Don't Miss Dragonite for Pokemon Diamond and Pearl

Dragonite is a unique, and strong, level 50 dragon pokemon. You can get yours at Toys R Us on November 8th and 9th. Don't miss out!

Get Deoxsys for Pokemon Diamond and Pearl June 27-29 at Gamestop

We missed going to Gamestop this weekend to get our Deoxsys for Diamond and Pearl on our DS's. Fortunately, they're doing a second weekend event June 27-29. Gotta catch 'em all!

We Missed the Toys R Us Download!

Darn it! I didn't get this info until 8 o'clock this evening. So I missed the download from Toys R Us. If any of you are up on these kinds of things, email me (or leave a comment) when something like this is coming up. Please!

I play Pokemon DS Pearl. Hubby plays Diamond. Kids play red (old skool), and leaf green.

I've only earned 2 badges so far. Hey, that's not bad for someone who only plays a few hours a week!

Mysterious Treasures

The new expansion for Pokemon TCG Diamond/Pearl, Mysterious Treasures, is coming out on August 22nd.

Various stores around the US, Canada and Mexico are holding pre-release tournies. Here's one in Rancho Cucamonga, California. And here's one in Littleton, Colorado.

Here's a searchable database for tournaments. Are there any tournies near you? You gonna go?

More About the Pokemon Learning League

We started with the card game. Then, hubby bought the Pokemon DS Diamond. Then, we found a waaaaay old Gameboy-Color Pokemon Red that the kids have been playing. Now, since we seem to be much more invested in the whole Pokemon brand, I'm reconsidering the Pokemon Learning League. Here's a review.

Have any of you used it? What do you think?

New Cards Today

We bought six booster packs for Diamond and Pearl today. We got Shiftry, Azumarill and a few other evolved critters.

We took all of our decks apart. The most promising deck builds, with what we have, are psychic and fighting/metal. We wanted to make a lightening deck. But Diamond/Pearl doesn't have enough lightening to do that.

We learned a thing or two about putting decks together. Now that we have more trainer cards and more evolved pokemon, we have some flexibility to put together some faster, more streamlined decks. And, enough cards to make some fun, all-low level decks, since we have so many basics.

Basic Rules of Pokémon TCG

Over the course of the many expansions, the rules for Pokemon TCG have changed here and there. But for our household, we have only known one set of rules: Diamond and Pearl.

Since the rules have changed over time, finding the most up to date rules on the internet is hard to do. The rules that come with the game in the starter pack aren't complete. But they are a pretty good overview.

Pokecorner has the best rule set that I can find online. Although, I did notice some discrepencies.

For example, in the pokecorner's rule set, it has an opponent drawing "up to two cards" when the other person doesn't have any basic pokemon on the first draw. In the current rule set, if a person does not have any basic pokemon in their first draw of 7 cards, they discard the cards, and then their opponent picks 1 card, not two.

This website explains what's new in the Diamond and Pearl rule set.

At some point, I'll write out a complete rule set that incorporates everything I know about it, in easy to digest bits for people like me who need it all spelled out clearly.

Unless, you know of a better place to get a good rule explanation which includes the new Diamond rules?

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

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?