Experience, Levels, and Board Capacity

Your player level does one simple, enormous thing: it sets how many Pokémon you can put on the board. Level 6 means six units fight; level 8 means eight. It also shifts your shop odds toward higher rarities. Deciding when to spend gold on experience versus when to spend it rolling for units is one of the core tensions of every game.

How experience works

• You gain +2 XP automatically every round, for free.
• You can buy 4 XP for 4 gold during any planning phase (you can buy multiple times).
• Each level needs a set amount of XP to reach the next. The early levels are cheap; it gets steeper. Here is the XP required to go from each level to the next:

Level 9 is the maximum. Since you gain 2 XP free per round, the real cost of a level is "the XP you buy to get there sooner than passive gain would".

The level-versus-roll decision

Every 4 gold you spend on XP is 4 gold you didn't spend rolling for units, and vice versa. The right call depends on your plan and your board state:

• Level when your board is fine but small. If you're winning fights at level 6 and have gold to spare, pushing to 7–8 adds a whole extra Pokémon and better shop odds — usually the strongest use of gold in the mid game.
• Roll (don't level) when your board is losing and you're on a specific breakpoint. If you're level 7 with a nearly-complete comp and taking damage, adding a copy that stars up your carry saves the game; a bare extra unit at level 8 might not.
• "Slow roll" if your low-rarity carry needs contest-free copies. Some comps deliberately stay at a lower level (6–7) longer to keep the shop full of the Commons/Rares they need to 3-star, then level up all at once afterward.
• Push level hard if your comp is built on high-rarity units. An Epic/Ultra-based board is unplayable until level 8 makes those rarities likely — get there fast even at the cost of early board strength.

Board capacity and synergies

Board size interacts directly with synergies: a synergy that needs 6 units of a type is simply impossible below level 6, and hitting the level-8 or level-9 breakpoint is what unlocks the top tier of most synergies. When you plan a composition in the Team Builder, notice how many units it takes to hit the thresholds you want — that number is the level you're aiming for.

It also means you should not run more of a synergy than your board can support. Nine units at level 9 can be, say, 6 of synergy A and 3 of synergy B. At level 7 you can't have both — you have to choose, or run a thinner version.