How to defeat a charged-up active Pokémon, newb question

[UltraXar]

Hi all!

Long time fan, but new player.

Irecently picked up a couple starter decks and have been playing with my son. The game is fun but we're stuck on one piece of strategy. Once you've charged up a Pokémon with a few energy cards and they have a strong attack, what is the opponent supposed to do? Every active Pokémon they put out is immediately defeated. When we first started playing, we immediately ran into this confusing scenario, and assumed that you must use up your energy cards on attacks, so we started putting them in the discard pile. That actually worked a lot better. We charged up for powerful attacks, maybe attack, and then discard of the energy cards. So every round you had a choice to either do a simple low energy attack or wait a turn to charge up for something more powerful. But then I checked up the rules and found out that the energy cards stay under the Pokémon until they are defeated.

So what do you do when you have a strong active Pokémon that does more damage than the health points of your opponent?

The only strategy I can think of is to charge up the Pokémon up on your bench, so that when you make them active at least they can get a single attack off and chip away at the hit points of your opponent's strong Pokémon before immediately getting defeated. But you're going to lose two or three Pokémon doing that, and you're basically out of the game at that point. And by spending turns charging up the Pokémon on your bench, you're neglecting your active Pokémon and allowing your opponent to charge upstairs and get a jump on you.

It seems like everything is determined in the first couple draws and whomever gets there active Pokémon charged first is going to win the game.

I figure it can't be this simple, and we must be missing some obvious piece of strategy. Can anybody else help us out here?

Only other thing I can think that we're missing is deck strategy. That we need to build more complex decks. That means buying a bunch of cards though, which I'm ok with, but it seems odd that you can't play a decent game with a starter deck, at least while we learn.

Thanks.

 

[donavannj]

You unfortunately need to find a high HP Pokemon to put active and use as a wall while you build up other Pokemon or just sacrifice other Pokemon to build up a Pokemon. At a basic level, it really is that simple. There are tons of Trainer cards you can use that help your deck get around this, so you guys may want to look into those next.

The starter decks are extremely simplistic and are geared at casual players who only play once in a blue moon or are just learning for the first time, and are often built around popular Pokemon rather than actually good cards.

 

[UltraXar]

That's what I figured. The starter decks gave us Suicune who has 100hp and a 80p attack. As a basic. Nothing else in the deck has more than 80 as a basic. That means that if you can get a couple energies under your Suicune, it can defeat every other Pokémon in the game in one attack. So in 3 turns, the game is over. I get that the starter decks are for learning, but you can't learn when there is one Pokémon that can immediately defeat all others, every turn, in one attack!

I get the point though. We need to go find higher Hp Pokémon, or we can't play the game.
That's a bummer.
Guess I better get online and find some higher HP players, or just quit playing.

Thanks for the advice.

 

[donavannj]

That's what I figured. The starter decks gave us Suicune who has 100hp and a 80p attack. As a basic. Nothing else in the deck has more than 80 as a basic. That means that if you can get a couple energies under your Suicune, it can defeat every other Pokémon in the game in one attack. So in 3 turns, the game is over. I get that the starter decks are for learning, but you can't learn when there is one Pokémon that can immediately defeat all others, every turn, in one attack!

I get the point though. We need to go find higher Hp Pokémon, or we can't play the game.
That's a bummer.
Guess I better get online and find some higher HP players, or just quit playing.

Thanks for the advice.

You could always buy a different deck that uses Suicune's type weakness. Or buy more cards and mix them in. Trainer cards are the way forward, really. A card like Lysandre would be useful to counter Suicune because you can force another Pokemon to be active.

There's more strategy to the game, it's just the $10 decks aren't really going all that deep into the game strategy-wise.

 

[UltraXar]

Yup I get that. I'm a little annoyed that you can't a play a single game with 2 $20 starter packs though.
I feel like I should be able to at least play a little for $40.
My 6 year-old figured out on our very first game that if he got a Suicune charged up, it was game over. It took about 3 turns.
I really like the game though and I'll bite the bullet and order some cool cards.
I just found out that trainer cards were a big deal.
The starter decks give you like 3 a person, which apparently dramatically understates their importance, so I guess I need to go ahead and get some of them too.

On a side note, I really liked the gameplay when we discarded our energy cards after use.
I encourage folks to try it. It made for fun strategy where you had to decide every turn if you wanted to spend your energy doing frequent little attacks or save up for big ones. To me, that seems more like real life. You can do a bunch of quick jabs our wind up for a powerful uppercut.

But, I recognize that we'll probably want to play other trainers some day so we might as well learn the right way.
If I understand the strategy we're missing is:
1. Strong basic buffer Pokémon to serve as a wall while you charge up your bench
2. More trainer cards to disrupt the current state of gameplay

Thanks so much for the replies.
My son and I really love Pokémon, we've been watching since he was 2, and we were both very excited when he got old enough to grasp the rules and play for real.
We both love the idea of the card game, we're just stuck in 3-turn luck-is-everything mode with these starter decks. I think that's kind of crappy, but I'll shut about that because this franchise is absolutely amazing. To deliver the constant flood of new high-quality episodes as they have done for 20 years is unprecedented. I should pay them hundreds for the cards considering tbe immense value I've gotten from watching this amazing show.

All that said, I feel like there's much more strategy to dealing with a pesky powerful Pokémon that does more damage than anything on your bench. I would love some more tips.

Thanks so much!

 

[Hands]

Team Flare Grunt automatically allows you to remove any 1 energy card attached to your opponent's active. It;s a supporter, so you use your supporter for turn on it, but it's very disruptive.

Crushing Hammer is an item card that lets you discard any one energy card attached to any one of your opponent's pokemon providing you get a "heads" on the coin flip. You could play 4 of these in a turn, 8 if you somehow had 4 puzzles of time in your hand,

Enhanced Hammer allows you to discard one special energy (anything like double colourless, strong energy, double dragon etc) from any one of your opponent's pokemon, it's also an item card so you could play more than one per turn.

You could also force your opponent's Pokemon out of the active zone with Lysandre, Escape Rope, Repel, Pokemon Catcher etc. If only to try and buy yourself another turn.

The Starter decks are actually pretty bad, even for new players. They don't give you anything to work with and put you in a situation where the play is straight forward and one sided (they're designed this way) The best way to start playing is to pick up the Keldeo Vs Rayquaza Battle Arena set, which gives you two full 60 card decks (you're meant to play with 6 prizes, not 3, another problem with the Starter deck kits) including two EX Pokemon per deck, several great support Pokemon, several very usable items and supporters etc. Both decks in the Keldeo-Rayquaza set are for expanded format, but feature numerous cards that are usable in standard too.

The Keldeo part of the set. You'll notice a lot of strong tech cards like Blastoise, Octillery and Regice are present. There's a lot more work around here than in the starter decks. The trainers provided are all good-excellent too.

The Rayquaza portion of the deck. Again, strong support from the Eels, alt attackers in Zapdos and Raichu and some really handy trainers for fast plays (there's also Lightning energy provided, I dont know why it's being displayed as fire in the tcgo image)

https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Arena-Decks-Rayquaza-Keldeo/dp/B01GT1CY7K

Cost wise the Keldeo-Rayquaza set works out so much better than starter decks. Two playable, versatile and education decks for $25 that includes 2 VS Seekers ($5-7 card on it's own) 2 N ($2-4 card on its own) and a bunch of other great cards is a lot better than 2 lackluster and unplayable starter decks for $40. It really winds me up that TPCI even makes and sells those expensive starter sets

 

[Hands]

Also have a look at some videos like this. This deck is a bit of a twist on an older one that saw a fair bit of play, it gives you several roads to victory that involve milling your opponent's deck down with Houndoom EX, Bunnelby and Rocket's Handiwork so they lose via deck out, denying energy via Jirachi's attack, the hammers and Flare Grunt so they can't attack and/or using Raticate to deal big damage so you can win on prize condition.

This game is so, so versatile and those starter decks really fail to show that to new players

 

[UltraXar]

Thanks for the replies.
What I did (before I saw the above suggestions) was to order a pack of "100 CARD LOT RARE 20 MEGA FLASH Holo CARDS+80 EX CARDS NO REPEAT", and a big bunch of trainer cards.
I want to go through the exercise of making our own creative decks with my kid, I think that'll be fun.
I'm hoping if we have enough player, energy and trainer cards to choose from, we can make some good decks and have some good games. They don't have to be great decks, we can work our way to that, and realistically we won't play many other people.

 

[Hands]

Thanks for the replies.
What I did (before I saw the above suggestions) was to order a pack of "100 CARD LOT RARE 20 MEGA FLASH Holo CARDS+80 EX CARDS NO REPEAT", and a big bunch of trainer cards.
I want to go through the exercise of making our own creative decks with my kid, I think that'll be fun.
I'm hoping if we have enough player, energy and trainer cards to choose from, we can make some good decks and have some good games. They don't have to be great decks, we can work our way to that, and realistically we won't play many other people.

Do you mind posting a link to the 100 card lot? A lot of those turn out to be counterfeit and I'd like to help you action it if they are