Pokémon TCG: Sword and Shield—Brilliant Stars

Do you recall your very first experiance with the Pokemon-TCG

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Let's see...I was still in grade school back then, lol.

Anyways, I'd always liked the video games, and I guess the TCG was just a natural extension of it. I still remember being so happy that I'd gotten a holo Venusaur way back when, about the only rare card I had for a while as well.
 
My first encounter with Pokémon cards came when I was 11 and in seventh grade. A boy in my maths class needed help with his homework, and in return for me showing him how to do some questions he gave me some commons. :) Over the years my dad bought me a couple of boosters, but they were a once-a-year kind of thing.

When I was 12 or 13 I missed the Royal Melbourne Show, but my friends bought me a Pokémon showbag which had a Gym Heroes booster and theme deck in it. By this time I'd acquired a stack of commons and some uncommons so I built a "deck" from them and forced my brother to play with me. He didn't really get the game though, so that kind of failed.

I didn't start playing seriously until much later, when I was 17. I was in #bulbagarden on IRC and Archaic (the webmaster of the site) mentioned something about TCG; I'd had no idea TCG still had organised play, let alone in Australia, but he linked me to the LD's forums and I went along to a prerelease a few months later. Rest is history :)
 
--great topic JandPDS!

My family first learned about Pokemon when our son got off the bus from Kindergarten clutching 2 pokemon cards; one energy and one common card, base set. This was 1998. Pokemon was all the rage then. Packs were hard to find but we managed to find some, our son spending his allowance money. We tried to learn but the game was quite complicated and to a child who couldn't read yet, impossible.
My husband became involved when our son made a trade with the big boy down the street and we soon learned the trade was grossly unfair, so Rich learned the value of the cards from the Beckett guide. He became the man on our street to "approve" trades.
Toys R Us had a league near us and Burger King had pokemon trading nights on Tuesday. My husband would take our son and read a book. Soon he got bored waiting around and learned the game himself. I started going to pre-release games so our son could get more cards. Now it's a great family event for us. Our son was the very last of his peers to get a gameboy as I thought it had no value. He's won many tournaments with that and made many friends. Yep, we're a Pokemon family. :smile:
 
Pokemon was all popular here in Holland at my school and I joined the hype because it was fun altough I didn't play the game until later. I first bought a pack which contained a Dark blastoise and I thougt it was a cool card and after a long time of just collecting cards I got a CD-rom with how to play the game in it. After about 4 or 5 years I finally learned how to play competively and this is the third season I play with reasonable decks.
 
I had read about the Gameboy game before it came out. I was a HUGE fan of Final Fantasy III (US) so I convinced my sister to get Blue the day it came out (her birthday) at Best Buy. Then I got Red for my birthday. I played it for about 24 hours straight. I went to my friend Steve S.'s house to play Pokemon with him and he showed me the TCG game. I was hooked. Kangaskhan and Exeggutor were so cool! I was at Best Buy for something and saw a Theme Deck there (ya, odd.). I got my first Jungle Theme deck. Then I got my friend Steve Z. hooked and we spent the next summer going to the flea market in Hartville buying and trading pokemon cards. My parents didn't want to drive me to a league, because the game was Japanese (dumb, I know.). I kept playing for fun until my 10th grade year when school and girls became too much. Then work.

Anywho, in 2004? I saw the FireRed and LeafGreen were coming out. At Toys 'r us, they had the TCG demo there. I bought a starter deck and brought my old Arcanine Alakazam deck. I won a Theme deck and then went online, saw a contest to win the Deoxys starters, won them. Then I saw about the Unseen Forces PreRelease. I decided that I needed to go. From there on I was hooked. I used to drive to Cleveland to play pokemon, thought that was too far, so I started a league in Akron with John Wetz and Chris Fulop. After John quit pokemon, and Fulop got into large amounts of debt with me, our cafe closed so I moved league to nearby Green. I now run 2 leagues and am a league leader at 2 other ones which I visit regularly. I am a TO, judge and the Great Lakes Regional Champion! I love this game and all of the friends I've made through it.
 
I read about the game in nintendo power when it first came out. They gave out free charmeleon cards. Started collecting after that, started playing around rocket. Won the first tournament I ever entered and was hooked from there.
 
This is such a cool thread! Thank you for asking that question.

Yeah with us, Josh and I started collecting just as Jungle came out. We used to go over to our local flea market and hang out with a few of the locals there and talk about collecting the cool cards. I never got the chance to collect anything like this when i was a kid, due to my poor parents being on old age pension since as far back as I can remember. So I vowed I'd do something like this with my son and daughter so we could get some bonding type atmosphere going. Eventually within a few weeks, we started to wonder what the different markings, and attacks on the cards were all about, and we were told that there was a game that you could play with them. So Josh and I were invited to a guy's house for a game - since we had to drop him off anyway. We were shown a Raindance deck. At that point - which was about the time the Gym Heroes came out - we were more or less hooked. We found out there was a store that had a special day to sell pokemon cards (funny how that turned out being a league day). They gave us so many promo cards that we were wondering what was going on! Yeah, those were the days. Years have passed, both Josh and I became professors, then Master professors, then league leaders of our own, I've even became the Nationals head judge 3 years in a row. But it all started because of a silly stack of cardboard - with a whole lot of fun inside.
 
I, unfortunately, went into the yugioh hype a few years ago. i went to a regionals and got crushed, and then i realized how ridiculous this game is. 30-40 year olds were laughing at me behind my back because i went 0-3. PATHETIC. so i looked for other tcgs and there u go.
 
Oh yeah! My brother had always been really big into card games particularly magic. When the pokemon card game was announced he was very excited because he knew it could introduce me to card games.

When it came out my brother went out and got Overgrowth, and BrushFire (whatever the fire deck from the base set was) and 2 booster packs.

The rest is history.
 
I borrowed the Starter deck from a firend of my and I was hooked. Then I borrowed a couple of decks from another friend, then I got my first packs. The rest, as they say, was history
 
It all started for me like... nine years ago - November 1999.

Pokemon at that time - was a huge craze back then, and it was everywhere. I got into pokemon and loved it since that day -when friends shows off their collection, it wasnt cards back then as it was those tazo stuff you got from hasbro toys - i think it was.

I was only a collector back then, and i was hooked on the cards so yeah... i only dealt with first 4 sets back then. I also collected (and completed) the 51-card collection 3D Stadium Action cards that you collect from the chips. It was good times.

I know about this site when I wanted some cards from the e-reader stuff, so that was 2003. And I didnt get to play competitively until a friend of mine, Archaic told me about leagues etc. Rest is well, history from August 2005 onwards :p
 
I was a fan of the game as soon as it came out. I totally begged on my mom at the mall to buy me the two player starter set. That's it. :p
 
great topic.


I first started out playing red version at 5 years old and it was great. In our neighborhood, Pokeemon was HUGE!!!! We had dolls, games, stamps, watched the episodes, it was great. Until one time....The pokemon TCG came out. When my friend got a ponyta card, we all stared with amazment, and that is my intro to pokemon. But for the longest time i lked the cards shine and collected from 1998-2003. Soon, i drifted from pokemon and it was not really a big deal anymore, until i met John in 2007, this past year, who taught me the TCG (9th in Ohio) and explained it. Now, i have gone to 2 tornamenys, got 2nd place once, have over 1,000 DP cards and am beating John now (9 in OH). I love Pokemon!
 
wow, my first experience... Well considering i loved the show and the gameboy games, When i saw Base Set 1 in the hobby store I went to, I bought it and was instantly hooked. I used to play Magic, and this game was much simpler to learn and play. I then found out about a league that met there every Sunday. I went and every time i played i had a ton of fun. When the Neo block came out, I went into a pOkemon downfall. Everything else took priority in my life. But then at the release of Aquapolis, I bought a box and was amazed at the new cards. I was able to build a better deck than I used too. At that time, I also became a WotC professor. At the end of the WotC era, I was welcomed into the POP Professor Program and still had a blast helping out my league. The league then had to find a new location, and our LL did just that. He then went on a hiatus, and thus asked me to run the league in his absence. about a year after that I then took the reigns of a LL for my current league location and also became a LO. With my PTO, I have been able to judge many events including 1citys, 2 states, 2 regionals, 2 gym challenges, 2 Pre releases, and he also grabbed me for Worlds 07 for the side events. This year I have been given an opportunity to staff at US Nats. So Pokemon for me has been nothing but an upside since the first time i layed my eyes upon Base set 1.

~Duke
 
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