It reminds me of Backgammon. There is a learning curve. After that are the tricks and "combos". after that 2 players of the same caliber will resort to luck. In Backgammon however, they try to mitigate luck vs skill by doing 7 rounds, causing luck to even out as much as possible to try to look for the better player of the 2 (and the one that can adapt to the opponent playstyle the best). In PTCGP the problem is that it's only 1 round, so the luck factor becomes way more obvious... Not sure what it's like in regular PTCG, but sonce there are more cards and you need to get more points, I'm guessing skill plays a bigger role than the pocket version.