Pokemon Masters (TCG Hack)

I Want to Like the Official Rules

I grew up with the Pokemon TCG, when it was this enormous juggernaut. I played with my friends constantly, and enjoyed every second of it. There was something so great about buying booster packs, opening them up, and using the weird things you found to make quirky decks.

Wait, there's a Pokemon League? COOOOOOOOOL LET'S GO!!!

Wait, why is my really enjoyable deck getting creamed? Oh, there's a meta that ignores all these great cards and just focuses on the least interesting but numerically most potent cards? You're telling me that I need to rethink from wonder and interesting play to ruthlessly monotonous grind-fests?

Sure!

I junked my interesting decks and went full-on Beatdown, which was the most cookie-cutter and boring deck of the time. It was relentlessly efficient. I gloried in the dopamine of Numbers Go Up Fast, I Get My Cards Out Quickly, and Things Seem to Happen. I did that for years. And years.

And then one day the dopamine stopped. And I realized just how much of an idiot I had been. Did I realize that there were systemic problems, and that nobody could stop me from just.. making up something different and doing that instead? Nope. Not at all. I just put my cards in a box, bitterly, and moved on to Magic. And had fun! That is, until I met players who valued efficiency over fun... and saw a type of degeneracy that made the Pokemon League look principled in comparison. This time I thought it was the people who were the problem. I wanted nothing to do with such degeneracy. So I just stopped playing at all.

Enter my brother-in-law, Kyle. Kyle has an allergy to bullshit that is almost absolute, without being too much of a misanthrope. I say this, because he somehow maintained the wisdom to know the difference between the masses being wrong and whether or not the thing they're wrong about is redeemable. I have no idea how he maintained this wisdom, but it has saved me many a time.

And Kyle had refused to give up on the Pokemon TCG.

I smiled, politely accepted gifts of cards, and tried it again with my kids. Nope, it still did what it did. I would play with my kids out of some sense of duty. The cards were bright and colorful, with interesting tricks... that couldn't stand up to my Charizard EX. I, of course, hadn't really thought it through. And it wrecked deckbuilding for me and my kids. They became obsessed with just trying to beat this one card. I wasn't able to get myself to give up the only good Charizard card I knew of. It was an impasse.

This was something I was pretty vocal about with Kyle. I knew my own degeneracy, my own addiction to the dopamine, and knew I had passed it on to my kids. I wanted a way out. I knew there was another way, and couldn't think it through, and said as much.

Kyle, being Kyle, listened to my rants and ravings. He did nothing more than chuckle and agreed that the Pokemon TCG had foundational problems.

About a year later, Kyle would come over for a visit. Standard stuff and all that. Nothing special... until he mentioned, casually, that he had come up with a new casual format for the Pokemon TCG. He hadn't playtested it yet, and he wanted me to try it out with him. Kyle has an eye for systemic patterns that is unparalled. I immediately said yes.

Kyle, my kids, and I played easily two dozen games in 72 hours. We tweaked a few things. Played some more. Had even more of a blast. Tweaked some more. It just got better and better and better.

General Rules of Pokemon Masters

This is intended for casual play. Kyle won't be running tournaments, and no one affiliated with us and Die Young Games will ever run tournaments. Anyone claiming to represent us to run a tournament doesn't. This will never be for sale, and is not intended to compete with the official structure.

This has been playtested, but it is assumed we missed things. If you find loopholes or feel that something is incoherent to the experience, comment on this blog post or come onto the Die Young Games Discord server and put your concerns up there!

The rules below are meant to replace specific parts of the Official Rules. If something isn't mentioned here, refer to the Official Rules!

Deck Construction

Your Deck is 40 Cards.

Only one copy of any non-Basic Energy Card is allowed.

Select six Basic Pokemon Cards. They must be different colors. 

• If your Basic Pokemon have Evolution forms, you must include one copy of each evolution, to the best of your ability.
• If there are multiple Evolutions of a Pokemon (like Evee evolutions) or multiple versions of an evolved Pokemon (Charizard, Charizard EX/GX), you only need to include one variant.
• If you do not own all the Evolutions on the chain (say, you want to play Charmander, but you only one a Charmeleon, no Charizards) you may include the Pokemon you do have (so you'd include Charmander and Charmeleon).
• You get three Basic Energy per Basic Pokemon. They must be of the same color.
• If one of your Basic Pokemon is Colorless, you must select three Basic Energy of another color from the other five.
• You may include as many additional Energy as you like, in addition to the Energy above.

You may only have one Trainer Supporter Card. This Card must be announced before the game starts.

No non-Supporter Trainer Cards or Energy Cards that search any Deck are allowed.

Only one Rule Box Pokemon Card is allowed. If your Rule Box Pokemon is Knocked Out, you lose the game. 

• If you wish to use a V MAX, V STAR, or any Rule Box Pokemon Card that evolves from a Basic Rule Box Pokemon, it uses your Supporter slot, and must be declared as if it was a Supporter Card.

Playing One on One

Set Up

Basic Pokemon

All Basic Pokemon are placed in Play: one in the Active Area and the other five on the Bench.

• You may not start with a Basic Colorless Pokemon in the Active Area.
• You may not start with a Basic Rule Box Pokemon in the Active Area.

Benched Basic Pokemon are played face down, and do not flip face up unless Evolved or moved into the Active Area.

Opening Hand

Draw four Cards. Do not show them to your Opponent.

Prize Cards

Draw one Card, and place it face up to the left of the Play Area. Take four Cards, and place them, face up, on top of the bottom Prize Card, as shown in the picture. 

Whenever your Opponent knocks out one of your Pokemon, you draw one of your Prize Cards. You must take all the top Prize Cards before you grab the fifth Prize, on the bottom.

If you can't take a Prize Card, you lose the match. Whenever a Card refers to your Prize Cards, check the number of your Opponent's Prize Cards instead.

Playing

The First Turn

The player who goes first may Attack and/or play a Supporter Card, but not Draw.

Drawing

At the start of every turn after the first, Draw one Card. 

• If it's an Energy, continue your turn.
• If it's not an Energy, you may show it to your Opponent(s). If you do, draw another Card. Do not show this Card to your Opponent.

Energy

Once during your Turn, you may either Attach an Energy from your hand, or Move an Energy from one of your Pokemon to another.

Gameplay for Three Players

As One on One play, with the following modifications.

Two Fronts

Each Player has two Active Areas,  one for the Player on their right and on their left. You still can only Attach or Move one Energy a turn.

The Law of Aggression

A Player must Attach or Move an Energy, if able. A Player must Attack all eligible targets, if able.

What Do These Rules Do?

Pokemon Masters feels like an Elite Four battle in card game form. Every game has been a tactical head-to-head. I've had to think more in one match of Pokemon Masters than I've ever had to think in any TCG I've personally played. I've also had to consider what my opponent is up to in a way that I didn't know most TCGs could do. And I think that's worth sharing with people.

You have to weigh the health of your Pokemon against the unknown nature of your deck. Do you sacrifice one of your Basics so you can get your big guy charged? Once your big guy is out, how are you developing your backup? All your Pokemon are going to fight, almost certainly. What order are you going to try to send them out? How flexible are they in the inevitability of the deck not cooperating? These are the kinds of decisions you're making in a Pokemon match. You are playing with time and chance. And it is a blast.

The Pokemon TCG has always had interesting cards, especially their Pokemon cards... and usually you don't look at them twice. Why would you? The Rule Box Pokemon hit your lizard brain in the worst way possible. You don't particularly want to look at them twice. The numbers hit your lizard brain. Those are the things that matter in the standard format. Once you make Rules Box Pokemon rare, you have to figure out these weirdo abilities on the normal Pokemon, of which you have to have an epic spread. Given that you can't control the deck all that much, this means you have these wild abilities with a deck that can't be controlled without using Pokemon attacks. So gameplay automatically becomes more varied, as a lot of the heavy lifting has to go through Pokemon attacks.

Adding the "you lose if your Rule Box Pokemon dies" rule does... things. Very very worrisome things. I can come out with my lovely Charizard EX, swinging with tons of damage... and then all of a sudden have to protect my flying lizard boi, because as it turns out normal Pokemon can do quite a bit of damage, if you're under the right kinds of pressure. So, after a kill or two, my lovely flying lizard boi has to go back to the bench, because he has about 60 HP. And now I have to worry about whether or not someone is going to pull out a Boss's Orders, or a Pokemon Catcher that flips heads, or someone has a Pokemon that will drag him back out. Using a Rule Box Pokemon is now a choice. You have to do it on purpose, and find ways to keep your Pokemon from dying. It's a type of tension that is your choice.

What These Rules Won't Do

Pokemon TCG is a broken game. Not all the cards are going to be useful in this format. I miss some of those cards. Some cards that "should" be usable (like those that reward having multiple copies of a card) aren't.  It's not particularly fair.  But this format isn't about making everything usable. It's about taking what's really a large mess and doing something fun with it. And I think it succeeds admirably well. You go from not even glancing at 90% of the cards to having about 75% of them being a viable option.

And that's pretty dang awesome.

This Isn't the End

I do not labor under the delusion that this is the last word on this format. If we can get people to try it, there will be a lot of questions and possible issues that we do not foresee. I welcome this. This is a genuinely exciting format, providing some of the most varied gameplay I've ever seen in a TCG.

Please try it. Go over to the Die Young Games Discord or comment here. Let's make this a thing.