Compared to Magic 2015 I looked at a few weeks ago, PTCGO is way better. I had a few technical issues here and there with the game but otherwise it feels like you can do pretty much anything you could do in a real game of the actual card game. Some might argue that the Pokemon cards are simpler - there is no 'instant' in PTCG, everything is played during your turn - but that's just the nature of the rules of one game versus another. It had been a while since I had looked at this and was surprised to see that there are now the equivalent of enchantments - such as giving +30 max HP to a pokemon.
The character creation is a bit silly, you don't really need to create your own avatar especially when anything you make will look dumb. I suppose they couldn't have gone for some pixelated sprites? Maybe something that looked like actual characters from pokemon, either the anime or the slew of games that are out there? The fact that you have to create an account and that the whole game is played online is a bit annoying because of loading everywhere and because the game can be in maintenance, during which you just can't play.
But when you get to the playing part of the game, it's pretty neat, you can fight a various number of computer-controlled opponents - I was a bit afraid it was going to be VS Players only - and by defeating them enough times you get rewards and more cards for your decks. The basic starter fire/water/grass decks are fine too and they're simple enough for beginners. You can also see what kind of deck your opponents are using so you can prepare accordingly. There are a few achievements too - but they're a bit distracting because if you want to collect them on purpose you might want to try and play differently than the optimal way to win.
Otherwise, this is a version of the pokemon TCGO on your iPad, it's free to play, you can enjoy the game pretty much without paying and no matter if you don't want to play against real people, that's fine too. I just wish there was a way to play offline without having to mess with all this account stuff.
