Pokemon TCG: the budget Vintage you didn't know existed
- Thread starter Jason Waddell
- Start date
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
Isn't there also a restriction on the amount of energy you can play? Maybe per pokemon? I seem to remember there was something going on there...
Yep, you can only attach one energy card to a Pokemon you control each turn.
In response to Jason's article: you're spot on about the differences from Magic. No competitive Pokemon player that I've met plays Limited. It just doesn't exist. Oftentimes, people attend a prerelease or two as they start becoming more invested in the game, but as soon as you get into Standard, you realize that this game was never meant to be played as a Sealed deck.
Card distribution is a lot more frustrating on the online client. The paper scene is actually much easier to get into, in my opinion. Once you have all the staples (largely comprised of the very strong Trainer cards, which rarely surpass prices of a few dollars at most), you can build decks very easily, because 20 cards or so are going to be shared between every deck. If you even need Special energy, you should be able to pick them up for 50 cents apiece. In the physical realm, trading is extremely common, more so than in MTG, I'd argue, and you can effectively swap out the Pokemon in your deck (by far the most expensive type of card, unless you're playing Expanded) for the Pokemon that you need to convert it to another Tier One deck. Once you make some friends that you playtest and brew decks with before each tournament, you also are provided a network of people that will happily loan you cards. Finally, booster packs are awarded freely at the events (which used to be entirely free to enter, though are still cheap) and these will keep you supplied with staple cards and a few valuable cards to use as trading ammunition.
When it comes to deckbuilding creativity, I think you'd be very surprised. Even though so many slots of your deck are shoe-in staple cards, the search and draw power they provide make it quite likely to see any given individual card in a game. As a result, you are faced with a plethora of agonizing choices in deckbuilding. In Magic, your deck is almost entirely comprised of 4-ofs. Pokemon lists will have 30-45 cards taken up by 4-ofs that are critical to your deck, 10 or so cards taken up by energy, and only 2-10 cards of flex space, depending on the deck. But these flex spots go a MASSIVE way to setting your deck apart from the field. There is no sideboard, so any slots spent on countering other decks uses precious space in your decklist. The term for these silver bullet cards is 'tech' in Pokemon circles, and they can tilt a matchup in your favor by as much as 5-10%, because you will be able to find the card almost every game with the incredible search and draw power you are already playing. But there are almost zero cards in Pokemon that can completely hose an opponent's deck. There isn't a Leyline that can win you the game by existing in your opening hand. In general, balancing your deck between consistency and the inclusion of 'tech' is a big deal in Pokemon.
Metagaming is a much larger focus in Pokemon, and every competitive player will be trying to scope out and predict what the field will look like before a tournament, selecting a deck accordingly. It's so easy to change decks, that even if you know what someone was playing last Sunday, you will have no idea what they might be packing today. Matchups between archetypes also tend to be more lopsided, which is unfortunate for game quality, but this means that choosing the right deck for the event, and building it accordingly, can catapult you into the forefront. To be honest, this aspect of Pokemon looks more like gambling than anything present in Magic. But the price of attending a tournament is so low that this ends up being a feature in many players' eyes... there will always be a good excuse for not doing well that day, and there will always be something to talk about, with the metagame constantly changing at lightning speed. Overall, it really is a fantastic, incredibly accessible game. Typing this makes me want to get back into the scene! There's a rotation coming soon, so now's the perfect time to jump in...
The two major skills in Pokemon that can set you apart are metagaming/deckbuilding, and sequencing (as you play a ton of cards per turn, and eking % points out of each of those actions will yield high benefits in the long run). So if these are your strengths, you will almost certainly do well.
So you're saying I could trade my pre-release pulls for playable cards?
So you're saying I could trade my pre-release pulls for playable cards?
Well, generally people only trade for what they need, so it's hard to trade non-playable things for playable ones. But that Naganadel looks plenty competitive (take my opinion with a grain of salt though, I haven't played in a year), and a hyper rare of such a card should carry significant weight in trade. Keldeo follows in a long tradition of cards with that type of ability, and most of the time they end up being quite strong, and as a result of that high potential, even if it doesn't immediately see competitive play, it should be a decent trading chip. Aerodactyl I have trouble evaluating, but probably won't be great because of the Fossil evolution mechanic. The Raichu won't see play barring very specific circumstances.
People will value new cards super highly during prerelease and right after set release, so trade them ASAP for cards that are staples that won't rotate or cards that will likely remain good after rotation. Then, as soon as the meta stabilizes at the start of next season, finish trading or loaning cards for a deck. From that point you should be able to hop right in. If you do well in tournaments, people will notice you, and you can find a group of nice people to steal decklists and cards from (friends). As soon as you're testing decks for a big tournament with your group, you know you've made it. From there you shouldn't have to spend almost any money on cards for the remainder of your stint in competitive play. This all might sound intimidating, but Pokemon is a much more relaxed discipline, compared to MTG. It's still a bunch of people putting Pikachus onto a table and saying "I'll use Mega Explosion GX".
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
Just checking some prices on https://www.cardmarket.com/en/Pokemon, and these cards are still pretty rare on there.So you're saying I could trade my pre-release pulls for playable cards?
The Alolan Raichu starts at €0.70 (8 offers) and seems to be the only "worthless" one of those four.
Aerodactyl goes for €20 (1 offer)
That Keldeo goes for around €20-25 as well (5 offers)
There's only one Naganadel available on cardmarket.com, and it's priced at 30 euro's.
Not too bad of a haul I would say if you manage to get even half that kind money for those cards
Ah, good to know. I don't have a big intention of actually selling them, but they're fun kind of 'trophies' of winning my first tournament.
I'll second this.
Competitive YGO is a bit of a disaster for their card distribution, with the biggest and best shit costing $100+ per card and you typically need 3 of these types of cards. Another flawed tactic they use is that the newest set usually includes a set of pre-packaged monsters that only care about other cards of the same type. Imagine if every MTG set had a new VERY narrow tribal theme and the only way they sold packs was by selling 3-4 highly desirable mythic rare Goblin Warriors.
The game suffers from a non-rotating system in which power creep is the only thing that makes new cards viable. The game is very old and I would argue that this has gotten out of hand, with the newest (since I looked, year or more) card type effectively nerfing the previous two card types because the game had become detrimentally fast.
That all said, there is an agreed upon "golden age" of YGO known as the goat format. While the format is unfortunately homogenous in itself, its style of play lends itself well to a draft. It was a simpler time where a decent portion of the strategy was to jam goodstuff into your deck. Think like maybe a twin deck. Powerful synergy smashed into a shell of the best UR control.
Resultantly, it's possible to make a great YGO draft around the older concepts. Put in some cool monsters, spells, and traps and you can play. I actually have a YGO draft myself and it does quite well. Singleton didn't seem worth maintaining because of how YGO cards interact with one another and I made a couple significant design errors due to my MTG cube perspective that need to be amended at some point, but it's perfectly serviceable even in it's extremely suboptimal state.
Maybe a cube around the newer concepts could work, but I struggled to make it happen. You have an extra deck in that game which is comparable to a wishboard if wishboards were central to every deck's strategy. It's hard to have people make a main deck AND have a wishboard full of versatile options. If I were to keep the wishboard concept, I'd probably give everyone the same base level wishboard and add a few additional picks into the main draft. Almost like how we do basic and nonbasic lands.
In fact, I feel pretty satisfied with my MTG cube and perhaps fixing YGO will be my next project. If anyone is interested and wants to join me, let's talk.
If someone wanted to get into a YGO cube, I'd imagine that some pretty basic old-school-like stuff could be tossed together at under $50. Grab some classic effect monsters, spells, and traps, add some 1900+ ATK 4*s, some monarchs, and you're off.
I realize I made this post too long for a forum that doesn't play YGO, but I got myself worked up about it.
I have fallen into both retro and contemporary pokemon tcg gameplay due to an offhanded comment by my partner and a purchase of some precon decks! 
From the League Battle Deck [Origin Forme Palkia VSTAR] and a few games, I found a recent event where a Palkia deck was competitive and bought singles to build it along with a 3 other decks (with the intent to expand to 8 decks): https://limitlesstcg.com/tournaments/320/decklists
I have the 5th, 6th, 19th and 25th place decks. From playing the 5th/6th match a few times, the games felt very close to combo and combo hybrid vintage decks. The decks cost only between 15 and 50 dollars to build/ship!
As I had played pokemon when it first released in the U.S., I thought to then explore competitive decks from that era. This blog set me down the path of buying WotC-era Pokemon cards to play in format that was only used for one championship event: https://jklaczpokemon.com/prop-15-3
It is much more difficult to buy singles to play the 1999s era (despite the cards being relatively cheap) due to the low inventory collections most stores seem to carry. I only just got the cards to complete a few decks fully and hope to play some games the next week!
From the League Battle Deck [Origin Forme Palkia VSTAR] and a few games, I found a recent event where a Palkia deck was competitive and bought singles to build it along with a 3 other decks (with the intent to expand to 8 decks): https://limitlesstcg.com/tournaments/320/decklists
I have the 5th, 6th, 19th and 25th place decks. From playing the 5th/6th match a few times, the games felt very close to combo and combo hybrid vintage decks. The decks cost only between 15 and 50 dollars to build/ship!
As I had played pokemon when it first released in the U.S., I thought to then explore competitive decks from that era. This blog set me down the path of buying WotC-era Pokemon cards to play in format that was only used for one championship event: https://jklaczpokemon.com/prop-15-3
It is much more difficult to buy singles to play the 1999s era (despite the cards being relatively cheap) due to the low inventory collections most stores seem to carry. I only just got the cards to complete a few decks fully and hope to play some games the next week!
Chris Taylor
Contributor
There is an excellent game boy color game for the 1999s era format if you're chasing the feeling rather than the camaraderie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pokémon_Trading_Card_Game_(video_game)