My son has quite a few YuGiOh and pokemon cards. The thing is, until recently he hasn’t really been literally inclined enough to read and comprehend them. His idea of playing YuGiOh involves things like “My monster is cooler looking than your so he wins” and “I have more of these orange circles (casting cost essentially) so I win.

I have quite a few Pokemon cards from my days working at KB Toys. You see, people would open the packs, steal the rares then leave the commons behind. Why not steal the whole pack when it’s so much more risky to open the pack in store and pick out the card you want I don’t know. The cards we sold were marked down rediculously cheap so occasionaly I’d go through the stockpile of stolen left overs and make my own “custom packs” and buy them. It’s Win-Win all around, They sell some otherwise unselable items, I get to pick out as many Pikachu cards as I can find. I didn’t have anyone to play against but I was kind of big on Pokemon at the time.

I have never actually played Pokemon cards mind you I just have the cards. The sad thing is, other than my couple theme decks, I don’t have enough energy cards to actually build a deck. Also my Theme decks aren’t quite as pre-contructed as they started out since last year sometime my son and his friends decided to take it upon themselves to relieve me of several of my cards (among other things). That’s a different story.

The point is, we’ve been playing off and on against eachother. I’ve got 3 decks, a Psychic based Sabrina Theme Deck that is pretty strong, a Water based Misty deck that sucks ass and a custom made Electric/White theme decks that totally rules.

I have a thing with CCG games where I like to build good strategies for weak cards. I built a Star Wars CCG deck centered entirely around jawas and keeping them alive. I irritated the hell out of my college buddy with his Star Destroyer army. My Jawas just kept comming back.

Anyway this Deck has several strong points. There’s Pokemon such as Raticate and Electabuzz that are flaw out heavy hitters. Pikachu and Raichu offer the excellent opportunity to damage benched Pokemon with thier Shock based attacks. Erika’s Jugglypuff comes in as a bit of a trump card, especially if pulled early. Jigglypuff has an attack called Pulledpunch. It does 40 damage to any pokemon with full life and 10 if they have any damage on them. This will kill most basic pokemon in two rounds. This is often fast enough to prevent them from getting enough energy to attack or evolve.

Better still is my army of Magnemites. I like to keem my bench relatively clear until I built up a few of these them I drop them out in force. Magnemite has an attack called Magnetism that essentially does 10 damage for every Magnemite you have in play. This can give a quickly deployed pokemon a sure fire attack of 60 damage easy.

I don’t always win but I often do. I will admit, my son is a shitty strategist and I’ll often advise him. For example, he’ll throw out his strongest pokemon and evolve them up even if he doesn’t have the energy available for them to attack. Yeah, that 150 HP Pokemon that does 100 damage is great unless he doesn’t have 4 energy on him, then he’s just a huge target. He also has a thing he does where he’ll replace a fallen pokemon with an allready weakened pokemon. even though he may have a good one on his bench. Let’s see, ou have two Krabbys, one has 10 HP left the other is brand new, why not throw out the strong one.

The other interesting aspect at work here is how the original cards match up against new cards. All of my cards are old, Gym Leaders and Hereos are the newest cards I have. Most of his are new, including new theme decks. His cards actually seem to be a bit stronger all around but it’s hard to tell if that’s not just a side effect of my tendency to pick “weak/cute” Pokemon cards out.