Pokemon Constructed: Why 60 Cards?

The Pokémon Trading Card Game has always had a strict requirement that tournament-legal decks must follow— every deck must contain exactly 60 cards, no more, no less. What would happen if this restriction were removed, would players add more cards to their deck, remove cards? This article will attempt to answer that question as well as give insight to how you might be able to improve some of your decks in the Standard format.

Let's start with a lengthy hypothetical (bear with me, there's a point). There's a brand new TCG releasing. There are no restrictions on how many cards can be in a deck, even one singular card counts as a deck. It's up to the player's to decide how many cards they wish to include. After a while of observing players build decks and compete, the game designers see that the vast majority of competitive decks contain somewhere between 33 and 37 cards. Too few cards and there isn't enough room for a coherent strategy, consistency cards, and cards to counter opponent's strategies. Too many cards and the deck becomes unfocused and inconsistent.

Some time later, while most decks are still built with 33 to 37 cards, players have figured out a few game-breaking strategies with newly-released cards that abuse the lack of a card minimum or maximum on decks. Players have found a deck containing only 10 cards that forms a nearly unbeatable combo because they're guaranteed to draw all of them. Other players have abused a group of new consistency cards which have allowed them to jam two complementary archetypes into one massive 70-card deck. Both decks are beginning to take over tournaments as they're far more powerful than the previously popular decks.

To combat this issue, the game designers finally decide to impose a restriction on the number of cards per deck. They decide to limit players to exactly 35 cards per deck, fitting neatly in the middle of the 33 and 37 cards that most competitive decks contain. Some decks have to add a couple filler cards to round out the last couple spots, making them slightly less consistent. Some decks have to make a couple cuts, making their strategies a bit weaker. In the end, most players are satisfied with the resulting competitive environment.

Eventually, the development team decide to create a new way to play their game with a new set of rules. In their testing, they discover that 35 cards is a bit too few to support this new game-mode. The team believes 45 cards is a good cards-per-deck restriction, but decide to host a tournament to gather data in order to make the final decision. Still wishing to avoid combination archetypes like they had seen before but wanting to be sure players would settle around 45 cards and not go over, they decide to impose a temporary maximum limit of 50 cards per deck.

The results of the tournament surprised them. While the developers expected most decks to play somewhere between 43 and 47 cards per deck (similar range found in the game's original format but centered around 10 cards more), the team observed almost every player playing the maximum amount of cards possible: 50. The team had underestimated the amount of cards players would want to include in their decks. A second tournament was held to confirm their suspicion, this time with a maximum of 60 cards per deck. The result was that most successful players had constructed their decks with between 53 and 57 cards, so a 55-card restriction was adopted when finalizing the rules of this new game-mode.

Have the Pokémon card game's designers overestimated or underestimated the optimal number of cards to include in an average deck? It's highly improbable they hit right on the mark at exactly 60 cards per deck, and certainly this number has changed over the course of the game's varied formats. While we can never pinpoint exactly what it would be for any deck since we've been forced to play 60 cards for the entire history of the game, we can, however, find evidence for whether or not this number was or is an underestimate or overestimate.

Judge Whistle, an Item card released in 2019's Team Up, is a particularly useful card when looking for evidence. The card gives players a choice to either retrieve a "Judge" Supporter card from their discard pile, or draw a card. Interestingly, due to the introduction of the letter regulation mark system in Japan during Sun & Moon, but not until Sword & Shield under TPCi, this card existed in a Standard format without Judge outside of Japan. Without Judge in the format, the card effectively read simply, "draw a card."

Playing a 60-card deck with four Judge Whistle is a very good approximation of playing a 56-card deck (as long as you aren't being prevented from playing Item cards). If Judge Whistle is always played whenever it's drawn, there are only a few minor differences from playing a true 56-card deck. With a 56-card deck, the probability of prizing any 1-of (excluding basic Pokémon) increases from 10.17% to 10.91%. This 0.74% difference wouldn't occur because Judge Whistle itself can be prized. Additionally, the probability for mulliganing decreases with fewer cards in a deck. With 10 basic Pokémon, the probability of mulliganing decreases by 2.82% from 25.18% to 22.36% when going from a 60-card deck to a 56-card deck. One last fringe scenario would be that if Judge Whistle were the only cards left in the deck, deck-out would be prevented at the start of the next turn when it otherwise wouldn't.

Outside of those minor differences, a few of which are arguably positive, including four Judge Whistle is exactly like playing 56 cards instead of 60, assuming Judge Whistle is played whenever it's drawn. But we shouldn't make that assumption, there are plenty of scenarios where it's beneficial to keep a Judge Whistle in hand instead of using it to draw an extra card. For example, Judge Whistle itself could be used to pay the discard cost of a card like Ultra Ball. Or using it could be preceded by playing other search cards in order to maximize the probability of drawing the cards that weren't searched for off of the Judge Whistle. This large increase in flexibility makes Judge Whistle convincingly worth the minor tradeoff of a slightly increased probability of mulliganing in most decks.

Now that we've established that playing four Judge Whistle is almost exactly like playing 56 cards with added flexibility, we can look at formats in which Judge Whistle was legal for concrete evidence of decks wishing to play less than 60 cards. If the vast majority of decks played 4 Judge Whistle, we could conclude that 60 cards is an overestimation of what most archetypes want— they'd be better off with fewer cards. If we observed around half of the decks playing some number of copies of Judge Whistle, we could conclude 60 cards was right around the number of cards the average archetype would wish to play— about half would play more cards if they could, and about half would play less. If we observed the vast majority of decks not playing any Judge Whistle at all, we could conclude that 60 cards is an underestimation of what most archetypes want— they'd be better off with more cards. What do we observe? Very few decks ever played Judge Whistle, even while Judge was legal, giving Judge Whistle an additional use.

Of course, there are a few examples of players who included Judge Whistles in their decks last year, such as Sander Wojcik in his Turbo Malamar VMAX deck, and players like Azul Garcia Griego experimented with Judge Whistles in their Arceus Dialga & Palkia/Zacian decks. But these are only a few exceptions in the thousands of lists from top players which included zero Judge Whistle. We can therefore conclude that 60 cards is an underestimation of what most archetypes want in recent formats.

If all of the previous evidence hasn't convinced you, let's take a look at a couple quotes from top players recently. In one of her articles on Mew VMAX in Astral Radiance, Natalie Miller discusses the inclusion of Gusty Pickaxe as a card functionally similar to Judge Whistle:

"A card which just cycles itself isn’t worth it in Pokemon, and never has been. In Team Up, we saw the printing of Judge Whistle, a card which essentially just cycled itself. Judge Whistle saw almost no competitive play, and I don’t think Gutsy Pickaxe will either."

Azul Garcia Griego, previously mentioned for experimenting with Judge Whistles in one of his Arceus Dialga & Palkia/Zacian decklists, shared a similar sentiment when someone in his Twitch chat suggested that a 56-card deck would be better than a 60-card deck:

"That doesn't quite apply to Pokémon, though. Maybe to other card games, I don't know. But in other card games it doesn't quite work that way either, I don't think all the time... It's only if those 56 cards are enough to have enough options to win games basically... You could play 56 cards and put four Trekking Shoes in, or you could make those four Trekking Shoes four draw Supporters [instead] and now you more consistently see a draw Supporter every turn. And then get like a fresh hand of cards more consistently to play the game. With all the search cards you're always finding what you want anyway."

Lastly, here are the thoughts of the three-time World Champion Jason Klaczynski. I asked him if decks would play more than 60 cards if they could, and he responded:

"In the Wizards [of the Cost] era, 100%. In other eras, probably. I mean, in Wizards, any deck that didn't have four Bills just adds Bills. The more unrestricted the draw cards, the more likely decks are to go over 60. Like the XY era, with Shaymin-EX, that might go over 60 too? But that's more complex, in my opinion."

In the earliest formats of the Pokémon TCG, before Supporter cards even existed, all Trainer cards were played like Item cards are now— as many as you'd like per turn. Bill was a Trainer card that simply read "Draw 2 cards." Clearly this is significantly better (in most scenarios) than a card like Judge Whistle, and as yet more evidence for decks wishing to play more than 60 cards, not every deck in the era played four Bill. Let's suppose there's a deck with 64 cards that contains four Bill. If we assume Bill is played immediately every time it's drawn, every time that player draws a card, there's a 6.25% chance (4/64) that the player draws a bonus card (Bill is drawn, played, and 2 cards are drawn). That probability decreases every time a Bill is used up, but until all four Bill are gone, whenever that player is told to draw a card, they are effectively drawing 1.0625 cards. Compare that to a 60-card deck with no Bill, and every time a player is told to draw a card it means draw exactly one card. Given that the player has the option to hold the Bill for all the benefits of holding Judge Whistle as described earlier, a 64-card deck with four Bill is almost always better than a 60-card deck with no Bill (as long as there aren't any Trainer-locking effects being applied).

Jason's response postulates a reason Azul briefly hinted at for why decks would wish to play more than 60 cards: unrestricted draw. Access to more options in a game is generally better as long as you don't have trouble finding them. Unlike in other card games, the power of Pokémon's draw cards in many of the game's formats allow players to easily cycle through their entire 60-card deck in only a few turns. As long as the proportion of draw cards is maintained when adding new cards, decks in these formats with high draw power can become much larger without becoming inconsistent and reap the benefits of extra resources— they no longer need to hold back their draw cards over concern of decking out or running out of resources.

As mentioned before, playing a deck larger or smaller than 60 cards would have an influence on the probability of mulliganing given a set number of basic Pokémon, and the probability of prizing any individual card. Playing more than 60 cards decreases the probability of prizing crucial 1-ofs. However, this decrease is slow and has diminishing returns, so it's unlikely that the practice of playing more copies of a card than you need in an effort to ensure you don't prize at least one would change without many more cards. The probability of mulliganing with a set number of basic Pokémon increases with more cards rather steeply, so proportionally adding basic Pokémon to a deck with more cards could be important. This graph shows the probability of mulliganing with a few set numbers of basic Pokémon and the probability of prizing 1-ofs and both copies of a 2-of given any deck size from 0 to 120 cards.

While all of this hypothetical reasoning is entertaining, how can it actually help in practice? By recognizing that many decks would want to play more than 60 cards if they could, when you're building a deck, you can start out by including more than 60 cards and then cutting down to 60 in the future. If you're playing in-person, you can even test games with these >60 card decks without a fear that your testing data is skewed too much. Then, as you play more games, you'll have a better idea of which cards you're using the least and know what to cut from your deck to get it down to 60 cards. Additionally, if you stumble across one of the rare examples of a deck that you believe would prefer to play under 60 cards, you can try playing that deck with less than 60 cards, adding cards you realize you need, and then fill up the last slots with cards like Judge Whistle, Trekking Shoes, or Gusty Pickaxe.