The Most Common Mistakes in Competitive Pokemon and How to Avoid Them

Strap in, folks — it’s time for some tough love from yours truly. After seeing Charlie Lockyer’s recent article, I was inspired to put together something a little different for this one. You’re used to the usual deck profile, and trust me, we’ll get some more of those soon enough. With this Paradox Rift format dragging on for what seems like an eternity, it has left me lots of time to think about why my results have been lackluster this season. I love blaming bad luck whenever I get the chance, and I’m not the only one. This game undeniably has a ridiculous amount of variance. However, it has a similarly insanely high skill ceiling. In other words, there are a lot of factors that go into a game of Pokemon, and there are many things that don’t even cross the average player’s mind. There’s always more to learn.

There are several different directions I could go from here, but for today, I’ll discuss the most common mistakes that Pokemon players make. These go for pretty much every level of player, and some may seem more obvious than others. If you ask me, the best way to improve is to learn and incorporate a little bit of information at a time. Absorb. Marinate. Apply. Rinse. Repeat. This slow-and-steady approach is not flashy and takes time, but as long as you are playing the game and learning things, it’s pretty hard to get worse. I’ve noticed a lot of common mistakes lately. Some of these are especially relevant to the current format, but others are timeless.

Problem: Not Playing Around What Your Opponent Has

This point is particularly relevant in the current age, with so much information. We can easily view card and deck data online. For every major tournament in the past three months, Charizard ex has been the number-one most popular deck. If you’re playing a deck with a bad Charizard matchup, you have no excuse to not know the risk you’re taking, and you had better have a good reason for doing so. Mew VMAX players, for example, have the justification that their deck is stupidly broken, crushes most random decks, and has good matchups outside of Charizard. (This is less true with the recent rise of Roaring Moon ex, but you get the point.)

We can take this a step further and observe that Giratina VSTAR, one of the other most popular decks, has been playing zero Iono lately. That means your hand is safe until you go down to three Prize cards, at which point you know you’re walking into a Roxanne. This allows you to safely hold and build combos to continue applying pressure and responding to what they’re doing. Some decks can play around Roxanne better than others, but at the very least, you have the agency. You choose when you’re activating Roxanne, so you should have a solid plan to close out the game. Hopefully you’re going down to two Prize cards and you just need one last KO. You should have your deck sufficiently thinned, or else have the necessary pieces already built on your board. We also know that Giratina is likely to play two Roxanne. If both copies are discarded or in the Lost Zone, you don’t have to play around it like you otherwise would.

Let’s not forget similarly disruptive cards like Path to the Peak and Lost Vacuum. I could rattle off the counts of all of these cards for each of the meta decks off the top of my head. Because I am a nerd. And if you want to be good at the game, you have to be a nerd, too. Any Charizard or Mew player will tell you that you have to play very differently against decks with no Path to the Peak than against decks with four of them.

More broadly relevant, any deck with a Pokemon Tool card should know which decks play Lost Vacuum. Being able to play a Forest Seal Stone on the board without fear of it being hit by Lost Vacuum is huge. This can protect you from hand disruption, for example. One of my favorite plays is leaving an unused Seal Stone on the Bench when you know that Giratina is going to Roxanne-Path you.

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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