Beginner’s Guide to Pokemon TCG

Written by Ross Gilbert, PTCG Radio

Basic Pokemon TCG Rules

Unsurprisingly for a game based on the Pokémon brand, the Pokémon TCG is quite a simple game at its core. Of course, when you really dig into the game and get to the top tables at these gigantic tournaments it can get very involved, but the basics are very easy to pick up.

All Pokémon start as basic Pokémon and these are the cards you play onto the board. Some Pokémon can evolve into Stage 1 Pokémon by playing the appropriate Stage 1 onto the corresponding Basic Pokémon (Raichu onto Pikachu for example) and some can even evolve into Stage 2 Pokémon (like Charmander onto Charmeleon and then Charizard). Not all Pokémon have known evolutions (as of now) and decks are often made of a mixture of smaller basic Pokémon and bigger evolutions to come and sweep up. It’s not always that simple but it’s a good place to start thinking.

Once you have your Pokémon you will need to attach energy cards. You can attach one energy card per turn (although, of course, there are mechanics allowing you to attach extra in certain circumstances) and once you have enough energy of the right type (colorless energy can be satisfied with any type of energy) you can use the attacks printed on the Pokémon cards to deal damage. When you deal damage, you lower the hit points of the defending Pokémon and when their HP reaches 0 you take a prize card. You win the game by knocking out all of your opponent’s Pokémon or taking 6 prize cards.

There are also various categories of Trainer cards which can help you or hinder your opponent, by allowing you to attach extra energy, remove energy from your opponent or allow you to switch your active Pokémon (the one with which you’re allowed to attack).

New Pokemon Sets

Like a lot of Trading Card Games, Pokémon releases 4 sets a year. Traditionally these arrive in February, May, August and November but this is more of a general guide than a hard and fast rule. These sets tend to be fairly large and should, in theory, shake up the metagame (the decks people are playing in tournaments) to keep the game nice and fresh. In practice, some sets are huge and change everything and other sets have minimal impact, though still provide new gameplay options and a lot of fun new cards for collectors.

In addition to these 4 “main” sets, there are also 1-2 special sets released every year. These are released outside of the general 3-month cadence and tend to be smaller sets, often with a collector focus and usually with less of an impact on the metagame (though some can absolutely change things up). Shrouded Fable and Paldean Fates are the two most recent of these at the time of writing. Paldean Fates was largely a reprint set with a LOT of shiny Pokémon to be collected whereas Shrouded Fable had no such collector gimmick and was very much a regular set, though smaller. It actually became legal on Day 1 of the World Championships and did feature some very nice meta-changing cards.

I also need to mention that various other promotional cards are released throughout the year. Some of these are released in products and others can be given out for everything from buying some cards on the Pokémon Center online to visiting the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (yes, really). These are often for collectors and not very playable but there are always exceptions...

Play Pokemon TCG

The Pokémon Trading Card Game has a very robust organised play program that is very easy to get started with but can take you all the way to the World Championships which this year was in Honolulu, Hawaii!

Your first port of call should be your local games store. Most game stores in the UK should either run Pokémon nights or be able to direct you to somewhere that does. Here, you can attend Pokémon league nights where you can begin your journey and maybe earn some fun promo cards, while making friends of course!

After this there should, fairly regularly, be League Challenges and League Cups which are your entry-level competitive tournaments. These can earn a small amount of Championship Points (the currency by which you qualify for the World Championships) as well as better prizes. Next up we have Regional championships, held in cities around the world. In Europe last year there were 9 of these in cities such as Liverpool (sorry, only one in the UK!) Dortmund and Lille. These are large, competitive events that in Europe can attract as many as 2,000 players (or more!) and which award $10,000 to the winner. It must be noted that in Europe some of these events are actually Special Events, rather than Regional Championships. The big difference here is that Special Events do not award prize money, though they do award the same number of championships points, as well as an automatic World Championships invite to the winner.

International Championships happen three times a year in Europe, North American and Latin America and shine as the biggest and most competitive open tournaments of the year with a $25,000 prize for the winner. Top 4 at these events will receive an invitation to the World Championships but competition is as fierce as it gets.

In August every year all the qualified players head to a rather lovely location to compete for the title of World Champion. The last 3 years were held in (as far as I’m concerned) the best locations yet as we travelled to London for the first Worlds outside of North America and followed it up with trips to Yokohama (Japan) and Honolulu (Hawaii, USA). In 2025 it will be held in Anaheim (California, USA) but the invite structure has changed so that only the top 125 players in Europe and the USA (as well as 100 from LATAM, 20 from Oceania and 10 from Middle East and Africa) will be invited. Competition for those places will be fierce. Will you be joining them?

Interested in more Pokemon? Check out our recommended articles:

- Selling Pokemon Cards at Auction? We talk to Goldin's Expert.

- The rarest and most expensive cards in Pokemon? We've got the list. 

- Did Pokemon make our list of the best trading card games you can get right now?