Building a Pokemon Deck: The Basics of Drawing Cards and its Importance

In the Pokemon Trading Card Game, there are three main categories of card types: Pokemon, Trainers, and Energies. Trainers have 3 sub-categories which are Items, Supporters, and Stadiums. Building a deck of 60 cards with a combination of specific Pokemon, Trainer, and Energy cards is the first step on the path to victory! The win-condition of most decks will be to knock out your opponent’s Pokemon and take 6 prize cards, so oftentimes deck building starts out with focusing on one or two Pokemon that have strong attacks. You can build your deck with all of the strongest Pokemon cards you can find, but without a way to access them consistently, you may find yourself attacking with a lone Totodile for 10 damage all day long like I did at my first City Championships in 2006. If only I was drawing extra cards or searching out key parts of my deck each turn, that tournament may have went differently for me.

Draw Engines Explained

There is no hand size limit in the Pokemon card game, and that is great: because the more cards you hold in your hand, the more options you will likely have! Draw engines are the portion of your deck dedicated to drawing cards. Some abilities are usable only once when the pokemon is played, and some you can use once a turn. In the history of the Pokemon TCG, there have been many highly successful Pokemon that had very underwhelming or even downright bad attacks. Why were they so good then? Well, that would likely be due to them having a very good ability that either could draw cards or search for cards. Trainer cards are a bit different as they have no attacks; they are cards that are made to support your game plan in some way. So it’s a bit more obvious when a Trainer card is good for its drawing or searching abilities. In the following sections, I will be covering Pokemon-based draw engines and Trainer-based draw engines, going over how to identify a valuable drawing effect, and which decks are more cohesive with which draw engine.

Pokemon-Based Draw

I will start off with Pokemon that have one-use draw effects. Pokemon that have one-use draw effects will usually have an ability that reads something like “Once during your turn, before your attack, when you play this pokemon from your hand onto your bench, you may draw cards until you have 7 cards in your hand”. This is the text from the extremely popular card Uxie (43) from Legends Awakened. One-use draw effects are normally stronger than once-a-turn effects. But depending on your deck, there is a decision to make: would your deck better benefit from a burst of drawing a larger amount of cards once or from a constant draw that has a more moderate effect?

Decks that are built to be more aggressive better utilize drawing in large bursts of cards because they need a hot start and to see a lot of cards in one turn. An example of this would be deck that is built around Mega Rayquaza-EX (76) ROS. These decks were built to flood the board with as many Pokemon as possible so that Mega Rayquaza would hit for a large amount of damage as early as turn 1. Mega Rayquaza decks often included 4 copies of Shaymin-EX (77) ROS, which allows you to draw until you have 6 cards when you play it down. A strategy of emptying your hand, playing down a shaymin, and repeat until you find all of the cards you need to overwhelm your opponent with early pressure is a very viable strategy with a deck like this.

Pokemon that have once-a-turn draw effects will usually draw you less cards than cards like Uxie and Shaymin-EX, but they have the potential to give you a stable source of extra cards. While burst-effect drawing is easy to make use of in aggressive decks, once-a-turn drawing fits well in decks that need to set up. You will see this type of draw engine often in Stage 2 decks, because the Pokemon need more time and more cards in order to evolve. Gardevoir-GX (93) BUS, which is a strong stage 2 Pokemon, inspired an archetype that won the World Championships in 2017. The standard Pokemon-based draw support for Gardevoir-GX decks is a line of Octillery (33) BKT. Once a turn, Octillery’s ability Abyssal Hand allows you to draw cards until you have 5 cards in your hand. This is great for a deck like Gardevoir because you will often be looking for one piece to the Rare Candy (SUM) / Gardevoir combo, so you can keep your hand and draw extra cards to potentially draw into the other piece you needed. This type of deck also does not need just one turn of set up, you will often be looking for Max Potions, Fairy Energies, and more Gardevoir-GXs over the course of the game. Another Pokemon with this type of draw ability is a classic from the 2008 set Great Encounters, Claydol. Claydol’s ability read “once during your turn you may put up to two cards from your hand to the bottom of your deck, then draw cards until you have six cards in your hand”. Oftentimes you will see a mix of draw support Pokemon, such as 2 Uxie LA and a 2-2 line of Claydol GE.

Trainer-Based Draw

For all intentsive purposes, I am labeling this section as Trainer-Based Draw. Under the umbrella of Trainers are the types of trainers: Items, Supporters, and Stadiums.

Items that allow you to draw cards are usually widely used because you can play as many items a turn as you wish. A Supporter like Hau which allows you to draw 3 cards is rarely used, if ever, due to the rule that you can only play one supporter a turn. There are Supporter cards much stronger than that. But in contrast, an item card that allows you to draw 3 cards would be very good and would likely be in most decks.

Stadium cards do not frequently have card draw effects, but when they do they usually see play. Scorched Earth and Tropical Beach are both stadiums with draw effects that have seen a fair amount of competitive play.

Formats with items that can draw cards usually have faster paced games because decks are able to more consistently and quickly execute their plan and end the game faster. Item based draw usually finds its way into most types of decks when there are strong draw items in the format. Some examples of recent strong draw items are Trainers' Mail and Acro Bike, which have both seen competitive success. There are frequently cards printed to control excessive use of item cards, like Seismitoad EX (20) which has the attack Quaking Punch that says your opponent cannot play item cards next turn and Garbodor (51) GRI which has the attack Trashalanche that deals more damage to your opponent based on the number of items in their discard pile. Cards like these may influence decks to have less items in them and slow down entire formats.

Draw supporters have increased in existence since Black and White. Notable draw supporters include N and Professor Sycamore, which have become staples in most decks in Standard and Expanded format. In earlier formats, Supporters were frequently given searching abilities as opposed to draw abilities, ie: Bebe’s Search, Celio’s Network, Roseanne’s Research, and Cyrus’s Conspiracy. Keep in  mind that because you can only use one supporter a turn, they will generally be more powerful than the average item card. In standard format (BKT-FLI at the time of writing), I believe that we have come to a point where the average count of draw supporters is around 8-10 in most types of decks. Frequently we will see something like 4 Professor Sycamore, 3 N, 3 Cynthia. In expanded, counts are much lower because of VS Seeker, which is an item card that can retrieve 1 Supporter card from the discard pile.

Wrap Up

I hope this article has helped to inform you on the importance of draw support in the Pokemon Trading Card Game and given you options as to the different types that you can utilize in your decks. The more cards you have in your hand, the more options you will have. Give yourself the best chance to win!