Father and Son from Canada getting into Pokemon

Hey everyone!

Well, if you would have told me 15 years ago that I would be signing up for a Pokemon forum I would have told you that you were crazy, but here we are.

My 6-year old son Hudson recently became interested in collecting Pokemon cards. I am a middle school teacher, and when I mentioned this to my students in grade 5, they were happy to very generously share duplicates that they had in their collection with Hudson. When I asked the students how to play, I was shocked to learn that none of them knew how - they just collected the cards.

For both him and I, simply collecting was not good enough... we wanted to learn how to play! Hudson used some of his piggybank cash to purchase the Pokemon trainer set from Wal-Mart and it was easily the best investment he's ever made. We have played it a ton since then, and have since mixed those cards in with the ones that he received from my students to create two 60-card decks.

I am very impressed with the trading card game, and for me one of the biggest draws is the simple math involved. My son just finished kindergarten but he is already able to use the counters properly and figure out damage remaining.

My proudest moment came when he dealt 10 damage to my Pokemon that had 60 HP and declared, "Now you have 50 left!" I asked him how he knew this, and he told me, "Well, because 10 minus..." (Here I cringed as I recalled the countless times I had to explain to my grade 5 students this year that you HAVE to start with the larger number when subtracting) But to my surprise he corrected himself, "Oh, I mean, because 60 minus 10 is 50!" What a guy!

Anyway, the reason why I'm posting, is because we are looking for a little bit of help. We have electric and water energy thanks to the trainer kit, but we are unable to use any other Pokemon because we don't have energy cards for them. I purchased an Aurorus EX box for Hudson, but there were no energy cards in it.

From what I understand, many collectors have more energy cards than they know what to do with. I'm wondering if any Canadian collectors would be interested in helping us out by sending spare energy cards to allow us to get started with this new love of ours.

We are also looking for another set of damage counters, as we run out of damage tokens on a few occasions.

I would of course, cover your cost for shipping.

TL;DR, New collectors looking for a little bit of help. (See bolded section above)

Hudson and I thank you for any help! Looking forward to being a part of this community.

Something that can help with your needs is to buy an Elite Trainer Box. What those contain are as follows (going off of memory, probably not 100% accurate):

• 8 booster packs
• Burn counter
• poison counter
• player's guide. This varies in style depending on which ETB you buy.
• damage counter dice (something like 8 6-sided dice intended to be used to represent 10 damage for each dot). These vary in design depending on which ETB you buy.
• a coin flip die (one set of numbers for odds, another for evens; i think the sanctioned way is evens are heads and odds are tails, but not 100% sure). This might actually be a plastic coin, depending on the Elite Trainer Box you buy. The style of either also varies with each different ETB.
• 65 card sleeves for protecting the cards when you play with them. Each different ETB has a different set of sleeves.
• ~7 or 8 of each Basic Energy. 45 Basic Energy in total.
• cardboard dividers because the ETB is designed to be used as a sturdy card storage box after you've emptied it of its initial contents. The styles on the dividers vary depending on the ETB you buy.

ETBs are a bit pricey, but given that what they contain can easily cost more than their retail price individually, they're worth it.

donavannj said:

Something that can help with your needs is to buy an Elite Trainer Box.

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Thanks a lot for your help, donavannj. I'll look into that.

There may be some bundles of energy cards on ebay, going for a reasonable price, if you are interested.

This is a great story. Hope you both enjoy playing the game!

drr26 said:

There may be some bundles of energy cards on ebay, going for a reasonable price, if you are interested.

This is a great story. Hope you both enjoy playing the game!

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Thanks! We sure love it so far. We play every day and I'm looking forward to expanding our collection and Pokemon types. So far we only have a couple of really strong Pokemon, so if one of us is able to get some energy behind that one then it's a fairly quick game just picking off the weak ones one by one.