ThePokemon TCGmight feature some incredible cards that are easy on the eyes, but the complex ruleset wasn’t easy on our five-year-old brains. Instead of struggling to read through the complex rule book until we understood the ins and outs of the Pokemon TCG, we just made up our own streamlined rules that made playing games way faster and more approachable.
If you were a genius child who played by every rule and mastered nuanced strategies, then you’re probably an exception, as most of us struggled to make sense of the rules. What’s worse is that the late 90s and early 2000s were ripe with plenty of TCGs, including Yu-Gi-Oh! to influence our ideas for made-up Pokemon TCG rules.
8Attacking Without Energy Cards Attached
Unstoppable Offense
This was easily one of the most egregiously game-breaking choices we made as kids, but when everyone has broken cards, is anything broken? The answer is technically no, but as long as your deck has similar cards to your opponents.
Certain powerful attacks are rightfully intended to be more difficult to use than weaker attacks, and this is a perfectly logical rule, but when you’re dealing with kid logic, all bets are off. Did we want to sit there passing turns until ourArticuno had enough Water energyto attack? Not really, so we didn’t.
7Play Any Card Without Evolving
Charizard Time? Charizard Time.
This rule was the best for stacking our decks with tons of strong Pokemon, so we didn’t have to waste space dealing with those pesky pre-evolutions. It just makes sense, coming from a Pokemon video game perspective, that you’d only want to keep the strongest version of a Pokemon on your battle team.
Would you bring a Charmander and a Charmeleon in your party of six Pokemon just to use your Charizard? Absolutely not, so we thought the same should apply to the Pokemon TCG. It was a pretty fun change, honestly, and while it would completely change deckbuilding, this is probably the one rule that could’ve worked in the real game.
6Forget About Weaknesses & Resistances
Too Many Mathematical Functions, Not Enough Pokemon
Choosing to ignore those little ‘weaknesses’ and ‘resistances’ indicators on the bottom of the card probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do; sitting there watching Venusaur easily compete with Charizard just felt wrong. But with multiplicative and additive modifiers to consider, we decided to just scrap the rule entirely.
In hindsight, it’s not the brightest idea, but it had the unintentionally positive effect of making all decks viable regardless of matchup, since all Pokemon were on an even footing when it came to typing. While we were busy breaking the game, this idea helped to keep things strangely fair.
5Ignore Prize Cards, Embrace Vibes
Why Lose Six Cards?
To this day, the idea of randomly removing six cards from your deck to use as Prize cards feels infuriating, as luck could theoretically ruin your strategy if six key cards were chosen at random. In a game already mired in layers upon layers of luck and coin flips, we ignored any semblance of a competitive format.
Despite the similar name, Prize cards are different thanPrize Pack Series cards, which is a valuable subset.
In truth, it feels like this rule makes luck more important than skill, so we just ignored it and decided that whoever defeated six Pokemon first, or cleared the field first, would be the winner. If there were one change we could introduce into the real game, this rule would have the best genuine rationale behind it.
4Free Switching
Choosing to ignore the retreat cost each Pokemon had wasn’t even something we consciously decided; it just came along with the removal of energy cards from our custom ruleset. It’s hard to justify this one as logical since it was more of a side effect of another choice than anything, but we did balance things out a bit.
On the occasions when we cared about having an Active Pokemon and a set of Bench Pokemon, we decided one switch per turn would be fair, though sometimes we haggled to bring it up to two when it suited our cause. Typical rulemaking as a child.
3The Yu-Gi-Oh! Monster Field Meets Pokemon
When having an Active Slot and Bench slots sounded way too annoying, there was a fun alternative: adopt the Yu-Gi-Oh! (YGO) monster field, which allowed five monsters to appear alongside each other. Playing Yu-Gi-Oh! during this era led to some understandable overlap in our heads between the TCGs, so why not combine them?
YGO nailed the epic feeling that comes with assembling a full field of monsters to attack your foes and protect your Life Points, so bringing that over to Pokemon felt like a natural way to mix the two without making the games too confusing to follow.
2Play All The Trainer Cards
Limiting the number of trainer cards you can play each turn is a fair rule, as theoretically, you could get lucky and be able to draw several cards on your first turn if there wasn’t a cap. But back in the day, we were so busy packing our decks with Charizard, Moltres, and Lugia to worry about Trainer cards breaking the game.
Things have changed forTrainer Cards, with beautiful full-art designsmaking these cards much more appealing than they used to be. Maybe we would’ve cared more if they looked as good back then.
1Secondary Effects Always Apply
Even as kids, we hated luck-based mechanics and any element of randomness in a game that we wanted to use as a determination of our skill as trainers.
Yes, changing all the rules to suit our playstyle might not have been a real indicator of how good we were at a game we didn’t truly understand, but allow it.
We had to compromise and flip coins to decide if a Pokemon woke up from Sleep and things like that, but any move that said it had a chance to apply a status effect was essentially treated as a guarantee. Regardless of the card’s directions, we agreed to flip one coin after applying statuses, and that was fair enough for us.
