Pre-Release Tips

With pre-release coming up this weekend, I thought I'd give those first-time players some handy tips to get you through the tournament. Remember this is a sealed tournament, so what you get is entirely random, which may make some of this advice very easy or very hard to follow.

Remember, pre-releases are a way to get the product early, so you can only play in one per day and are not allowed to buy extra packs during or after the event.

How does it work?

You will receive a pack with 22 cards and 4 booster packs to build a deck from. You may only use cards from this pack (plus basic energy cards) to make your deck. These decks must contain 40 cards, not the standard 60.

You will then play against other people who have made decks in the same way. In each game, you will only play with 4 prize cards instead of 6.

In this format, you can run as many copies of a card as you want. So, for example, if you get 6 Snorlax, you can use all 6, in normal games, you’d be limited to 4! This is especially useful if you get a lot of the same trainer.

Tips to building a deck

  • Try to include as many trainers as you can use, these will help you draw more cards faster
  • Try to limit your deck to two types and colourless Pokemon, this will make it easier to get the energies you need.

Generally you want to include:

  • Approx. 14 energy (try to limit it to 2 types)
  • Approx. 8 trainers (you don’t usually get many more than this, but include more if you can)
  • Approx. 18 Pokemon. Try to keep it to a lot of basics, only try to run evolutions if you have around 3 of its previous evolution, this won’t always be possible but it’s a good starting point

Other rules

No trading with other players until after the tournament

In each match, the first player to win 2 games wins

The prize structure differs from store to store. Check with the tournament organiser before the tournament starts. Generally there should be at least 2 boosters added to the prize pool for each player that's playing. How these are distributed differs from tournament to tournament.

Game play