Playing.

General
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So who on here has actually played pokemon tcg socially or competitively. What do you enjoy most? What decks dominate? What cards use to dominate in classic tcg (base set to rocket) what about gym and neo? Interested in finding out. Peace

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Iā€™ve played competitively in the last three seasons.

I enjoy traveling to cool places with friends the most.

Blastoise/Black Kyurem EX/Tropical Beach completely dominates right now.

For past decks, go to bulbapedia and search ā€œDeck Archetypes.ā€ It will give you a list of major decks from every format.

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Fairies is doing alright. It doesnā€™t quite stack up to BKEX/Beach and Yveltal EX variants.

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Thanks for the input guys. Not really interested in playing. Was just curious. I live in Australia not sure that there would be too many players but I respect the people who do play the game and give it that competitive flavour outside of collecting.

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Thereā€™s a ton of Pokemon in Australia.

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Iā€™ve been playing for the past 4 years. I wouldnā€™t say Blastoise is exactly dominating right now, but it is a very good deck. Yveltal EX/Garbodor is probably the best deck in the format. If you need any more information feel free to pm me!

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Thanks organsman all the best in your battles :grin:

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I could talk about the old formats all day. I played through the entire WOTC era, and I still play these formats all the time. Maybe some people will find this interesting, so here goes.

At first I think most people know what the best/most popular decks were. Haymaker, Raindance, Sponge, Potpourri, Wiggly etc. Almost every deck was packing Scyther, Electabuzz, etc. There were some other decks that were playable but never quite got there because of massive SER/ER. Decks like Damage swap, Venucenter, Buzzapdos etc. I could make a list of all the cards that almost got there but didnā€™t because of SER, but it would be massive. Almost every deck was trying to score a 1st turn KO. Oak away for plus powers etc. Team rocket added an even more devastating card that further crippled many decks, which was Rockets Sneak Attack. Pick apart your opponents hand for an early game win. There was even a deck that came later called Trapper that was annoying to say the least, it used three cards (Impostor Oaks Revenge, The Rocketā€™s Trap, and Rocketā€™s Sneak Attack) which with a bit of luck could discard your opponents hand on turn 1. Gym didnā€™t add many playable cards to the game, except Trap and of course Rocketā€™s Zapdos, and some small ā€œtechā€ cards like Erikaā€™s Dratini, Erikaā€™s Jigglypuff, Brockā€™s Mankey, etc. Neo was the set that revolutionized the game. Cleffa was a 4-of in every deck. When Standard and Modified were split, there were 4 dominant decks. The best deck in modified at the time was easily Feraligatr, winning countless tournaments. The counter to Gatr was not Meganium like you might think, but actually Crobat (itā€™s two attacks were very good, it had free retreat, and was weak to psychic which wasnā€™t very popular as opposed to fire which was). Typhlosion was also a great deck, and the 4th was Steelix. this created a kind of ā€œrock paper scissorsā€ effect in the format. Crobat beat Gatr, which beat Typhlosion, which beat Steelix etc. Typhlosion could sometimes beat Gatr with a good pilot player, Blaineā€™s Arcanine could do a massive 120 damage, and 1HKO Ferlagatrā€™s 120 HP. Modified was a game of pretty much 1HKOā€™s, so another necessary card in almost all decks was focus band, Focus bandā€™s positive effects outweighed the ā€œtails failsā€ part of the card, if successful not only would your opponent not get a prize, but also have to stave off another attack. Slowking and Sneasel got the hammer, but of course would go on to dominate the Standard format with pretty much the best deck which was Sneasel/Murkrow which also had Slowking so your opponent couldnā€™t SER/ER the Darkness Energy. Ironically Standard became a very slow format while modified was more fast pace. Other decks eventually rolled around, such as Espeon, Turbo Tops (which I partly created, although considered too ā€œflippyā€ for some) Dark Ferlaigatr, and some others. I could start to go into Expediton/Aquapolis/Skyridge but it would take a whileā€¦

The best Pokemon ever printed were probably Cleffa, Murkrow, Slowking, and also Scyther (simply because it was so playable in the early formats)

Best Trainers are pretty self explanatory, Prof. Oak, SER, Comp Search, Gust of Wind etc.

There is so much information I could share but to get it all down on paper would take forever. If anyone has any questions please ask, I love talking about the older formats.

Also if anyone is interested, I think I still have an article I wrote about about the Turbo Tops deck I created over 10 years ago. I can tell you about the original version of the deck and how I attempted to ā€˜standardizeā€™ it.

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