Explain the Pokemon TCG to a Magic player - Deck Construction questions

[Swimmer♂]

So I used to collect pokemon cards for the first few years they were released. Never played the game, just collected them.

Anyways my boyfriend has been playing for awhile and we've agreed that I'd teach him how to play magic the gathering and he'd teach me pokemon.

We've played a few games, I understands the basics and the rules. I've even constructed 3 of my own decks from my pokemon cards. I have a couple of Gold/Silver era cards but almost all are the Red/Blue era pokemon. But when I look at his cards vs. mine...holy power creep batman! Its insane how much more HP and damage they do now a days lol.

What I'm looking for here:
1) Does the deck construction method I've used for my 3 decks of older cards still work? I based it on a 16 energies, 6 energy search trainers, 4 energy discard pile retrieval, 4 to 8 other random trainer cards and 26 to 30 pokemon in the deck (about 12 to 15 basics with tiered construction. i.e. 1 butterfree for 2 metapods and 3 or 4 caterpies). Is this still appropriate with more modern cards?

2) In magic the gathering there are 5 colors. White, Green, Red, Black, Blue. White has defensive stuff, Green plays big creatures, red does lots of damaging spells, Black has *really* powerful cards that also hurt you, Blue fiddles with the rules of the game (rough summary).
Do the 8 pokemon TCG energy types typically have abilities or attributes that other energies don't have? Like a specific style of play? My bf mentioned that Grass has healing, Water has bulky creatures, and Electric generally requires less energy to attack but I was wondering if there was more to this and if everyone could give me sorta a guideline for the different types.

3) If anyone here has played both...as a blue/black mtg player any suggestions for what energy types to play?

4) Magic the Gathering has "The Gatherer". http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Default.aspx
Does Pokemon have anything like this?

I'm sure I'll have more questions later lol

Thanks for the help =)

-Swimsuit Guy

 

[Blah]

Moving to the proper forum.

I'll try to help:

1) I'm afraid not. Decks nowadays tend to run 8-13 Pokemon (give or take a few), 30+ trainers (including 12-15 supporters), and about 12 energy with the exception of Blastoise. Take a look around online at some current lists to get a feel for what they look like, as they are very different then older lists.

2) Not really. The type of the Pokémon normally determines what energy type it uses (with the exception of Dragon which doesn't have its own energy) and what weaknesses and resistances they have. Other than that, types don't really affect playstyle like they do in Magic.

3) I haven't played very much magic, but based on your descriptions of the colors, doing lots of damage and "manipulating" rules would make Blastoise an obvious choice (you can attach as many energy as you want per turn and you can do 200 damage with ease) . The one downside is that it's extremely expensive due to the need for Tropical Beach in the deck. Rayeels and Darkrai are also extremely offensive and high-damaging decks.

4) Pokebeach's front page has every scan from all Pokémon TCG sets. The only legal sets right now are the ones under "Black & White Sets", meaning the set Black and White to the current set, Plasma Storm. You can also use http://www.bebessearch.com/ to make and print decklists, as well as playtest them online using http://www.playtcg.com/

Hope I helped, and if you have any more questions, feel free to ask.

 

[Riskbreakers]

I play very casual magic and I have to disprove a misconception here.

Pokemon types =/= magic colors.

Unlike MTG colors where they have some theme to them, Pokemon types are only good for their weaknesses and resistances which can affect your choice of deck. Say, if there are more broken Electric type cards in the format, you'd be scared to run water due to weakness.

But seeing as you run blue/black which are usually the control decks, sadly the format right now will not be able to cater to you as all Pokemon decks that are tournament-playable are all glorified Red Decks. Yes, all viable decks right now are beatdown. The only difference is that some beatdown decks (Garbodor, Plasma Klang) can lock something out from your opponent, but the meat of the those decks are still beatdown.

Pokemon format right now = RDW everywhere



Now for deck construction, Pokemon really doesn't penalize players to play broken cards unlike MTG where some broken cards would be around 4 or 5 to cast. This notion should give you the signal that in Pokemon, it is more permissible to run broken Trainer/Supporter cards which are the equivalent to your Sorcery spells (Instant spells are non-existent in Pokemon). Since acceleration and speed is a key in Pokemon as well, Mana and Creature counts are significantly lower because it is Trainer cards that carry the deck to make it fast enough to keep up with the meta. Pokemon also doesn't have that "mana system" where you are only restricted to playing cards that your mana can provide, Pokemon allows you to play every Sorcery you can in a turn as long as you want to (exception is supporter cards)

Basically, the most common decks right now have around

10-17 Pokemon
10-15 Energy
The rest are Trainer and Supporter cards.

Tiered construction for decks was never a good idea, not now, not ever.

 

[Swimmer♂]

Thank you for your help =)