Use cases
What people build with the Pokémon TCG API
Every page below is a working integration, not a feature list: the code runs against the live API, and the pitfalls are the ones that actually cost people an afternoon.
- pricesBuild a Pokémon card price trackerWatch a list of cards, store a daily price series with its provenance, and alert when a card moves more than a threshold.The trial — 800 credits, granted once — is enough to build and test this against a small watchlist. Running it daily needs a paid plan, and the history endpoint returns seven days on the trial, 30 on Developer and the whole series from Growth up.
- botsBuild a Pokémon TCG Discord botA /card slash command that answers in under a second: search, disambiguate, and reply with an embed carrying the art, the rules text and a price.The trial covers building it: images cost nothing, a revalidated lookup answers 304 for free, and 1,000 distinct cards is plenty for a bot that answers questions. A server that stays busy needs the Developer plan — a lookup is one credit, a lookup with prices is two, and 30,000 distinct cards a month.
- appsBuild a Pokémon card collection appMirror the catalogue once, keep it current with a change feed, and value a binder without hammering the API on every screen.A local mirror is a Growth job: the trial covers 1,000 distinct cards and Developer 30,000 a month, and the whole catalogue is past 57,000. On Growth, import all cards through /v1/cards?limit=250&orderBy=id, following links.next; a page of 250 costs five credits, including when you request images or translations, so the full import is about 1,155 credits. The quickstart gives dated card counts. Keeping a mirror current through the change feed costs one credit per poll, plus the requests to fetch changed records.
- toolsBuild a Pokémon TCG deck builderFilter on structured card data, hydrate a decklist in one request, and check the construction rules — deck size and the four-copy rule — against real card data. Format legality is the one thing this API does not carry yet.Everything here works on the trial. The reference lists that populate filter dropdowns do not count against quota at all.
- visionBuild a Pokémon card scannerTurn a phone photo into ranked card candidates, let the user confirm the printing, and add it to a collection in two taps.Verified Free accounts get 5 trial recognitions; ongoing recognition is included from the Growth plan up. A scan costs 25 credits, or 26 with include=index and 29 with include=prices for up to ten candidates. The full-card batch remains available when the picker needs more than the value.
- analyticsRun Pokémon card market analyticsPull daily series for a basket of cards, compute movement over a window, and build a report whose method survives being questioned.The history endpoint returns seven days on the trial, 30 on Developer and the whole series from Growth up, which is also where the movers feed starts. Seven days are enough to prototype the pipeline; a report needs Growth.
- no-codeUse the API from Sheets and no-code toolsPull card data and prices into a spreadsheet or an automation platform without writing a service — and without leaking your key.Batched properly, a 500-row sheet is five requests a refresh, so the trial covers building it and the Developer plan covers refreshing it daily with room to spare.
- agentsGive an AI agent Pokémon card dataExpose search, lookup and prices as tools an assistant can call, so answers are grounded in data with a date attached instead of recalled.The trial is enough to build and test an agent. Tool calls are ordinary requests, so an agent that searches before answering costs a handful of credits per conversation; the Developer plan is where one runs for other people.