I've never actually played the Pokemon TCG before this, so I have no clue about deckbuilding balance except like, general transferrable knowledge from other games like OBVIOUSLY you don't want more evolved cards than basic ones and you'll want effects that thin the deck for you

(managed to overdo it in an experiment involving a Meowth the AI opponent took too long to take out and was pleasantly surprised decking out didn't end the game)

anyway I'm very casual about logging on and playing, like I might just grab a booster and log back out some days. But this seems like a chill app that doesn't mind if you do that so

pocket isn't like the actual tcg anyway it's about as much the real tcg as duel links is the ygo tcg

but correct basically every deck runs two pokeball and two professor's greed-- i mean research because. deck thinning :V

taps chin. the sweet spot is about 50:50 tbh, adjusting up or down based on individual deck

i run a couple decks at 8 pokemon, i do know some places say you can go up to 12ish fine if you have to

what you want to not do is like... split your focus between too many different evolution lines

like if you're running a 3 stage line with another 3 stage line with a 2 stage line then that means you're going to be playing from behind tempowise unless you can get that 2 stage evolved fast to hold the line

Yeah that sounds like a way to brick lmao

while you slowly evolve the two 3 stages,

yeah

hand full of the higher evolution forms, no basics to play them on

bricky hands!

sabrina is Highly Recommended in most if not all decks for maintaining tempo bc retreat costs are a thing and you can either force out x speeds or screw up their energy gain curve

and also it can like. for example you are a point away from the victory, and you just attacked and weakened a mon that you can ko next turn. they retreat it on their turn and put out something else in front to stall

poof! sabrina forces them to switch with the weakened backline, you win.

giovannis are useful once you learn your damage thresholds and which mons win what duels / where the 10 damage diff actually makes a difference

I will save up my pack points for her then! I got lucky and pulled a Giovanni earlier, he's sitting in most of my decks now just because he sounded useful

nods! the tutorial gives you a copy of red card, potion, and x speed iirc, potions and x speeds are generally useful (not run at max all the time but if you need deck filler then they're never bad) and red card can be... situationally useful (sometimes it's just a free mulligan for the opponent)

notably none of those you pull from packs, you can just buy em for cheap from the shop

but yeah giovanni useful! fire specifically has a stronger giovanni in blaine though if you're running rapidash/ninetales/magmar, and i mention it mainly because of the outbreak event going on rn in wonder pick

which probably can help in building a budget fire deck at least

(blaine is +30 to those three specifically which is hilarious for reaching ko thresholds on ninetales)

Didn't realize those items weren't in the packs, went and grabbed an extra potion and x-speed!

also thank you for the balancing tips! went with 12:8 since I'm indecisive

yeah! play with the ratios and see what works best for you/a given deck

flings a friend req from meikyuu

accepted!

I did not set out to collect all the Eevee art but it seems RNG wants me to. Maybe I'll make a binder when I'm done shopping

there we go

"An Earth of Eevee" was too long

other two Kanto evos are going on the top row when I get them

with any upcoming to fill in below

(or I find a fourth Eevee card and Vaporeon gets shoved over one)

well, that was a learning experience. I completely misunderstood Ditto's effect. I know it now

ditto is... so hard to use

hilarious when it works, though.

I haven't been able to figure anything decent from experimenting tho, what were you trying?

Oh I misunderstood it wanted the exact energy requirements

hadn't had the opportunity to use it before

sent a request!

went to copy an attack from my opponent's bench and, uh, yeah. That was embarrassing.

And accepted!

(got to copy a Rollout off a benched Snorlax before it got KOed though. Given my opponent put the Snorlax down after my failure they were giving me that one...)

if you want to try to duck some of the meta decks in battling if you use the password "noex" people are gentleman's agreementing not to use ex cards in those matches

but it's not like an official rule so it's not a guarantee

Good to know! I'm fine with ex cards though

I usually am (and usually run a pikachu ex deck) but sometimes I am tired of seeing mewtwo haha

I've been haunting random battles in beginner which has a spread

you still get some tryhards running Mewtwo ex and stuff but overall there's a significant amount more people who appear to be experimenting with their decks than in the event mode

(shout-out to the guy attempting to run Muk/Weezing, I could never do it but hey you do you)

weezing koga is a terror

I'll probably do that once the event ends. Since I am a beginner and experiments are basically all I have while I figure out what I like

I head a good tip though, which is if you run red card and they koga their weezing back into their hand you can red card it out of their hand

weezing koga is a terror, i just think the muk is bringing weezing down

since they can't re-evolve for a turn

but perhaps a better deckbuilder than I can figure out one for them!

oh that's evil

red carding them back into the deck...

pikachu has a lot of trouble with weezing so I'm thinking of replacing one of my x speed cards with a red card since my cards generally have low retreat cost anyway

I've been chilling with venomoth/vileplume pseudo-trap; I'm actually not sure how many people know how sleep works

since the ability to retreat is turned off when asleep, so ... coin flip hell.

how sleep works: I will never ever flip heads when my pokemon are asleep, but my opponents always will if I try to use sleep

how it's worked for me so far had been:
trying to stall for Dragonite: opponent always flips heads

screwing around with poison and sleep in vileplume/venomoth: oh they haven't flipped a single head this entire game. holy shit they drew exeggutor ex on turn like 8. and now they still can't flip heads. they've been asleep for 3 turns. i kind of feel bad here,

Poison is fun. I unlocked the Nidoqueen/Nidoking rental and found myself putting Nidoking up front for the poison more than Nidoqueen for the extra damage

people tend to underestimate poison lol

'oh 10 damage a turn right'

wrong, ten damage per turn swap.

20 every turn you get,

oh, pulled Sabrina this morning before work! ....also Pidgeotto, which bridges the gap and lets me also run Pidgeot for the same effect, if I really wanted to double up on being annoying

interesting opponent: their strategy hinged on winning every sleep coin flip while Greninja chucked water shurikens from their bench. Unfortunately they never got it going.

I was lucky enough to get the entire Pidgey line in my opening hand+first two draws. They opened with Snom, never drew Frosmoth, put Drowzee out without enough energy once Pidgeotto took it out, didn't draw Butterfree and Metapod couldn't stand up against Pidgeot, who had too much HP for Greninja to save its frontliners.

poor drawing luck in a deck that hinged on luck anyway. I would have liked to see the intended strategy in action

New cards or not you'll have to kill me to get Genetic Apex Pidgeot away from me, I love this bird

(I'll try the ex in a couple decks if I get it but...)

it just won me another game

pidgeot/arbok I think genuinely was a semi popular anti Mewtwo deck so I believe in pidgeot power

I've just. never pulled one

oh god I can see it. Force out+lock in. Sounds incredibly fun! I don't have an Arbok though.

oh my god I have a theme. I didn't mean to have a theme but I have one

harpies in ygo and now this

menacing roost of birds like "aw, are you setting up? Cute."

oh, hello

hello???

welp, got a ragequit

not like conceding loses you anything?

they spend like four-five rounds building up Celebi ex on the bench. they can see I'm giving my Tauros (Mythical Island) enough energy to attack in prep on mine

they decide there's enough energy on Celebi and swap it in, oneshot the Jigglypuff I had out

Bring Tauros out, play Giovanni, oneshot Celebi

"waiting for opponent to return" pops up on the side of the screen

and I have to wait their entire turn timer

it's not like Jigglypuff was an effective stall, either, if they'd actually put any of their energy on their active they could have gotten rid of it. They were flipping heads on every sleep check

truly why did they not think you'd probably have a giovanni in hand if they spent 5 turns building celebi...

Right? I guess they might have thought I was banking on too few heads to take down Tauros the next turn.

(but then they'd have a Celebi a Pidgey could beat...)

could've had an Erika, though

all around it's weird. Tauros only does 40 against non-ex, they could probably have defended their last point.

....this one didn't ragequit but did continue to play their Celebi ex into the ex breaker I was clearly building in response

seriously just switch lanes and put your Serperior out there, force me to readjust because that's three energy I wasn't using to beat that

pokemon ex is not an I Win button

guaranteed people just built celebi because it's the 'top' of the meta and easy to play but truly. believe it or not there's drawbacks to EX mons

yep...

another match, another Celebi ex deck. This one was more strategic about it! (also I never drew Tauros)

unfortunately they had a turn where they had four coin flips and all of them were tails. Oof.

setup was hilarious though because they had two Celebi and got both in their opening hand, so they put them both into their opening field like "look! "

I'd be excited for drawing all my highlights at once too!

I've been trying to toy with and tweak a water deck based around Vaporeon + Gyarados (EX), with a few mons thrown in for tech options/stall, but man

i've tweaked it a few times do far and will continue to, but water feels so dependent on an early good misty to get any momentum

Vaporeon's good at conserving that momentum but the start of a game feels really rough, progression wise

very few things in water seem to attack on a normal 1/2/3 energy curve...

meanwhile I dip into vs player to see what people are running and

ah, a sea of celebi

haven't seen that before

lol right? They're everywhere!

I've got a water deck but it's mostly just messing around. Greninja+Tentacruel+Bruxish

I say that like all my decks aren't just "lol this sounds fun" regardless of whether it's good

Water does seem to just take so long to get going. Even if they didn't do extra damage Electric would be a hard counter just for its speed

aaah just fought a really cool Hypno/Weezing deck designed to put the opponent into coinflip hell

unfortunately Smokescreen doesn't stay up if Weezing is forced to the bench and I had Pidgeot

but that was such a cool match

ohhh for a moment I thought you were talking about the og weezing with pokemon ability poison and hypno sleep to disable switches and let it rack up

smokescreen + sleep is double gamble evil, that's so funny

that would have been funny too! (and technically you could run one of each but it would be clumsy)

(i imagine you could pull koga or leaf shenanigans to smooth the switch from one weezing to the other but yeah it's definitely more clumsy than two of the same, I think,)

cool! Game, this is the second time you’ve given me any form of Gyarados. I am begging you to also give me a Magikarp