New Ways to Play Pokemon TCG

Of our three kids, our 6 year old daughter is the most enthusiastic about playing Pokemon TCG.

She has memorized all the pokemon's names, evolutions, powers, special abilities, hit points, resistances and which set they come from.

Do you have a kid like that? Pretty amazing to witness, isn't it?

She's been playing so much, we're all having a hard time keeping up with her. So she's come up with her own version of Pokemon that she can play by herself.

Based on a mix of pokemon nintendo DS game, and the books (which the kids also love to read), she uses one of her decks (usually water or leaf) to capture as many pokemon as possible before she runs out of cards.

We have a lot of old pokemon cards, and pokemons from the new expanstions that didn't make it into our decks. She puts them in a pile, and with her own rules, battles them with her prefab deck.

I'm helping her play right now as I type this, and so far, she has about 30 pokemon that she defeated. Yesterday, after she had played pretty much everyone in the house at least twice, she played her own solitaire version for almost two hours.

We are really enjoying her enthusiasm for the game.

List of Pokemon Cards

This website lists all the pokemon cards, with a picture of each card. It's organized by the set it came from and/or alphabetical order. There is also a search option.

We've used this site to help us figure out where some of our random cards came from, and whether they are gym/tournament legal for 2007-2008. It took us a while to figure out which cards are legal.

I'll post about that next, because it's a little complicated. Well, for a newbie like me anyway.

The pokégym website is by far one of the best indexes I've seen. In fact, it's the only one I've seen. If you know of another, please let me know.

Why Mantyke?

We chose the name Mantyke for this blog because it's a baby pokémon. And it's cute. And it matches the color scheme of this blog.

Plus, the names of the other baby pokémon that we like; munchlax and mimejr, already had blogs named after them.

We like baby pokémon because they are harder to hit, and have interesting and useful poké-powers. Mantyke can "Call for Friends", which can be really useful if we have an empty bench.

Baby Pokémon have a 50% chance of being missed on an attack. And they have a decent number of hit points considering they are only babies.

From what I understand, baby pokémon are new for the Diamond/Pearl expansion. (Correct me if I'm wrong on this.)

Do you like the babies? Do you use them in your decks?