Pokémon Thread XXX: Hot Skitty on Wailord Action!

[TaiLiu]

Not a Pokemon TCG player, but my understanding from other games:

Snorlax: Block ability prevents the active pokemon from retreating, and acts as a 150 HP basic pokemon. It prevents the opponent from developing their game state, hence 'stall'.
Hisuian Goodra: Takes 80 less damage from attacks, and can full heal itself once during the game. If your opponent doesn't have attacks that hit for enough damage or ignore the damage reduction, they will never get through Hisuian Goodra. It is a wall.
Great Tusk: Puts cards from library into graveyard; if the opponent reaches 0 cards in library, they lose, even if you haven't taken all the prize cards or run them out of backline pokemon. Generally, your goal with mill is to last long enough to win via deck out. For example, milling them for a few turns with Great Tusk while you develop your Hisuian Goodra. It's a defensive strategy (your goal is not necessarily KO all your opponents' pokemon) but not necessarily involves unkillable pokemon. (For example, if you put out Great Tusk early, there's a good chance it'll get KO'd without too much issue, but you used it to get three turns of mill so the opponent will run out of cards nine turns before you do; then all you need to do is get a sufficiently large wall and to wait.)

Thanks for the explanation. That makes sense.

Players each have sixty cards each, right? I wonder how long it'd take to win via deck out.

Possibly the most famous example of walling without stat boosters or residual damage was the 2014 VGC World Championship, with Se Jun Park's Pachirisu. If your opponent can't hit your damage dealers, they're in for a bad time...

And to make myself look really old while I'm at it, one of the strategies back in the Base Set days of the Trading Card Game, was one Mewtwo and 59 Psychic Energy cards. In those days, if you didn't have a Basic Pokemon in your opening hand, your opponent got to see your hand and got to draw two cards before you shuffled and redrew, repeating until you got your Basic Pokemon and could then start the game. You'd then focus on using nothing but Barrier for the rest of the game. Even though you're almost guaranteeing your opponent a massive hand advantage, there weren't many options to put cards back into the deck at the time, so if your opponent couldn't work around your defenses, winning was a matter of turns due to decking out. It was far from a perfect strategy, but it didn't take long to change the "opponent draws 2 cards" to an optional step, and looking up the rules now it's knocked down to one card with judges suggested to intervene if it happens too much.

Another nasty wall was the non-Japanese print of Slowking, where some doofus forgot to include the line, "If this card is your active pokemon," in its Pokemon Power. So, when your opponent played a Trainer Card (uh, I think they're analogous to Spell Cards in other games), there'd be a 50/75/87.5/99.93% chance of that card going to the top of your opponent's deck with no other effect, depending on how many Slowkings were in play. They'd draw that card the following turn, so their options were to succeed against the odds or just not play any Trainers if they wanted to actually get cards into their hands. And for the most part, it's somewhat important to have cards in your hand when you're playing a card game...

Oo, I remember learning about the Pachirisu. Park was just a teen back then. I wonder what makes a good e-sports player. Is it more like being a good chess player or more like being a good physical sports player?

That's pretty cool. Were you a TCG player then?

That's amazing. No wonder they banned it. The link mentions that Wormadam was later banned. Which I guess shows how different the TCG is from the video games, cuz it's hard to imagine that happening for the VGC.

I'm pretty sure that is the first official errata to exist for the TCG too, with the second being they buffed potion for the reprints. It also explains why there are no reactions/interrupts like that since... I think cleffa all the way back in gold/silver. Everything else is resolved after the action. Which is a shame, becausea card game equivalent of focus sash would be really spicy in the current meta.

Isn't there a Focus Sash card? :O