Deckbuilding For Teaching Tournament Pokemon To A Child

Thursday, May 24th, 2012

Petra Doing a Magic Trick at Battle Roads?

This BR season, I wanted to do some sort of OneHitKO Budget Challenge, but life took its toll, and I really didn’t do much Pokemon for a while. We hit up states, but we were fairly unprepared. Now that a new set is out and a new BR season is already upon us, my plans will have to wait for some other time.

What has happened, though, is that I think it’s time to teach my second daughter how to play Pokemon and get her in on some tournament play. This past weekend, I brought Petra (my second daughter behind Ava) to Battle Roads. Ava and I played, and Petra watched. She sat with me quite a bit, and she was excited each time I won. We cut the day short, when I dropped (which helped TAndrewT get second on the day). The whole thing sparked the idea to get her started on playing the TCG, but she’s only 5 years old. How can we pull it off?

This article won’t get too deep into my plans for Petra. I hope to get to that in a future article. I will, however, discuss a bit of what I did when Ava was getting into the game 2 and a half years ago.

What I did at the time was take a known deck and childproof it. I did everything I could to choose a deck that had a single goal and build it in a way that limited all the options. You might say that I wanted an “autopilot” deck, but to a 6-year-old (as Ava was at the time), even “autopilot” requires plenty of thought.

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