Gym Leader Challenge (GLC) is a fan-made Pokémon Trading Card Game format created by Andrew Mahone. The pitch is simple: you build and play like an actual Gym Leader, using only one type of Pokémon, the way Blaine only used Fire or Misty only used Water. Every other competitive format lets you mix and match whatever wins; GLC forces a single identity for the whole deck.
That one restriction changes everything else about how a deck comes together. You cannot patch over a weak matchup by splashing in a different type's best attacker, and you cannot lean on four copies of your best card to smooth out bad hands — GLC is also singleton, so every deck is built the way a collector actually accumulates cards: one of each.
GLC decks are still 60 cards played to 6 Prize cards, using the current Pokémon TCG rules for turns, attacks and Knock Outs — nothing about the base game changes. What GLC adds on top is four extra constraints: your deck can only include Pokémon of a single type (Basic Energy of the matching type is unlimited); you can only run one copy of any card that shares a name, aside from Basic Energy; the legal card pool starts at the Black & White series (2011) and runs to the newest expansion; and Pokémon with a Rule Box — ex, EX, GX, V, VMAX, VSTAR, BREAK, Prism Star, Radiant — are banned outright, along with ACE SPEC cards.
On top of those four rules there's a maintained ban list for specific cards that would otherwise break the format's balance — full list on our GLC hub.
A handful of cards get banned even though they'd normally be legal, because they undo the whole point of the mono-type restriction. Double Colorless Energy is the clearest example: it's banned in every printing, since a special energy that provides two Colorless energy for one card slot quietly lets non-Colorless decks borrow attacks meant for a different identity — the exact thing the type restriction is supposed to prevent. The rest of the ban list follows the same logic: cards get cut when they're strong enough to homogenize decks rather than define them.
In Standard or Expanded, if a card is good you play four of it and consistency stops being a design problem. In GLC you can't: every Basic Trainer, Supporter, evolution and attacker earns exactly one slot, so a 60-card deck is really 60 individual decisions instead of 15 decisions repeated four times. That's what makes a well-built GLC list feel personal — two Fire decks built by different players rarely look the same, because there's no single 'best' consistency package to copy.
It also means resilience matters more than raw power. A deck that only has one copy of its key evolution line needs redundancy elsewhere — extra ways to search, extra ways to recover a knocked-out attacker — or it folds the moment that one card gets prized.
All ten types play differently enough that 'best type' isn't really a meaningful question — it's closer to picking a playstyle. We've written full deck guides for three to start: Fire, the most explosively aggressive type in the format; Water, built around energy acceleration and recovery rather than raw speed; and Dragon, the highest-ceiling, highest-risk type, held together by a single specialized energy card. More type guides are coming.
Whichever type you pick, the full decklists, ban list and rules reference live on the Gym Leader Challenge hub, and our deck builder will validate a GLC list against these exact rules as you build it.