That's blatantly wrong. PTCGL is the online card game, you don't hear much about it because it's basically free and there's no strong incentive to market it to you.

In person, the competitive scene in western countries is larger than MTG right now, and on the same scale as Riftbound. In Japan it's always been the biggest by an order of magnitude. The two big western open entry tournaments, EUIC / NAIC, sell out ~4,000 player tickets in a matter of seconds. Regionals tournaments that happen almost twice a month throughout the year sell out ~2K-3K player tickets in a matter of minutes.

My understanding is that Pokémon is surprisingly cheap if you want to actually play the game as they reprint staples to oblivion (often <100$ for tier one decks). It’s all collection based , which in and of itself is not necessarily an indictment on the value of Pokémon cards, but is much closer to greater fool theory than I’m comfortable with .