

In practice, the way to build a deck is to buy these card codes from the secondary market for 10-25 cents a pop, then trade them through the in-game marketplace for the cards you need.
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Instead, in each physical Pokemon card back comes a code for a digital card pack.

You can’t actually spend money within the Pokemon TCG client. All told, the Theme deck ladder is quite enjoyable until you climb to high ELO, where nearly every player is queuing up with Relentless Flame, a powerful and innevitable deck with a boring, linear gameplan that is boring to play with or against. The only real restriction is that only one Supporter card can be played per turn. Moreover, there’s no mana system in Pokemon, so all of these effects can be played on Turn 1. You’ll find most Tier 1 competitive decks run nothing but basic energies, and the most powerful spells in the game are given to you in the aforementioned Theme decks.Įven low power-level decks are loaded with Time Spiral effects and conditional tutors. I started with Tropical Takedown, a five-color deck whose primary game plan is to load the graveyard with energies to fuel its main attacker.Ĭoming from a Magic background, Pokemon’s card economy is rather surprising. You begin with underpowered starter decks against annoyingly forgiving AI opponents, then graduate on to playing Theme decks (think Magic’s retail pre-cons) against human opposition. The theme decks are surprisingly well built, and many of them require creative sequencing to properly utilize. Pokemon TCG has an official Free-To-Play digital version structured to slowly ramp you towards constructed play. I had known of the card game since its inception, even dabbled in some trading, but had never actually played a single game of it. It was this cute set of sleeves I bought myself. And I don’t know if it was the plethora of Pikachu-themed vending machine, the Squirtle luggage tag or this statue of Pikachu in a Ho-Oh kimono, but something was pulling me to try the Pokemon TCG. For the first part of the trip I thought that, perhaps, I would end my decade-long anime drought. Last month while honeymooning in Japan, I decided I should extend my day-to-day Japanese cultural intake beyond eating westernized sushi, cuddling Rilakkuma pillows and marathoning episodes of Terrace House (konbanwa, btw).
