Building a Deck for the Pokemon TCG: A Beginner's Guide.
Getting into the Pokemon TCG can be a daunting experience, whilst the game seems simplistic on the surface, anyone who's played competitively or watched any of the tournament streams will attest to the underlying complexity of the TCG. Building a viable deck from scratch is one of the hardest things for a new player to do, and I'd usually advise that they instead start by netdecking (copying an existing tried and tested deck) from Limitless. But it is good practice to build something of your own, and in this little guide I'll attempt to help give new players an idea of what goes into a functioning deck.
Win Condition: -
Before anything else is considered, one must decide what their primary win con is. There are two main ways to win in the TCG, by taking all six of your prize cards, or your opponent running out of cards in deck (called decking out). When building your first deck, you should consider which of these is your focus. For the purpose of this little guide we'll only be looking at the taking prizes win con. If any of you have any questions about winning via deck out feel free to DM me on the forums or reach out to me on our Discord and I'll happily go into depth on the topic. But today we'll be focusing just on the more traditional and easier to achieve win con.
Card Allocation: -
A legal deck must contain 60 cards, no more and no less. For most cards you have a limit of 4 copies of said card in the deck. So you can have up to 4 Lugia V for instance. There are quite a few exceptions to this. Ace Specs (powerful trainer cards) are limited to just one Ace Spec per deck, not one copy, just one. Raidant Pokemon work the same. You also have to be mindful of cards that have the same effect. Professor's Research and Professor Sycamore have the exact same effect (discard your hand and draw 7 cards). In a format where both of these cards are legal, you'd only be able to have 4 copies in total, you could have 4 professor's research, 4 Sycamore, or a 2-2 mix, but you could not have 4 Sycamore and 4 Professor's Research. In relation to Pokemon as long as the name is different you can have 4 copies of it. So with the aforementioned Lugia V, you can have 4 Lugia V, 4 Lugia VStar and 4 Lugia in the same deck as they are all different. You cannot however have 4 of Lugia from Darkness Ablaze (140/189) and 4 Lugia from Celebrations (022/025) in the same deck. Whilst these are completely different cards, they have the same name and therefore are limited to 4 in total of a Pokemon with said exact name.
Picking your 60 can be really tough and will bring you to make many considerations. I've seen some guides talk about a 20-30-10 mix between Pokemon, Trainer Cards and Energy. This is not terrible advice, but many decks will not need 20 Pokemon and some will need more than 10 energy. So there is really no one size fits all clean number for each type of card. What we will do instead is look at a specific card as our main attacker and build from there.
We'll look at Entei V as our main attacker. (Brilliant Stars 22/172). We'll be running 4 of these to maximise our chance of starting with it and to ensure we can consistently find copies to keep the train going. Entei V has a very good ability (Fleet Footed, which allows you to draw an extra card per turn when it is in the active) and a fairly robust attack that ramps damage up with the amount of Pokemon in play. Now, without help, this damage caps out at 220, a respectable number but a little short of some of the biggest meta threats.
To supplement this, we'll look at Rapidash (Silver Tempest 22/195) as a support Pokemon. Rapidash allows you to discard a fire energy from hand to boost your Entei V's damage by 30 for the turn. If you use two Rapidash that'll get it up by 60, helping Entei V hit the very meta relevant number of 280. A third Rapidash gets you to 310, which short of Charizard ex, covers everything meta for a one hit KO. Our big issues with this is that we need the energy in hand and energy is also a finite resource that we need available for Entei V so it can attack. This is where trainer cards come in. We can use Earthen Vessel (Paradox Rift 163/182) which lets us search the deck for two basic energy at the cost of discarding one card from hand. We can deal with the issue of salvaging the discarded energy with the stadium card Magma Basin (Brilliant Stars 144/172) which allows us to attach a fire energy from the discard pile to one of our benched fire Pokemon, at the cost of putting two damage counters on said fire pokemon. This allows us to start setting up Entei V's on the bench.
So now our deck is looking something like
4x Entei V
3x Ponyta
3x Rapidash
4x Earthen Vessel
4x Magma Basin
That's almost a third of the deck done. The next thing we should look at is general support Pokemon. Fezandipiti ex (Shrouded Fable 38/64) will be a Godsend for us here, our Entei V are already fragile at 210HP, and moreso if we're using Magma Basin to accelerate to them. Fezandipiti ex will allow us to draw 3 additional cards during our turn if the opponent knocks one of our Pokemon out during their prior turn. Combined with Fleet Footed this gives us 4 additional cards for that turn, allowing us to see precious resources.
The next support we need to consider is our one radiant for the deck. Radiant Greninja (Astral Radiance 46/189) synergises well with Magma Basin and allows us even more draw support (it's ability concealed cards allows us to discard an energy from hand once per turn to draw 2 additional cards, the energy in the discard now able to be accelerated via Magma Basin to a benched Entei V). However, we can also look at Radiant Charizard (Crown Zenith 20/159), which works as an incredibly potent back up attacker or a way to break through a card like Mimikyu (Paldea Evolved 97/193) who's ability stops exs and Vs from dealing damage to it. Radiant Charizard also has a remarkable ability that lowers its hefty attack cost by a colourless energy for each prize card the opponent has taken, meaning late game you can do 250 for a single fire energy (280 with a single rapidash ability used that turn). Since we already have additional draw support from Entei V and a way to easily get energy in the discard, we'll opt for Radiant Charizard over Radiant Greninja
This would put us at
4x Entei V
3x Ponyta
3x Rapidash
1x Fezandipiti ex
1x Radiant Charizard
4x Earthen Vessel
4x Magma Basin
Next we need to consider energy count. 12 is a good number to go with here, it allows a high chance to hit energy and gives us some breathing room with spamming Rapidash's ability. So with 12 fire energy we're now sat at 32 cards, more than half the deck.
The next 28 cards are all going to be trainers. We need to be mindful of two things, consistency for our engine and how we want to interact with the opponent. Since we'll be losing an Entei V virtually every turn we can take advantage of cards like Iono and Roxanne which will greatly limit the hand of our opponent without harming us too much. a 3 count of Iono and a 1 count of Roxanne would work well. We'll also want gusting options (gusting it where you force your opponent's active pokemon out of the active spot) so we'll throw in two Boss's orders and a Counter Catcher. Counter Catcher is an item card, so does not take up your supporter for turn like Boss does, and has nearly the same effect (however, counter catcher requires you be behind on prizes).
So now we're at
4x Entei V
3x Ponyta
3x Rapidash
1x Fezandipiti ex
1x Radiant Charizard
4x Earthen Vessel
4x Magma Basin
3x Iono
2x Boss's Orders
1x Roxanne
1x Counter Catcher
12x Fire Energy
Now we're at 39 cards, leaving us 21 cards to boost consistency. Cards to consider are Nest Ball, Buddy Buddy Poffin, Great Ball, Capturing Aroma and Ultra Ball. We'll be using Nest Ball (lets you grab any basic from the deck and place to the bench) and Buddy Buddy Poffin (will let you grab two basic Pokemon with 70HP or less, perfect for your Ponyta). So we'll add a 4 count of each. That puts us at 47, that leaves us 13 slots to play around with. We can add 4 Arven (Arven lets you grab an item and toolcard from your deck) a single copy of the Ace Spec Hyper Aroma (Twilight Masquerade 152/167) which is another consistency card to help us grab Rapidash. Since Arven also grabs tools we can put in a single copy of Forest Seal Stone (Silver Tempest 156/195) which will allow Entei V to use the VStar ability on Forest Seal Stone to grab any card you want from your deck. We can add 3 copies of Trekking Shoes to allow us even more draw support, a copy of Night Stretcher (Shrouded Fable) to let us grab a Pokemon or an energy back from the discard in a pinch, two copies of switch to deal with any attempts at locking Rapidash in the active from stall players and a copy of a second tool, Defiance Band, which will give Entei V even more punching power if you're behind on prizes.
4x Entei V
3x Ponyta
3x Rapidash
1x Fezandipiti ex
1x Radiant Charizard
4x Nest Ball
4x Buddy Buddy Poffin
4x Earthen Vessel
4x Magma Basin
4x Arven
3x Trekking Shoes
3x Iono
2x Boss's Orders
2x Switch
1x Roxanne
1x Counter Catcher
1x Hyper Aroma
1x Forest Seal Stone
1x Defiance Band
1x Night Stretcher
12x Fire Energy
This is the 60 we've ended up with. It's not perfect, it won't be winning you any tournamnets, but it'll steam through a lot of mid tier decks and is more than capable of taking upset wins against almost every meta deck in format.
So what have we covered? We've been through picking a central lynchpin for our win con, we've considered a way to round off damage math for knock outs, we've been over draw support and recovery options alongside benefitting from going behind on prizes. We've also looked at consistency, resource management, making the discard work in your favour and interfering with your oppenent's boardstate via cards like Boss's Orders, Iono and Roxanne. We have a strategy, we have countermeasures, we have recovery and we have consistency and these really are the pillars of any functioning deck in the Pokemon TCG.
(I'm going to clean this up, sort some visual aids and post it as it's own thread, it's just here for now to give one of the guys on Discord a bit of a starting point)
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