Takeoff and Development

Things are starting off humbly for us old schoolers, but  I feel like we're striking a gold mine in a gaming experience together. I've been gathering resources, studying games, listening to other players and working with my friend Michael to ensure we continue to grow in a healthy way. This will be a write of up developments so far.

We found out in about 30 seconds that restricted Bill caused games to stall to nothing and quickly unrestricted him. Game experience has improved greatly as a result. Michael and I have ongoing conversations about freeing Professor Oak from his 1x prison. The main arguments that would advocate for Oaks unrestriction are as follows:

- Almost every deck wouldn't play more than 2 or 3, even at its competitive height, not every list played 4, and if they did they would often be punished for doing so by fighting against decks with high survivability. 

- The continued restriction of powerful trainers like Energy Removal and Gust of Wind ensures that a higher access to cards doesn't mean a series of redundant powerful attacks that end a game and quash out entire archetypes from existing. Evolution and big Energy decks are still permitted to exist while people draw cards, and the benefit seems largely symmetrical. 

- Slower, controlling decks are given a new access of attack, to exploit excessive card draw as a means of finishing an opponent off.

This is by no means an announcement that Oak is being unrestricted, only that it'll be tested and explored a bit because we all know that having more cards is way cool. A smaller restricted list is better for everyone, we all want to play our cards, we just also want to walk the tightrope of letting everyone play the cards they /want/ to play. I'm lookin at you Charizard. Once a decision is reached on Oak, we may look at things like Item Finder as well, but decisions to let things out of jail should be done individually and slowly to make sure nothing is being missed.

Now, we've talked about design a bit, let's talk about the fun stuff, the games!

I quickly found a favorite, stuffing a bunch of my favorite puffy friends into a deck all together, a Gengar/Clefable/Wigglytuff deck that leans on Haunter's Pokemon Power to make life a living hell for everyone trying to knock them out.

This was the first list

Knowing that draw power is low in this current setup, I like having energy for all of the Pokemon I have, so I played a high count, it's easiest to tune from there. It was, of course, a bit too high, but so was the half-a-PokeDex worth of Pokemon I played. Chansey was just a cutting board, and so was Lickitung. I casted too wide of a net,  but I learned, so that's pretty dope.

Landing on something a bit more robust and with more ways to pile things into play seemed ideal. Kangaskhan is the perfect turn 1 play and I'm a-ok just drawing cards off it til they KO it and I have a big Wave set up with Wigglytuff. This is probably not an optimal way to use Tuff, since it'd be better leading a bench full of useful Pokemon Powers, but this is a pile of some of my favorite cards, and the Rule of Cool leads me here. Haunter is my sacred cow, Clefable is also puffy and pink, and Metronome is absolutely bananas.

I finally got some Blastoise from a friend, so I can start tuning up the deck I dreamed of as a kid, but never got to play, Rain Dance. Using Pojo's Killer Decks as a point of reference (and a good laugh) is going to be an enjoyable resource for some more serious deckbuilding. On deck is a something focused on damaging the bench a la Fossil Zapdos and fat Raichu, a Misty theme deck, and some kind of Venusaur deck.

When the website is launched, I will add a section for deck tech articles for people to write in with, as well as many other resources for deckbuilding, online content, and tournament reports. Unfortunately as it stands, I cannot afford to pay for a service that will build the webpage for me, and I lack the expertise to do so at this time, so that is on a hiatus while I learn how to do that. I opened a Ko-Fi to give anyone who felt like pitching towards those costs the ability to do so as well <3

Thank you for reading along, I believe people have had time to hunt down cards, tune up some decks, and network a bit, so stay tuned for a formal meetup to happen!