unowngamert - 3 Wins
21. wadedaze - 3 Wins

I don't think it's fully acurate but that's the best I can come up with. Thanks for reading!