Is the Pokémon data the same?

The card pool is the same and pokemontcg.io is one of our upstream sources. We add Japanese-to-English linking, normalised pricing from five marketplaces and daily price history.

Do I have to rewrite my queries?

The filter grammar differs — we use plain query parameters rather than a Lucene-style q string — but the concepts map one to one and most migrations are a single afternoon.

The Pokémon TCG API is free. Why pay?

For a hobby project, do not. It is a good service and it has powered a lot of the Pokémon tooling that exists. The case for paying starts when downtime costs you something, when you need history rather than a spot price, when the rate limits are shaping your architecture, or when you have added a second game and are staring at a second integration.

Do you have the same cards?

The same English catalogue, plus Japanese sets carried as first-class sets rather than as an afterthought. If you find a card of ours that is missing or wrong, tell us and it gets fixed — that feedback loop with a named person on the other end is a meaningful part of what the paid tier buys.

How much work is the migration, honestly?

For a typical application, an afternoon. The concepts map almost one to one because both APIs describe the same cards; the work is renaming fields, moving game-specific ones under a namespace, and swapping the query syntax. The part that takes longest is usually deciding which price source you want to treat as canonical.

pokemontcg.io · Pokémon only

Pokémon TCG API alternative — pokemontcg.io compared

pokemontcg.io is the community standard for Pokémon card data. TCGGraph offers the same Pokémon coverage plus seven more games, normalised prices from five marketplaces and a stricter uptime commitment.

Try TCGGraph free See pricing

What Pokémon TCG API does well

Free, well documented and the default choice for Pokémon projects for years.
Complete English card pool with clean attack, weakness and resistance modelling.
Simple REST design that is easy to learn in an afternoon.
A large ecosystem of community libraries built on top of it.

Where TCGGraph differs

Coverage stops at Pokémon. TCGGraph carries the same Pokémon data plus Magic, One Piece, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Lorcana, Star Wars: Unlimited, Digimon and Grand Archive.
We serve Japanese printings linked to their English counterparts through a shared card identity.
Prices come from five marketplaces with daily history rather than a single source snapshot.
We publish an uptime SLA on paid plans and a public status page.

Side by side

Feature comparison

Feature	Pokémon TCG API	TCGGraph
Games covered	Pokémon only	8 games
Japanese printings linked to English
Price history	Current prices	Daily, to 2019
European prices (Cardmarket)	Pokémon only	All 8 games
Price sources	TCGplayer, Cardmarket	5 sources
GraphQL
Webhooks
Published uptime SLA		99.95% on paid
Price	Free	From $19/mo

When to use Pokémon TCG API instead

If you are building something Pokémon-only and free is the deciding factor, pokemontcg.io is a fine choice and has served the community well for a long time. It is one of our upstream sources. Consider TCGGraph when you need a second game, Japanese-to-English card linking, deeper price history, or an availability guarantee you can point a customer at.

Migration

What the change looks like

Concepts map closely. Most migrations are a single afternoon of find-and-replace plus a test pass.

Pokémon TCG API

# pokemontcg.io
curl "https://api.pokemontcg.io/v2/cards?q=name:charizard" \
  -H "X-Api-Key: $POKEMONTCG_KEY"

TCGGraph

# TCGGraph
curl "https://api.tcggraph.com/v1/cards?game=pokemon&name=charizard" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TCGGRAPH_KEY"

Signals

When it is worth switching

None of these are reasons on their own. Two or three together usually are.

Rate limits are shaping your product — you are batching, backing off or caching aggressively to stay inside them.
You need price history rather than today's number, for a portfolio, an alert or a repricing job.
Your app has grown past Pokémon and now needs a second game with the same shape of data.
You need somebody to answer when the data is wrong or the service is down.

Migration

Moving off Pokémon TCG API, step by step

The honest version, including the parts that are not one-to-one.

Step 1
Translate the query syntax
The Pokémon TCG API uses a Lucene-style q parameter, so q=types:fire hp:[300 TO *] becomes types=Fire&minHp=300. Ranges become min and max prefixes and every field name keeps its meaning, which makes this mostly mechanical.
Step 2
Move game fields under their namespace
Fields that sit at the top level there — hp, types, attacks, weaknesses — live under gameData in REST and under the typed pokemon field in GraphQL. Everything shared between games, like name, set, rarity and prices, stays at the top level. One find-and-replace usually covers it.
Step 3
Adopt the price series
Where you currently read a single tcgplayer price object, you get a series per marketplace and condition. Take the market value from your preferred source to reproduce current behaviour, then add history when you want it.
Step 4
Stop pre-emptive caching
A lot of Pokémon TCG API integrations cache hard to stay under the rate limit. Credits meter work rather than requests, cached 304 responses cost nothing and images are never metered, so the cache you built to survive rate limiting is often no longer earning its complexity.

Field mapping

What each field becomes

The part that takes the longest is discovering that Pokémon TCG API spells the same concept differently. Here it is, written down.

Pokémon TCG API	TCGGraph	Notes
id	id	Different format, same role. Ours is prefixed by game.
hp (string)	gameData.hp (int)	Typed as an integer, so numeric filters work.
types[]	gameData.types[]	Same values, moved under the namespace.
attacks[]	gameData.attacks[]	Same shape: name, cost, damage, text.
set.id	set.code	Same identifier, renamed for consistency across games.
tcgplayer.prices	prices[]	An array across five sources rather than one object.
legalities.standard	legalities.standard	Same keys and values.
images.large	images.large	Unmetered on both.

FAQ

Common questions

Anything else, email hello@tcggraph.com. We will tell you if the answer is that you should stay where you are.

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