mareepasheep

Hello, my name is Kimberly! I'm aspiring to be competitive with the TCG and have always had an affinity for Pokemon. If you want to hear a long-winded story, read on!

A history of my TCG experience: I played Pokemon TCG when it first came out when I was a kid- and was very very terrible at it. Having an older brother and cousin, I just couldn't seem to beat them. (This probably had to do with my lack of strategy and bias towards Wigglytuff...) The same thing happened with Yu-Gi-Oh!, although I was certain I had the heart of the cards... I had pretty much decided trading card games were not for me. Fast-forward to late high school when my friend with a teaching job asked me if I had any old Pokemon cards so she could learn to play with her students and be the "cool" teacher. Little did she know what she had done! ^0^" I went and unearthed all our old cards and made a deck to teach her. I swear this is why Pokemon suddenly became popular in my high school. I had started playing with my initial friend, but then I encouraged my boyfriend to build a deck and this spread to basically all of the senior class that were in band class. Yup. The cool kids. After high school I had started going to community college in the area and attempted to create a league. It was not easy, and although I took the test to become a Pokemon Professor and failed (was a few points away if I remember correctly) I had managed to scrounge up a weekly PokeGroup that met at a trading card shop in our local mall and went for Steak-N-Shake afterwards. Good times. Eventually we moved the group to a local library due to conflicts with the Magic group and the environment not being as kid friendly as a Pokemon gathering should be. (We had attracted the attention of several younger members at this point and I was determined to make them feel included. Also, the trading card shop was denied permission to be a league ... ) Near the end of our adventures we went to pre-releases and competed in a few tournaments despite having to drive long distances. Shortly after that, I transferred to a university. Without me to organize and encourage the group, it fell apart. And that was the end of that.

...Or so I thought! I have moved across the country and took all my Pokemon cards with me, untouched for over 4 years. I've spent the last month sorting through and organizing all of them, something I've wanted to do for a very long time. I thought I might sell them, and that's still an option. But, after I painstakingly organized each and every card I own, I realized I might still want to play the TCG, if not at the very least collect more. I have a few sets that are almost complete, after all. Also, the only reason I stopped playing was because I lost the community I had built. I did not lose interest.

So, I entered into an Expanded format tournament on Sunday with only a vague idea of the meta and a very limited card pool.