I've been playing mtg since dec with my 2 sons. We've gotten fairly competitive locally and play weekly.
My local card shop is showing interest in ptcg and my youngest son wants to start playing because his friends in school play.
So I have a few questions.
1. First is cost. Is it as expensive and MTG? Competitive MTG decks are ~$500. At least they are in the standard format. Other formats are much more expensive.
It's much less than that! Although every deck is different, and some cards do reach that amount if not higher (Tropical Beach comes to mind), you don't always have to use them in your deck. In fact, there are several decks in this format that might cost you about... $80 bucks to build? Naturally, if you wanted something like Virizion / Genesect, well, that would be more expensive considering the price of the cards would reach about... $150 dollars if you bought them all outright? But either way, trading is always an option. But before you do any of that, I recommend you proxy a list before you do anything, and then see how you a). like the playstyle, and b). like how the deck functions with the list you have. I know you are probably no stranger to this idea, given your competitive stance to Magic, but this is advice I like to give to everyone.
2. Where is a good site to see competitive deck list?
You can find several deck archetypes riiiiiight HERE!
3. Are any sealed product worth purchasing as a beginner?
That depends on what you want to build. As always, there are usually playable EXs in tins, and most decks do usually revolve around certain EXs, too. Basically, if you want to build... Say, an Yveltal / Garbodor list, you should buy the tin of the Yveltal EX in stores to fulfill that portion of your deck for cheap, or just buy them online or trade for them for cheaper. Prereleases are also a great way to start yourself off, as you buy cheap packs, build a deck around them and play with the cards you drew. Plus, you'll be using such exotic types of cards that it will teach you the ins-and-outs of playing.
4. What are the competitive sanctioned formats? For example in mtg, we have standard, modern, legacy, etc...
At the moment we have a format of Next Destinies-On, meaning everything in that set and forward is legal, whereas everything behind that set is illegal to play. Unless you live in Japan, who has a much different format than everyone else. All tournaments use that specific format unless specifically stated otherwise to be Unlimited, which uses all cards ever printed, and Extended, which uses slightly older cards, such as Emerging Powers onward.
5. Legality of cards? Rotation?
As I stated prior, the format is Next Destinies-On, or NXD-On, meaning every card printed in that set and newer, all the way to Flashfire. Everything behind Next Destinies is illegal.
6. Anything else you feel would be good information. Thanks
Yveltal / Garbodor is a very popular deck right now, so when deckbuilding, you should probably not make a deck that runs high energy counts without a valid justification, otherwise Yveltal will just one-shot your brains out. Another thing is to look at other deck archetypes and consider your matchups to each of them -- if there is an archetype, you're most likely going to run into them at tournaments, so you're going to want to consider how you will beat that deck before you sit down to play them.
