Playing the Pokemon TCG As An Adult

This is all Kyle's fault.

I had played the card game as a kid, preferring it to the video games. Not much has changed on that front in the decades, but I'd dropped off as I got older and encountered the inevitable conservatism of teenagers. I always kept my finger somewhat on the game, until my brother-in-law Kyle got me a couple of decks, coz he's Kyle and he's always trying to get my grump self to do stuff. I found that the game worked very differently from when I was a kid... which actually changes the way I remember the game in a really weird way. And it's interesting to see my children play it and what they get out of it.

So for those of you who don't know: in Pokemon you build a 60 card deck. Six of those cards become Prize Cards, which are put to the side. Whenever you knock a Pokemon out by doing enough damage to it you take 1-3 prize cards. Whoever takes all their Prize Cards, takes out all the opposing Pokemon (so that way there's no one to fight), or the opponent has no cards to draw, wins! However, in order to deal damage to a Pokemon you have to have energy cards... which do nothing but attach to your Pokemon, usually once a turn. The inherent problem of the game then becomes getting the energy out of your deck onto your Pokemon in a timely, orderly, and constant fashion, before your opponent does it faster and better. Fortunately the designers realized the inherent limitation of this issue and have provided a lot of really good ways to get through the deck quickly and to find the cards you need to.

The biggest thing about the game is that it is deterministic: with the exception of some attacks, damage is a static and known quantity. You know how much energy they need to pull off an attack, even if you don't know if they have enough energy in their hand. But you do know what they need, and how often they should be able to get energy onto their Pokemon. Because of this you're able to somewhat reliably guess the flow of battle and plan accordingly. This is of course means that the hand is the ultimate resource. Since it is mostly unknown to the opponent, one should keep it as secret as one can. "Cheat" cards like Switch (retreat a Pokemon for free) or Welder (see right), or Boss's Orders (which forces out a Pokemon that your opponent doesn't want now) are the actual game: tricks that you use to outsmart your opponent by controlling the tempo of the game. You are trying very hard to get around that tempo as much as you can, and your ability to do it in a way that surprises your opponent seems to be the core of the game.

Which comes as a surprise to me as an adult. See, as a kid I had sensed that there was a deeper game going on, didn't know what it was, and so I went with the deck archetype that let me cut out the unknowns as much as possible: the Beatdown deck, which always sported powerful basics who, with a little bit of help, could one-shot other Pokemon before they evolved. A good Beatdown deck could clean out an opponent in six turns, right about the point when most "normal" decks had finally gotten going. It was a wildly successful format at the time. The Pokemon folks decided that wasn't how they wanted the game to be played, so they upped the HP on most Basic Pokemon, making one-shots a lot harder to outright impossible, while upping the damage of evolved Pokemon a ton, meaning that even a Stage 1 Pokemon could reliably kill most Basics very quickly. These are good changes, and I'm finding that I'm enjoy the deeper game of Pokemon a lot, not to mention teaching it to my kids. There's this "Look three or four turns ahead" going on, where I'm realizing that killing a Pokemon right now may end the game for me in a few turns, and so I'm having to tiptoe and set up the game so that way when I do move it's going to stick.

The thing that didn't change, however, is the creativity that Pokemon engenders. So many cards, so many ways to combine them, and so many ways for people to express themselves! It's been amazing tinkering with my Charizard deck and helping my kids tinker with theirs. I'm always getting surprised by the things they decide will work that I think obviously shouldn't... only to find that actually? It works out just fine. Ya just gotta be adventurous and see what combines.

Is there a problem of the constantly revolving sets and updating the library so people can keep building? Sure. I'm gonna hafta figure that part out. But I have no intention of competitively playing, or even suggesting it to my kids. At least yet. 

I didn't expect to come back to this game. I'm glad I did. They rebalanced the game, forcing people to actually play the game that was intended in the first place. It's fun making decks, testing them, and recalibrating them. Once I accepted the limitations of the game, I found that I had a fast and furious race to the finish.

But don't think I'm letting this card out of any of my decks, ever.