Pokémon TCG: Sword and Shield—Brilliant Stars

just an observation on old decks

Articjedi

Active Member
I found an old pojo book from around the fossil days after looking around in my room. They had a bunch of old archetype decklists in the back. It didn't take me long to realize how much the game HASN'T changed since the old days especially with the stuff that's popular now. Back then the most popular cards were oak, pluspower, computer search and gust of wind. Now we have uxie, bebe (since the really broken effects are on pokemon not trainers, this serves a similar purpose), luxray sp, and crobat sp which all do something similar. Haymaker is a lot like the sp decks now with the constant gusting and fast cheap attacks that were incredibly efficient. Wigglytuff did damage based on the amount of pokemon you had in play, a paltry 3 for 60, which is tiny now, but now we have jumpluff which does a similar attack for cheaper. Fossil gengar looks a lot like the one we have now, with a curse power and a 3 for 30 and 10 to the bench. Gyarados' first few turns look a lot like the sponge mewtwo deck, which tried to discard two energy off an oak or search then did 40 on turn two. There was even a fossil moltres that discarded from the top of your opponent's deck, not unlike the flygon mill decks we see every once in a while, as well as the return of raindance in the form of feraligatr prime.

We've come a long way from the old days of pokemon, but for some reason this year's format just screams nostalgia for those of us who've been here forever.
 
There are quite a few changes.

One being SPs being dominant against basically any other deck.
Two being Energies. We keep Energies very minimal these days compared to quite a bit before.
Three, which goes with two, is that Energies that require more than 3 are never used.
Four, it's either T1 or T2 set up or don't bother. It can take 7 or more turns to set up your field before.
Five, everything besides your attacker is pretty much a "tech". Before, it was combos and just trying to win with what you have instead of completely setting up to the full extent.

But yeah, it's pretty successful as the gameplay itself had very little change.
 
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