|
|
| A deck-building guide
for beginners
By Nova I got an email screaming at me to write an article for beginners first entering the Pokemon card game, instructing them how to make their first deck. I’m not kidding. No, seriously, here’s the letter: Dear Nova: Write an article telling beginners what to do! They need your help! Signed: The voices in your head. So anyway, I’m writing this partially to get it out in the open so that I’ll have witnesses when the men in the white suits come to take me away, and partially because you, the newcomer to the Pokemon TCG, probably have little to no idea what you’re doing when it comes to building a deck. First off, welcome to the game. And congratulations on your choice of an excellent and fun-filled game. Seriously, it’s a great time. Some have even argued that it has more opportunities for strategy than chess. Others then compared it to a futuristic version of super-chess, where a box spits random chess pieces out at the board, and those are the only pieces you’re allowed to beat your opponent with. And there are two thousand-odd chess pieces to pick from, and you have to pick sixty to cram into the play area. And you don’t have time to go through all two thousand pieces and memorize all of them, because you've got better things to do. And wild animals are setting up an inconvenient siege of your play area, looking you up and down hungrily, just as a distraction from what you should really be concentrating on, which is the game. And your only advantage over your opponent is that they’re subjected to all the same things as you. So where do you start, in what can be a strange and intimidating game for the inexperienced? Well, personally, I started by looking up help on the internet. And it looks like that’s how you’ve started off, too. Which is a good thing. No one can teach you like someone more experienced than you. Surveys show that people online, such as myself, the only participant in the aforementioned survey, have nothing but time on their hands. So people like me have gone through all two thousand cards, and painstakingly made a list of cards that we feel are worth using, and then painstakingly committed that list to memory. You’re welcome. But teaching someone to play takes time, and it usually takes at least some personal contact between teacher and student. So the best advice I can give you , after you’re done with this article, which I swear gets to the point eventually, is to go out and find someone else to play with. Join a Pokemon League: you can find one here. Get a friend to build a deck. Whatever you can do. You need practice with the deck I’m going to build in just one minute. The second best piece of advice I can give you is to find someone better than you are, and try as hard as you can to rock their world with a non-stop flurry of victories. Victories for them, not you. The only way anyone has ever learned anything effectively is by learning it from someone better than they are. In this case, the best way to learn is to fight someone better than you are and watch how they beat you. Then, once you’ve gotten losing down pat, try to pick out holes in their strategy. Try to make them lose instead. And if that doesn’t work, imitate their deck as closely as you possibly can. But all that’s a ways off; just keep it in mind in case you come to somebody you always lose to. The third best piece of advice is to become very, very close with the rules. You need to know how to play, after all, before you can start playing. I’ll give you the basic rules about deck building here, the rest of the rules can be found in a rulebook, or here at the Compendium, a repository for all official rulings . You need exactly sixty cards in your deck. Not more, not less. Sixty. You can only have four multiples of any one card in your deck, except for basic energy. Non-basic energy says that it doesn’t count as basic energy right on the card. What that means is that if I wanted to put as many hitmonchan as possible in my deck, I could only have four hitmonchan. Now I need energy to power the hitmonchan, so I can put in ten fighting energy, if I want it. But I can only have four double colorless energy to go with my gligar, because double colorless energy is not a basic energy card. Okay, so you want to make your first deck. Great. There are a lot of cards. I have a fair amount of experience running my own Pokemon League, with Gloom, and I can tell you that there are certain cards that work a lot better, in practice, than others do. And some decks that are easier to use than others. Some people might already know what I’m talking about, it’s the infamous haymaker. Haymakers don’t use any complicated things like evolutions, pokemon powers, or really any high strategy at all. All they concentrate on is dealing as much damage as possible in as short a time as possible. Which is a great experience for first-time players. There are a few Pokemon that have gotten real reputations as haymaker Pokemon. Here’s a list of all the good hays that I can remember right now: Jungle Scyther, Base Set Hitmonchan, Base Set Electabuzz, Base Set Lickitung, Fossil Magmar, Discovery Tyrogue, Movie Promo Mewtwo (Numbers 4 and 17), and Genesis Gligar. These pokemon generally have a relatively high HP, and can usually attack for one or two energy cards (energy cards, not energy. There’s an important difference. Gligar attacks for two energy, but one energy card, a double colorless energy). There are a few exceptions, like tyrogue with his thirty HP, or hitmonchan with his three energy card attack, but they’re redeemed by their excellent other properties, like high damage (hitmonchan), or baby rule and obscenely low energy requirement (tyrogue). In this deck, you won’t want to use any pokemon that aren’t on the list above. Now, the reason I listed haymaker pokemon at all is because I know how hard it can be to get some of these cards. So if you really need to, rather than going with the big boys like hitmonchan and electabuzz, both rares, you can go with some more common cards, like gligar and lickitung, which will work just as well, and are easier to find anyway. So you can mix and match the pokemon in the deck I’ll create, which will be my vision of a perfect haymaker. The pokemon are easy, as far as I’m concerned: just take three of everything. So my haymaker will feature three hitmonchan, three electabuzz, three scyther, three gligar, and three cleffa. Cleffa is a necessity in any deck, as far as I’m concerned, and it happens to go along well with this theory of using three of everything. As I said before, these pokemon can be mixed and matched to accommodate the cards you have and the cards you can trade for, but it’s best if you limit yourself to two or three types, no more, just so all of them can work together as far as energy goes. For instance, gligar and hitmonchan can both use fighting energy, gligar and scyther use double colorless energies to their best advantage, and scyther can attack using anything he wants. My ideal deck features only two types. Scyther doesn’t count as grass, since his only attack really worth using requires only colorless energy. The next thing to move on to is trainers. Haymaker decks are typically about half trainers, because there are so many necessary. And again, the number and type of trainers will vary based on which pokemon you picked in your deck. But there are a few that belong in any haymaker regardless of pokemon content, and these same trainers will generally fit in any deck. Watch for another article about trainer selection to follow this one. Anyway, here are the trainers you will need in this deck I’m building for you:
*bing!* You’ve got mail! Hey, Nova! They don’t know what a default stadium is, you dumb chikorita! Signed: The voices in your head. A default stadium is a gym you put in your deck specifically to get rid of gyms that hurt you or help your opponent, which is usually saying the same thing. A good choice is usually healing fields or sprout tower, depending on whether or not you have colorless pokemon or not. Another popular choice is energy stadium. I don’t have any colorless pokemon, and I’d really like some protection against them, so I’m going to go with two sprout tower as my default stadium.
Energy is easy for a haymaker deck. If you have any pokemon that require two or more colorless energy to attack, put in four double colorless energy. Any energy slots that remain should be divided up between the types of energy required for your different pokemon to attack. But what happens if it doesn’t divide easily? What if you divide it up and there’s still an extra card? Don’t panic, first off. Next, take a look at all of your attackers. Which one requires more of a specific energy to attack? Can one pokemon attack for one fire and one colorless, while another’s maximum attack is two electric? Make the extra energy electric, because it can also be used as colorless. And that’s it. A sixty card deck that will teach you just about everything you need to know about the game. It will get you started, and if you play for long enough with it, you can start to get really killer with it. One of the players at my league can stand up to any player in the room with nothing but some advanced haymaker tactics. There are other haymaker pokemon, but they’re extremely tough to play in the beginning. Learn how to play properly first, then start throwing new strategies in. Learning how to play can take a long time. Don’t get frustrated. It can take months and months of practice to become a great, tournament-winning player. Just stick with it, and you’ll do great. Nova’s haymaker deck: Pokemon (15)
Trainers (31):
Energy (14):
Good luck with your first deck, and I hope to see you at a world championship someday. - Nova |
|
|
||