Pokémon TCG Pocket

Following my display board of May's team, I realised that I have enough full-art cards of Dawn's pokemons (except for Piplup / Empoleon).

Piplup, Buneary, Pachirisu and Mamoswine are from the anime; Rapidash ~~and Xerneas are~~ is from the manga; Bellosom is from the game

Edit: mixed up Dawn and Serena somehow😔

I finally saved up enough shop tickets for the 7-cards display board!

I have also just obtained May, and happened to have high-rarity cards of some of her pokemons, so naturally there's only one thing to do.

There is no one true team for May that is common across the game, anime and manga, so I took some liberties mixing her cross-media pokemons (really just choosing the ones I have full-arts of; no venusaur😭)

No full-art version of Skitty has been released just yet, but it is too iconic to leave out😔

References:

• (Mega) Blaziken
• Beautifly
• Skitty
• Glaceon
• Latios
• (Mega) Altaria

Opened a single pack first, then a 10 pack, so this was the 7th pack

cross-posted from: https://crazypeople.online/post/12292820

For those of you across the Fediverse who follow our communities:

As you may know, our current host (KNThost) is going out of business. As part of that transition, we are migrating crazypeople.online to new infrastructure. We’ve been working on this in the background for a while, and it’s almost time to finish packing and make the move.

When: Thursday, December 18th @ 16:00 UTC (Subject to change). (Click here for your local time)

Expected Duration: Up to 24 hours.

What you will see: During this window, communication between our server and yours will be cut off.

• On your home instance: Our communities will likely look like a static archive since no new updates will be coming through.
• Direct Access: If you try to visit our site directly, it will be completely dark for a short time. It will likely be up and down a few times before the migration is finished, and even after that you might see connection errors for a while as the new DNS records propagate across the web.

Don't Worry: We aren't gone. Once we're fully moved in and the internet updates our address, we'll be back.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask here.

Right after finishing the set and all three museum collections :)

Hi everyone!

While I've been focused on our upcoming server migration (more on that soon!), @Endmaker@ani.social has been doing a great job keeping the vibes alive here.

Since they clearly share our love for the game and this community, I've asked them to come aboard as a moderator, and they've graciously accepted.

No dramatic changes here- this just gives a hopefully familiar face more ways to interact with the community they are already supporting.

Welcome to the team, Endmaker! 💚

Also see: accompanying press release for upcoming events

Which new cards are you most excited for?

Just some fun question for others who play the game-

What sort of approach do you take when it's time to open a new pack? Do you take the default pack after you choose what booster to open? Do you pick a certain spot every time? Fling the wheel of packs and see where it lands? Do you open packs facing frontwards or backwards? Maybe something else entirely?

I usually do one of two things. Either I'll spot a backwards facing pack during the opening animation and pick it, or I'll fling the wheel left or right and open the pack it lands on. Most of the time I prefer opening packs facing frontwards, but every so often I switch it up and do a flip up opening.

What's your method?

If we are not already friends, you can add me with 6033208432700562

Good luck!

For a game that's supposedly about magical animals, everyone is looking for 2-star cards of humans. (I know, I know, it's the meta / how useful they are.)

At the start of this season, I predicted that Cofagrigas would pop off.

With ranked battles back, there is now a more serious environment to test it out.

TLDR of my findings: it's no good. Play the meta decks if you want to climb ranks easily.

I made a couple of modifications to the deck before bringing it to ranked mode:

First up, one copy of Pokeball was replaced with Lisia. With 5 low-HP pokemons in the deck, Lisia is simply too good to pass up. Also, Chingling is rampant in the current meta and would block the usage of pokeballs.

The other change was to replace Red Card with Mars. Again, Chingling disables Red Card. The pokemons in this deck also tend to get knocked out a lot, which means Mars become more effective.

The results:

I played a total of 50 games with this deck, starting in Ultra Ball 3 and ending in Ultra Ball 4.

I won 26 of these games, lost 23 and tied 1.

That means that this deck has a win rate of 52%, which is a far cry from the winrate of a standard Mega Altaria deck (55-60%).

Now that I have played a significant number of games with Cofagrigas, its weaknesses became apparent.

First up, its HP of 120 is too low, well below the threshold of 130-140 HP, which means it gets knocked out by the likes of Hydreigon, Mega Altaria and Mega Blaziken easily. Bringing a Giant Cape doesn't help as its HP would only get extended to 140.

It's output damage of 120 is too low as well, requiring Red to cross the HP threshold. The thing is, everyone knows about the HP threshold and would run a copy of Giant Cape for pokemons that are vulnerable.

The discard mechanic turned out to be a huge drawback. Cofagrigas was only able to attack 1-2 turns before having to discard key cards or running out of cards to attack. Copycat was unable to compensate for this weakness as everyone have wised up to it and always dump their hand.

Its biggest weakness by far is its 2-energy retreat cost, both for its pre-evolution of Yamask as well as Cofagrigas itself. When Yamask is the only basic pokemon in my starting hand, it tends to stay in the active spot until it gets knocked out. It becomes especially bad when going first.

For all its downsides, this deck didn't do too badly with its 52% win rate. However, the real carry is Mega Altaria. Unfortunately, Cofagrigas simply doesn't have a place in this metagame.

Having said all that, it may be possible that this deck failed to perform well because its pilot (i.e. yours truly) suck at the game. To account for that, I needed some reference points i.e. I've got to check my win rates with other decks.

After these 50 games, I switched to a standard Decidueye deck:

It's not exactly meta, but it is solidly counter-meta and should have a positive performance.

I played 20 games, starting from the bottom of Ultra Ball 4 and ending in the middle.

I won 10 games and lost 10 games, so this deck has a winrate of 50%.

Technically, that means that the Cofagrigas deck performed better.

However, I'd argue that they have roughly the same performance, given that the sample size for Decidueye is much smaller, and that I got quite unlucky while playing this deck:

I ran into 3 Hydreigons - which Decidueye is supposed to counter and get a free win off of by the way - that managed to evolve by turn 2!

I then switched my deck to Mega Blaziken-Heatmor:

I only played 10 games with this deck, making it an incredibly small sample, but that's because that's all it took to climb the rest of the way into Master Ball.

I won 7 games and lost 3 games, with the final games being a 4-win streak.

Edit:

Correction, it's 7 wins and 4 losses. The tie is annoying.

I know that the sample size is small, but this is the kind of performance I'd expect of a meta deck.

Also, the point of high-roll decks like Hydreigon and Mega Blaziken is to get lucky and climb via win streaks.

Cofagrigas clearly cannot compete with a deck like this.

Got these in 3 packs in a row. Was pretty wild.

For reference, some of the most iconic pairs that came to mind are:

• Darkrai ex + Giratina ex
• Greninja + Cyrus
• Celebi ex + Serperior

Is it because of its sick artwork? Or is it because its super fun to play? Or something else entirely?