Starter Deck Ownage

We're totally new to Pokémon but we're not new to Trading Card Games. We both have played Magic: The Gathering and Jyhad. Note however, that this was about 10 years ago and the last time we bought cards was when the Ice Age expansion was release for MTG.

So, going into Pokémon, we knew that there was some work to be done with deck optimization and card selection. We started out with the three starter decks for the Diamond and Pearl set and soon accumulated about 6 booster packs worth of cards. With these extra cards, we balanced out the decks so that the fire deck wouldn't get totally annihilated by the water deck and the leaf deck wouldn't get burned to a crisp by the fire deck.

Enter Father's Day. Early in the morning we all went over to our Game Empire in Pasadena to have the kids play in their tournament. Fun was had, but the kids could only get through about three games before we had to jet for my brother's house for Father's Day festivities.

My nephew has been playing Pokémon for about 8 years and has played in many tournaments and has had literally years to optimize his deck and his tactics. We had our cards with us because we just came over from the game store. It seemed natural to get a couple of games going. Well, the first game that I played ended in total disaster for me. He played a fire deck with a bunch of cards that you can't play in current Tournament play and it was very apparent after a couple of rounds that I was completely outclassed. Tammy played a second game with him where he played a Tournament legal deck with one of our augmented starer decks and was also defeated handily.

This experience has certainly shown us that we can't just go out and play with decks that are generically crafted by Nintendo. That said, what are we to do with our almost factory decks. More boosters from the 2007 Tournament legal sets are certainly in our future. However, I don't think we'll go out and buy specific cards from EBay. I really like the mystery of buying a booster and possibly getting something unexpected that will help out all of our decks that we play in the family as well as at the game store. Also, I would like all the decks we create in the house to be balanced so that everyone has the possibility of winning no matter what deck is chosen. (I know that it will be very challenging to achieve this particular goal.)

Just as a baseline, I'd like to list all the cards that are contained in the default Fire deck. It will be interesting what we do with this deck as it matures over time.

1 x Infernape
2 x Monferno
4 x Chimchar
1 x Medicham
4 x Meditite
2 x Rapidash
4 x Ponyta
2 x Starly
1 x Hippowdon
4 x Hippopotas
1 x Professor Rowan
2 x PlusPower
2 x Poké Ball
2 x Pokédex HANDY910is
2 x Energy Search
2 x Potion
16 x Fire Energy
8 x Fighting Energy