Gym Leader Challenge (GLC) is a community-driven format for Pokémon TCG, created by Andrew Mahone. It was created during the horror era of Arceus & Dialga & Palkia-GX, the pandemic and a particularly stale Standard format. It has gained a lot of popularity since and is my favourite format to play the game.
It’s not an official format but Pokémon has recognised it and every now then offer a limited version of it in Pokémon TCG Live. If only they’d add all the cards going back to Black & White into the game so we could actually play the real deal.
The format’s ruleset is simple:
- Cards from sets after Black & White are legal (other than the ones on the ban list)
- Your deck can only contain one type (color) of Pokémon.
- Only one of each card with the same name allowed in a deck, except for Basic Energy (aka singleton).
- Cards with a Rule Box (EX, GX, ex, V, Radiant and so on) are not allowed.
- ACE SPEC cards are not allowed.
So you build your deck by choosing a type and then picking 60 cards where no card can share a name with another other than basic energies. In TCG, that’s usually called singleton.
The matchups are more back-and-forth and slower than Standard format. The card pool is massive, spanning over a decade worth of cards and the exclusion of Rule Box cards makes the matches way more exciting, giving room for cards that otherwise wouldn’t see play or never got their opportunity to shine in Standard or Expanded at their time.
Andrew has a fun introduction to the format in his Youtube channel and there are plenty of great channels that make videos about GLC (see Pokemon TCG).