Introduction

It’s me, coolestman22, with an article about the Top 4 decks for Battle Roads. In this article are 4 lists of the decks I believe will have the biggest impact on Battle Roads, one of which emerges from our newest set, Dark EXplorers (I wish they would stop the EX puns already). Most of these I have at one point played so they are somewhat tested, but remember that each player has personal preferences so not every list will seem 100% perfect to you. It’s not the exact list that you have to use, so feel free to edit the lists to your personal preference.

First off, we’ll take a look at what did well at Regionals, even though there might be a few differences in the lists now that Dark EXplorers is out.

According to thetopcut.net, here are the Top 4 decks in all of the U.S. Regionals:

This looks pretty much metagame-oriented, with the only exceptions being the Liligant deck and the Kyurem-EX/Terrakion/Mewtwo …

Hello all members of Omar-Nation, this is Pikkdogs here with an article about a different way to play test.

“Practice?  We talking about Practice? …… Not a game, not a game, we talking about Practice. …… Not the game I go out there and die for, we talking bout Practice”

Yes Allen Iverson, today’s article is about practicing the Pokemon TCG.          

As any good player will tell you, the only way to get better is to play-test a lot.  It lets you know a lot more about the decks your are playing and lets you work out the tightest list for your deck.  It also lets you know what other players are thinking, and how other decks operate.  So if you face them in a tournament, you will have a better chance of beating that deck.  But how can you get your play-testing done?  I know of four major ways to play-test; at a league, by yourself, with your friends, or online.

Play Pokemon would rather you handle your play-testing at official leagues.  Leagues are a great way to meet new people and learn about the game.  You can even earn cool promo cards and other stuff like that.  But, …

What is MRDIF?

I am sure you all have heard of the new popular acronym (at least new to me) BDIF, witch stands for Best Deck In Format. Well I decided instead of writing an article about the Best Deck in Format I would write an article about the Most  Ridiculous Deck in Format, or MRDIF. For this article I chose to write about Gyarados as the MRDIF because I feel it really is!

How Do You Play Gyarados?

I realize that a lot of people already know how to play Gyarados but for those of you who don’t I’ll go over it briefly for you. Basically the goal of Gyarados is to discard Magikarp using cards like Regice and Junk Arm. You may ask “why would I want to get rid of your basics?” Well that’s because Gyarados’s “Tail Revenge” attack does 30 damage times the number of Magikarp in your discard pile for no energy. There are some cases where you do need to use cards like Pokemon Rescue to recover a Magikarp because Gyarados got KOed but you mostly rely on Rescue Energy now to recover Gyarados.

Ways to Play Gyarados!

In all of my experimenting with …

You’ve thought up your next great deck. You’ve worked out some ideas on paper (or in Excel as I’ve taken to doing recently). You’ve even gone as far as building a deck (with a few proxies here and there). Now what do you do?

Of course, you’d like to test it out against some known decks. For various reasons, that might not be the next step, though. You might just want to play the deck by yourself first to see how things go, but how do you go about playing Pokemon TCG Solitaire? That’s exactly what I want to know, too.

If you have the same question, then it’s only fair for me to tell you how I’ve played Pokemon cards by myself. I’ve done it a few different ways, so I’ll lay them out below. I’d love it if you could respond and tell me how you do it. I’d like to try some new ideas for solitaire playtesting.

1) Just Draw

This is the most simple way that I can think to test your newly built deck, and it can be incorporated into any other solitaire game. Shuffle your new deck, and draw 7 cards. Look at

I brought my/Ava’s Shuppet Donk deck to test with Team Omar last night. I know that some people just hate the idea of Spiritomb AR in a Shuppet deck, but I wanted to see if it could help against SP. I think I played 4 matches, and 3 of them were against different SP decks. If I recall correctly, I only won 1 game. Even that one was questionable, because (for testing purposes) we replayed an early risk I took that would have resulted in a loss for me.

The funny thing is that I found all my matchups to be fairly positive. I feel like Shuppet should get completely owned by SP, but with the right Spiritomb start, I can stall the opponent enough to get a few early KOs. If one of them happens to be a Dialga G, it might just win me the game. As it was, I only did well against the fighting-heavy SP mainly due to weakness. I did pretty well against Abdi’s SP deck, too, until he realized exactly how my deck worked. Then Dialga shut me down. I had a really close and odd match with Omar (who reminded me multiple …

I’ve been playing Porygon a bit. The deck is definitely fun to play, because it does a lot of things that aren’t really possible in most decks. Setting up can be slow if you don’t get the right pieces early, but with Call Energy, TS-1 Evoluter, Roseanne’s, Bebe’s, etc. you can usually get a good double supporter (thanks to Download) plus Claydol turn on turn 2 or 3.

There are two main problem areas that I’ve found: getting energy and losing TMs. They both stem from a single problem, though, and that is letting your active Porygon take damage.

The deck can run on very little energy, and you could easily win a game with only 2 with the right draw and matchup. The problem is that your active Porygon-Z will, at some point, take damage. When that happens, you will want to retreat, Switch, Warp Point, etc. You would usually have another Porygon-Z waiting on the bench, and it’s easy to Install TMs onto the waiting Porygon. What is not easy, however, is getting energy onto the waiting Porygon.

The same issue applies to TMs. Sure, you can move them around, but what happens when your active gets KO’d? …

Well, we went to the Rapid City Pokemon League on Saturday. It was the morning after a pretty good snow storm (and Christmas), so they didn’t get a good turnout. They said that they’d usually get around 20 players, but they got 3 (besides Ava, my two brother-in-laws, and myself). I was hoping to earn some Claydols, but they didn’t have any. I ended up with a new Uxie and a Snorlax. The guys there were cool, and they taught me how to play 2-vs-2. I accidentally won our first 2-on-2 match when I double-donked each of their only Pokemon for the win. The second game was much longer.

Ava wouldn’t play at league. She did play around and one of the guys played her Next Quest TFG with her, so that was cool. After league, though, I was getting convinced that Ava would not play in the City Champ on the 10th. I asked her if she still wanted to, and she said she did. I told her that she’d have to practice with me every day, and she agreed.

Sunday evening, I got her to play against me. I used VERY suboptimal green deck (Beautifly) against her, and …

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