One Hit KO

A big hello to everyone in Omar-Nation, this is Pikkdogs here with a Pre-Release tourney Report and some advice for anyone going to Pre-Release tournaments next weekend.

A lot of people are saying that this is the worst set ever, while I don’t know Pokemon TCG history from Base Set to Diamond and Pearl, I do know that there are not many good cards in this set.  There are 2 good trainer cards, maybe 2 good Pokemon, and a handful of good re-prints; thats it.   No good Primes, Level X’s, or Legend Cards!  These reasons make this set not hugely impactful, but it also does make it one of the best sets ever for Pre-Releases.   

Guide to Winning a Call of Legends Pre-Release

Consistency

This set is full of re-prints of supporters that help in consistency including; Proffesor Oaks New Theory, Copy Cat, Professor Elms Training Method, Sages Training, and Cheerleaders Cheer.  When you combine this with good search/draw Pokemon like Smeargle, Mawile, Pidgey, Ninetails, Relincanth, Skarmory, and Pachirisu; you will get quite the consistent deck.  This means that if you get just a couple good attacking Pokemon, you should be able to get them out fairly quickly.  If you …

This episode is all about the release of Lost World and what impact it will have on our game as we know it. Hear my opinions as well as the true facts behind why LostGar is so successful in Japan and why it might not be the same story over here.

Hope you enjoy.

Thanks for watching,
Dan
Continue reading "PokemanDan’s PokeClass Episode 18 – Lost World for the Game!"

Hey all members of Omar-Nation, Pikkdogs here with a little bit of a strategy article.  This site hasn’t had a Luxchomp article posted here for quite sometime, and I am pretty proud of it.  But alas, we can’t ignore it forever, so here is an article about Luxchomp.                       

We all know that since it became popular, Luxchomp has been the winning-est deck in the format.  It is a great deck that is lightning quick and features a lot of elements of disruption.  Of course it features the Pokemon Luxray Gl and Garchomp C, which gives the deck a lot of advantages.  But to give it even more advantages, Luxchomp players have teched out their decks with a lot of different cards.  There are too many cards to include them all in every deck.  So to make things easier, this article will tell you a little more about the techs, and you can include the techs that fit your metagame the best.

The Staples– Before we talk about techs, lets first look at staples.  I consider that Luxchomp has 5 staple Pokemon cards.  1. Luxray Gl (usually a 2-1. 3-1. or 2-2 line), 2.Garchomp C (usually a 2-2 or 3-1 …

Hello to all members of Omar-Nation.  As you can see from the title of this article, Pikk Three is back. I have not done this article in a while, since the season was in full swing, there was a lot to talk about.   The Undaunted set brought in some new decks, and the Triumphant set changed a lot of the decks out there.  But now, Battle Roads and City Championships are over, there are no new decks out there (none that anyone will talk about anyway), and the next set seems to be fairly boring.

So because of these reasons, I think its time to go back to the Pikk Three article.  If you don’t know what this article is, I’ll just have to tell you.  Its an article where I review three cards, one that is popular, one that I think is under-used, and one that is coming out in a new or yet un-released set.  Its basically a card of the day article on steroids, so without further wait, here is the article.

The Staple-Garchomp C Lv.X

Description-Its hard to believe that I have never reviewed this card before, because it is probably the best card in …

PokemanDan presents the longest episode ever!

If you watch the whole of this then thanks, I think you’ll find it’ll be worth it. As you can probably guess, I cover quite a lot in this episode. There’s my newest article called ‘Money Matters’ which covers all about the financial side of Pokemon along with a Cities report and finally two decklists from my shortlist in the Deck Surgery.

Thanks for watching and I hope you enjoy!
Continue reading "PokemanDan’s PokeClass Episode 17 – Money Matters, Cities and Deck Surgery!"

Hey all members of Omar Nation, this is Pikkdogs here with a Stupid Deck Idea.  As most of you know, our Stupid Deck Ideas are basically fun decks that either show a little promise or are just fun to play.  This deck fits in the former category, and features Yanmega Prime.

I call this deck World B. Free, after one of the craziest named NBA players.  The name kind of fits because Yanmega Prime can attack without any energies, or for free.       

First I got to give props to Cheffords and his buddies at work.  While they did not help me with this deck, they are the only other people I know with a similar deck.

So, on to the deck strategy.  The strategy of this deck is to have the same number of cards in your hand as your opponent does, so you do not need to pay for any of Yanmega Prime’s attacks, thanks to his “Insight” Pokebody.  Yanmega Prime has two attacks.  With “Linear Attack” you can snipe for 40 damage, and with “Sonicboom” you can do 70 damage.  While 70 damage isn’t a great attack, if you can combine it with disruption it may be enough.…

This is the second part of a 2-part series. You can find part one here.
“Donking for Dummies Part 1: Radu’s Obnoxious Uxie Deck”

Time Management
I mentioned in the previous article that you will take extremely long turns. I said you will do it without stalling or slow play. I will explain how one goes about achieving this in this section. If I were to play a “fun” game against this deck the Uxie Donk players turn would probably be about 10-12 minutes, if I were to play against it in a tournament the average players turn would be somewhere between the 15-18 minute range. This is not ideal, not because you want to win on time, but because you are likely not taking all the time to think and plan that’s would be best. People just play this deck too fast. You have right to shuffle for more than two seconds, you have right to take a little bit of time to think between plays. What you will be doing may seem unreasonable given that you are denying your opponent a turn. It, however, is not. Honestly, you will be taking less time in between plays than a Luxchomp player would, your searches will be faster. You will check the discard pile three or four times during a game. That’s in 30 minutes of playing time. Most decks check the discard that many times in just 15 minutes of play. But your opponent will not like this regardless of any logic that is used. But keeping your opponent happy isn’t your job. Now, let’s look at some of the factors which lead to people not using enough of their time and losing game they should have won on time.

Continue reading "Donking for Dummies Part 2: Radu’s Guide To Cultivating Hatred"

This is guide to playing the universally hated Uxie Donk deck. The deck goes by some other names as well. The more common ones are Uxie Quadro, Solitaire, Donk Deck etc. I affectionately refer to is as Obnoxious, due to the fact that pretty much everything about the deck is incredibly obnoxious. If you don’t know why this deck is obnoxious then you simply have never heard of it before. The deck aims to FTK/OTK (First Turn Kill/One Turn Kill) the opponent even if they start four basics. This is my favorite deck to play this format.  That being said, I have never used it in a premier event due to my fear of Vilegar. Uxie Donk is also the deck I find to be, by far, the most intriguing this format.

As a card player, OTK and FTK decks always interested me.  They are somewhat common in Yugioh, but in modified Pokemon this is a true first. The engines that decks like this use are always incredibly intricate and fast. There are many people who have asserted that this deck and decks like it take no skill to play, or that it is only played by skill-less players. Those people are dead wrong. This deck does take a good amount of skill to play right, with the intention of winning tournaments. People simply don’t understand how much I cringe when I let people use this deck and they misplay horribly with it. It’s not a hard deck to learn, but if you fail to adhere to the simple academic rules which I will lay out here, you will not win as much as you should. To be fair, if an average player playing this deck has a 60% win rate, a very skilled player will only have 70 or 75% win rate, but when you are talking about winning in a larger field and going X-0 or X-1, those 10 or 15% make a huge difference.

This article will be broken into two parts. First, I will explain the strategy behind playing the deck and what it aims to do. Then, I will explain how one would go about playing this deck in a tournament, including a very large section on time management. A lot of what I say may seem obvious. I have learned over the several years I’ve been playing that nothing is too obvious for your average player to ignore, so I’m saying pretty much everything. Before all that, I will introduce myself for those that do not know who I am.

Continue reading "Donking for Dummies Part 1: Radu’s Obnoxious Uxie Deck"

As many of you probably do not know, I am in the Masters of Library Sciences Program at Wayne State University.  In short, I am going to school to be a librarian.                  

Why should I care about that?

You shouldn’t.

So why are you telling me this?

Well, if you will let me finish my story, I’ll tell you.

Anyway, last semester I was in a class that was being given a presentation about the preservation of books.  While I was listening to what kind of things can ruin books, I was thinking of how this kind of stuff can apply to cards as well.  After class, I went online and learned a lot of stuff about card preservation.

While I will admit that I don’t practice great preservation, it is an important concept to anyone in the game.  Preservation is one of the most important things about maintaining a card collection, no matter how big or how small.  In this article I will tell you why you should preserve your cards and how you can do it.

Why You Should do It.

There are two main reasons to preserve your Pokemon card collection.

1. To preserve its value for trading

A big hello to everyone from Omarnation.  This is Pikkdogs here with a quick house cleaning article.

As most of you know, a few weeks ago we started our first contest to celebrate our first anniversary.  Now that the results are back, we can finally share them with all of our readers.

Ed and I were excited to run the contest, but unfortunately it did not go as well as we hoped.  We didn’t get half the entries as we thought we would.  But, we still did get some entries and got to  connect with a few of our readers.  Here are the winners of the contest:

1. Evan C.-winner of a Pokemon TCG Tin

2. Alan T.-winner of a 2010 Play Pokemon Energy Pack

3. Myles D.-winner of a Ho-oh Legend.

The winners have all been contacted and the prizes are on their way.

Since we did not get the amount of entries that we thought we would, we would like to know why.  This input would be very helpful in making our website better, especially if we ever decided to have another contest.  Are you guys interested in contests?  Was this specific contest not interesting enough?  Was the …