Pokemon Trading Card Game GBC

[Gold Geno]

God, I remember building so many silly decks in the original TCG game. My personal favourite was only avaliable in postgame since it used Legendary Zapdos. You ran one Zapdos, a mess of Energy cards and a bunch of trainers dedicated to keeping it alive. Legendary Zapdos' attack deals 70 damage to one Pokemon on either side of the field at random other than Zapdos itself. If Zapdos is the only Pokemon you ever have on your side of the field, it'll always hit the opponent.

It was dumb and I loved every moment of it.

 

[adman2]

So far, I've beaten two of the "Elite Four" with my Onix and Rhyhorn stall deck. When all the legendary birds resist your attacks, you have to resort to things like Energy Removal, Leer, and occasionally Gust of Wind. Hitmonlee managed to take down Zapdos though.

 

[adman2]

Now I've become the Champion with my all-Fighting stall deck. Here's what it looks like:

Pokemon

Onix: 4

Rhyhorn: 4

Hitmonlee: 1



Trainer

Mr. Fuji: 4

Energy Removal: 4

Switch: 2

Pokemon Center: 1

Poke Ball: 2

Defender: 1

Gust of Wind: 3

Potion: 3

Super Potion: 2

Full Heal: 2

Recycle: 4



Energy

Fighting: 23


Is it true that Ronald only has Fire energy in the final battle? If so, the AI is worse than I thought. I never saw him attach Water energy to his Articuno, so Gust of Wind forced him to waste his turns on a useless Pokemon until I won. Mr. Fuji comes in handy to "heal" Pokemon and add cards to the deck. Onix stalls anything that deals less than 30 damage, and has enough HP to benefit from healing. Rhyhorn reduces the chance of an enemy attack landing to 50%, and legendary Moltres requires another coin flip to deal damage.

So many Pokemon resist Fighting that the late game practically requires stall if that's the only type you use.

 

[Lightning Energy]

Is it true that Ronald only has Fire energy in the final battle? If so, the AI is worse than I thought.

Yeah, he only uses Fire Energy in his final deck (I guess to use Moltres lv. 37's Pokemon Power). It makes things rather easy, since you don't have to worry about Zapdos lv. 67's dumb attack...

 

[adman2]

I started playing around with a mono-Fire deck. It's far more powerful than the other types I've used so far, but it seems every other Fire attack requires discarding energy. If you like hyper offense, Fire is the type for you.

(Mr. Mime with its ability to block any attack that deals over 20 damage will be a pain in the Psychic Club. . .)

 

[adman2]

Fire has to be the least diverse type in the game. Moltres seems to be the only one that isn't weak to Water, and its attack fails if you get tails on a coin flip.

Grass has the Poison types that are weak to Psychic instead of Fire. Fighting has the traditional Fighting types that are weak to Psychic, and the Rock/Ground variety that have a Grass weakness instead. Even Colorless has Flying Pokemon if you need to beat a Fighting deck. Fire has almost no variety by comparison. At least Charizard is fun to use!

EDIT: No Pokemon that I can think of resists Fire, and that includes the Water types. Fighting requires a stall deck to deal with all the Flying Pokemon, but Fire at least doesn't have that issue.

 

[adman2]

Here's the final deck for the mono-Fire playthrough:

Pokemon

Charmander: 4
Charmeleon: 3
Charizard: 2
Magmar: 3


Trainer

Professor Oak: 1
Bill: 4
Energy Retrieval: 3
Energy Search: 1
Switch: 3
Poke Ball: 1
Computer Search: 2
Gust of Wind: 3
Potion: 3
Full Heal: 2
Recycle: 2

Energy

Fire: 23

This deck is inconsistent, but fun. Get Charizard quickly and kill everything with Fire Spin. Losing two Fire energy per use stinks, so be sure to have Energy Retrieval to get some of it back. Setting up energy while Ronald's Articuno sat there doing nothing helped me win the final battle. Amy of the Water Club and Jack the Grand Master were tough, because almost all Fire Pokemon are weak to Water. (Grass and Fighting are more diverse types that have different weaknesses).

EDIT: This will probably be my final TCG playthrough for a while. Be sure to pick up this game on the 3DS online store if you can, especially if you want something different from the main Pokemon series.

 

[TrainerX493]

Pokémon tcg was one of the very few games I had for the system, I played that thing to pieces! I loved making all sorts of decks (usually a mono deck) and using them against everything. I definitely recommend playing Pokémon tcg 2, there's a lot more battles to be had and a lot more than just "gyms+e4" format.

I didn't really have a standout deck in the first game, but the second one I recall a insanely powerful one I made around Dark Raichu, Dark Cleffable, and GR Mewtwo. GR Mewtwo had an ability to boost the power of Dark Pokémon moves by either 0, 10, or 20, but unlike similar abilities, it affected bench damage too. Both Raichu and Cleffable had coin flips, but they pretty much always was OP, hitting the active Pokémon for a good chunk of damage, and dealing up to 40 damage to EACH bench Pokémon for Raichu, and bench damage + sleep for Cleffable, KOing things almost each time. Cleffable also had the same thing GR Mewtwo had but to reduce damage for Dark Pokémon instead. I had Kangaskon to wall and draw cards, Dodrio to give free retreats to almost everything, and Dark Dragoneir/Dragonite to get the Pokémon out on the field to round up the rest of the Pokémon I used (they all hit hard too if needed).

P.S. Forgive me for any misspelling of Pokémon names I may have done.

 

[Carl]

Oh my god this game. I saw it available for virtual console and just had to download it. It's been years since I last played it but man does it hold up well. So well that I had to dig up, read and reply to old posts on the smogon dot com.

I've been playing all week and just finished the storyline. I picked the Bulbasaur and friends deck which was pretty solid to build off of. I heavily modified it as I went but it was a good starting point. Almost immediately took out the Flareon and Fire energies since that's useless here. From there I tried to simplify the families for the grass and water cards. I worked it down to just Dewgong / Vaporeon on waters and Nidoking / Venusaur lines on grass with a couple Kangaskhans. I really liked getting Nidoking set up, that was super fun. Then I started hitting better cards and shifted towards a full grass and colorless deck because I fell in love with Venusaur's ability and chose to build more around that. That ended up turning into the deck I was affectionately calling Big Grass Energy. Probably not very original and could be improved further but this is what I finished with:

4x Bulbasaur
3x Ivysaur
3x Venusaur
4x Scyther
3x Jigglypuff
2x Wigglytuff
2x Chansey

4x Prof Oak
4x Bill
1x PKMN Breeder
2x PKMN Center
2x Computer Search
2x Pluspower
3x Gust of Wind

17x Grass Energy
4x Double Colorless

Energy Transfer is great and I enjoyed not having to think at all about where and when to place grass energy. Just throw it out on the field and Venusaur will get it to the right card eventually. General concept here is to kick the battle off with anyone but Bulbasaur and go to work either trying to get some quick kills (a la Scyther) or stall and build up the bench with energy and a Venusaur (Chansey route). Jigglypuff is kind of a middle ground option that can either stall or fire off quick 20 power attacks. More often than not Venusaur or Wigglytuff will clean up since it's easy to get a full bench and then shuffle Energy as needed to launch relatively cheap 60 power attacks. Pokemon Center was nice utility with Energy Transfer and using it with Chansey after Double Edge is a nice gimmick for getting a consistent really strong attack. I would have loved to have more Pokemon Breeder but even after a lot of grinding (I have 40+ of some pokemon cards now) I still couldn't land more than one. I'd drop Ivysaur completely if I had them since I like getting Venusaur in play ASAP and Ivysaur is just OK as a card. I barely ever attacked with it and only used it as a means to get Venusaur. In general, I could probably optimize the trainer cards and energy counts a bit better, too. The only main NPC I didn't use a grass deck against was Courtney and instead I cobbled together a fairly generic Rain Dance deck for her.

Anyway, super fun game, and felt like sharing thoughts somewhere. I found a copy of TCG2 to move on to and I've never played it before so that should be even more fun.

 

[ASMRxism]

Does anyone know how card pack rng works? I have been grinding Joseph in the Science Gym for Laboratory packs trying to get Mr. Mimes and Fossil Haunters. I have one each of them, but 13+ Venomoths, Hitmonlees, Poliwraths, Muks and Ninetales GB. It's hard to blame this purely on RNG and now I'm starting to wonder if there's some programming quirk I'm missing.

 

[TrainerX493]

Does anyone know how card pack rng works? I have been grinding Joseph in the Science Gym for Laboratory packs trying to get Mr. Mimes and Fossil Haunters. I have one each of them, but 13+ Venomoths, Hitmonlees, Poliwraths, Muks and Ninetales GB. It's hard to blame this purely on RNG and now I'm starting to wonder if there's some programming quirk I'm missing.

Thanks to the decompilation projects, we do actually know the rates. There's a lot going on (if the game generates a grass Pokémon, it will have a lowered chance of generating a second one, for example), but from what I can tell, it does boil down to:

1-of-10 cards in a pack is rare (3-of-10 for uncommon), and the chances is 1-of-how many rare cards is in said pack.

 

[ASMRxism]

Thanks to the decompilation projects, we do actually know the rates. There's a lot going on (if the game generates a grass Pokémon, it will have a lowered chance of generating a second one, for example), but from what I can tell, it does boil down to:

1-of-10 cards in a pack is rare (3-of-10 for uncommon), and the chances is 1-of-how many rare cards is in said pack.

Interesting to know that there's decompilation projects. I knew the rates of rarities per pack, but is there anything besides true randomness that determines what rare you get? Still insane to me that I could have such difficulty getting some rares and a never ending supply of others from the same duel.

Incidentally, my save file got deleted when I dropped my game boy, and on the new one I've gotten my full collection of Haunters and Gengars.