No room for nonconformity?

I was wondering if some of you guys pack a spreadsheet with you or something like that. But I suppose that isn't the case.

What comes to mind are the card articles. Sometimes, they cover cards that might not be considered worth playing in the metagame. And yet, in the sections that list what could go with them, they're pretty much searched dry! It's as if the people who write them and the regular users here have memorized them all and can recall them instantly!

As I've always been a rogue deckbuilder, I also look at sets as they come out and figure out ideas of what to do with them. The thing is that very often, I see a card, and I can vaguely remember some other card that has some other specific effect but can't remember which one it was. But I guess the difference is that I try to memorize every fully-evolved Pokémon whereas there is a filtering system for you. I come up with several ideas, cross-reference it with decks in the metagame at the moment, and eliminate what the two lists have in common so I don't accidentally coincidentally come in with a popular deck. Regigigas Lv. X was actually one of those deck ideas eliminated in this method. (The other rule I have is that I never use the same deck twice per competition, but I know what I've already used before.)

By the way, I'm seeing the same thing happen with Black/White as I saw with Skuntank back in Diamond/Pearl. People understandably mistake Stunfisk for a Water-type, for instance, and refrain from using the likes of Earthquake when I know they have the move.
 
Well, the thing is that there are relatively few cards in each set that are worthwhile to remember– I couldn't remember for the life of me what Swanna BW does, but once Magnezone came out, the competitive players knew its type, HP, Weakness, Resistance, Retreat Cost, Poké Power, and Attack by heart simply because they needed to know how, exactly, it would impact the metagame (in fact, nearly all cards are analyzed to some extent when they first come out; some just end up being more popular than others. For example, sometimes I have trouble remembering what Gengar Prime does exactly– say, its Retreat Cost– even though it was one of the most-hyped cards from its set). Nearly all cards fall fairly neatly into 3 distinct categories, and this is how I tend to keep track of them:

-Unplayable/playable only for its evolution: Remembering these is sort of a waste of time. Anything here is just useless and will always be useless unless you need it to evolve into something else.

-Playable: These cards are simply cut out for the metagame; they have a deck that needs them/is built around them; they're worth remembering because they will likely have some impact on the metagame.

-Potentially playable with support in future sets: These are cards that could in theory be good, but just don't have support. Electrode Prime is a perfect example of this; when it came out, it was fairly awful because it gave up a prize, but now there are a fair amount of decks and even some rogues that are based on using Energymite to get a quick setup. It just needed the powerful basics from the BW/EP sets for it to be good.

That's how I tend to organize the cards, though obviously it's different for everyone. With so few cards in-format, and a small number of usable ones in each set, there are really only so many combinations one can go through. As I mentioned before, once we get more sets, combinations start increasing exponentially, and that's why the MD-on format had so many different viable rogues.
 
All right. I guess this ties back into the central point of this topic: How often is a card dismissed as "unplayable" but turns out to be really useful because everyone overlooked it?

That's the sort of card I like to center my decks around. There are few things I love more than finding potential in something others deem useless.
 
It's not too often that something tossed by the wayside becomes very useful, but it does happen rarely. What's more likely is that a card is simply greatly underestimated - for example, when Uxie LA came out, it wasn't as hyped as some of the other cards in the set, but ended up being one of the most valuable and useful cards in its format (I remember hearing about some people buying 60 or more copies of Uxie at a few dollars when it came out and being able to sell them for three or four times that when its usefulness became evident).

For the most part, cards that are thought to be completely unplayable won't become good to any extent, but there are some examples of cards that go from being league-deck-esque to top-tier. The best one is probably Durant, which was mostly dismissed because it didn't seem (according to theory) as though it would be able to work quickly enough to deck out the opponent before he or she got 6 prizes, but after testing it out in the meta, it's gone up to Tier 1/2. Chandelure was also sort of like this, where it really wasn't talked about very much because it seemed sort of mediocre, but it's doing very well now.

I'd say about one in ten, at the least (though that's just a rough estimate), meta decks weren't thought of when the last key card originally came out (counting where deck ideas evolve a bit in how they're played), meaning there's usually about one or two in any given format. It's not rare, but it's certainly not common either. There are also some decks that see some popularity, but not enough to call them meta, that come from "unplayable" cards, which occurs a lot more often.
 
Wow, thanks for the detailed answer to the question. I was actually totally unaware that Uxie from Legends Awakened (that's the one with Set Up, right?) was simply glanced over; I wonder if that was due to Claydol. I actually managed to get a decent number of them but not Claydol. Sometimes, I got the impression it never happens at all; it sometimes feels like the scrutinizing of each set as it comes out is so perfect that no new decks of comparable potential could be created--either that or it's so rigid that no new decks are attempted. All right, so it does happen from time to time.

I'm full of questions, so I suppose it's worth a follow-up: When a bunch of new cards come out, are there a lot of different types of decks that are made and then tried, then narrowed down to a few decks with lasting power?
 
Wow, thanks for the detailed answer to the question. I was actually totally unaware that Uxie from Legends Awakened (that's the one with Set Up, right?) was simply glanced over; I wonder if that was due to Claydol.
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Yes, that's the one. And Claydol was largely the reason it was overlooked; why have a one-time draw-until-7 when you could have a constantly-recycling draw-until-6? Now of course we know that they do totally different things, but since they were so similar, Uxie was largely shunned. And, on occasion, like Scizorliscious said, some cards seem to have very little potential when they're first released, but seem to increase in use greatly later when other cards come out. One example is Seeker - it made drop powers so much more recyclable. Mesprit (Psychic Bind) increased in usage quite a bit because of that (even though it's regularly used in only Gyarados, Regigigas, or Legos, but it found its way into a few other decks).

I suppose quite a few of us are guilty of making hasty value judgments on things, and as such, certain strategies don't even seem to cross our minds, until someone brings them to our attention. (An example of this is ZPS; no one had even heard of it until it stormed the Nationals of both Mexico AND Canada. Magnezone Prime could be considered another example, actually; it didn't see much use until the MD-on rotation, because at the time, Cosmic Power was still around, leaving Magnetic Draw heavily outclassed.)

Edit: forgot to answer this
I'm full of questions, so I suppose it's worth a follow-up: When a bunch of new cards come out, are there a lot of different types of decks that are made and then tried, then narrowed down to a few decks with lasting power?
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What's usually looked at are each of the final stage evos in the set (or the basics, if that Pokemon does not evolve), and seeing if either A) it can become its own deck with the right support, or B) it goes well with existing decks/cards. An example of A would be Gothitelle EP; an example of B would be Eelektrik NV. (Eelektrik's notable for not being a final evo, yet it has a highly potent ability, which is what drew attention.)
At least, that's how I've thought people view it. I think my explanation may be a bit lacking.
 
Ah...I was wondering why nobody cared much about Seeker. I remember I used to use Mr. Briney's Compassion a bunch and knew it was very handy, both for Poké-Powers that involved playing or evolving a Pokémon and to get oneself out of a tight situation. Did the same happen with Twins? I didn't hear much about Twins, but now it's used a lot. Know anything about that Lunatone-Solrock deck during the 3rd-generation? I didn't encounter it at all until some time after the cards had come out and it went on to win the Seniors division that year (or 2nd place, I don't remember). It was notable for me for containing only 4 Rares in the whole deck and nothing above.

What I mean is if this situation is accurate: A new set comes out. People come up with a bunch of different ideas on decks. Most of these are tried out and tested, and as it goes on, decks get eliminated until a few of them are deemed capable of winning tournaments.
 
Seeker's pretty situational, really. You would use it to pick up a damaged benched Pokemon or recycle a drop power, or in some cases, go for the donk when your opponent has only 1 Benched Pokemon left. (That last option attests to Seeker's potency; it can net you a win condition much faster.)

Twins is used mostly in decks that don't care about the prize exchange very much (like Gengar or Durant), or can set itself up to get behind and come back (like CaKE or Regigigas last year).

I remember hearing about the Lunatone/Solrock thing, yet I think that's more of a testament to how many different kinds of decks were actually feasible back in that metagame. You could make a deck out of almost anything, so I heard, and it would function well. (Seriously, Rai-eggs? It doesn't make any sense, but it worked.)

What I mean is if this situation is accurate: A new set comes out. People come up with a bunch of different ideas on decks. Most of these are tried out and tested, and as it goes on, decks get eliminated until a few of them are deemed capable of winning tournaments.
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That's how it is now, yes. I don't know if that was the case before Platinum came around (Platinum was when I really started to pay attention), but it is now. There's a bit of a power creep going on and it's deciding what is and isn't as playable anymore. Next Destinies just made it worse - the Pokemon-EX mechanic is fine; the Pokemon themselves having ungodly amounts of HP are not.
 
Ah, I remember Rai-eggs.

The very first Pokémon TCG tournament I went to was during the Delta Species days. Every participant had a different deck. I kind of miss seeing that, as deck themes had become increasingly homogenized over the years. And people's attitudes got worse.

And all right. It felt illogical and unintuitive to me to have the idea that the people looking through these sets already figure out exactly what's going to be viable before they even play them.

Hey, while we're on the subject of conformity and nonconformity, I remember in that tournament where I used that Raticate deck--I won the first three rounds and wound up sitting at the low-numbered tables, where there were these...what I presume were top players who regularly make top cut and all. And one thing I noticed was that most of the people at these tables had a very similar way to lay out their stuff. I was the only one in the row of tables to not use a play mat, to use transparent penny sleeves rather than the solid-color sleeves or pre-release sleeves, to have dice in a plastic bag rather than that small plastic box, to have non-cubic dice (I collect bizarre dice, and I'm currently looking for a 7-sided one), to have those plastic coins that come with the decks, to not use an old plastic deck box from earlier Pokémon generations, and to not be chatting with people nearby about how the tournament's been going so far. It was almost as if this was a community of some sort, that they were all friends with each other. Am I correct? And is there a reason why everyone in this row seemed to have the same equipment? When you get to the second row of players, suddenly people are using whatever they feel like bringing (such as no play mat). I felt more comfortable in the lower rows because seeing everyone bring out identical or similar stuff felt unnerving to me.
 
7-sided dice? I'd pay to see that. I'm not even sure how that would be incorporated into 3 dimensions, though...

I've noticed a lot of people who go to tournaments have been doing so for years, and as such, they own a lot of the same stuff. They've been playing together for years and have kept with the series, and as such have all sorts of goodies to show for it. (That's what I assume, though. I was completely absent from PTCG in the Hoenn days, and that was quite a lengthy time period.)

Usually the people who win consistently are also consistent in what kind of goodies they have. You get farther down and the audience becomes a bit more varied, because odds are greater that some of these people are the kind that play for fun and don't care if they win or lose. By contrast, there are the people who aim for the top, and they have some sort of image to project.
(These are just my extrapolations based on what I've seen, though. They may/may not be correct.)

If it means anything, I:

~occasionally use a playmat (I only own two, and one is still in plastic wrap)
~use prerelease sleeves/solid color sleeves (since I'm a cheapskate)
~keep dice in a plastic box (because my die plastic bag got stolen/lost)
~use dice exclusively for randomizing (because coins are rigged, I swear it)
~don't own a deckbox (because I keep all my decks in one of those Spacemakers from the 90s used to store school supplies)
~try to chat with people, provided they're willing to talk (I've noticed they are more willing to talk after round 1, since they have their past rounds to share)
 
Well, the reason I'm looking for a 7-sided die is because I know they exist, but I haven't been able to find one for a decent price. (9-sided dice are incredibly rare, however, so I'm not going for those yet And I'm still looking--I WILL have a 7-sided die the next time I enter a tournament!) I used to get dice from a site called Advancing Hordes, which had a lot of weird dice; now I just collect them whenever I find a good oportunity and a good deal because Advancing Hordes closed down voluntarily. I have a die of each of the platonic solids, as well as a 3-sided one, a 5-sided one (that glows in the dark), a 10-sided one, a 30-sided one, and a Zocchihedron (a 100-sided one). I also have a cubic die inside of a cubic die (handy for stuff like Dual Ball), a non-cubic 6-sided die, an oven-baked clay die (cubic) imported from Peru, the Pokémon Rumble Energy dice, and wooden dice. I used to have an oversize icosahedron (solid plastic, so it was like 3 pounds) but it was traded off. (I almost got a cubic die with kanji numbers instead of pips or Arabic numerals, but they were sold out.)

Obviously, those little plastic boxes that I see them fit dice in would not fit these dice.

It seems like those little dice that fit neatly into those little plastic boxes seem to be the only type of dice they trust. It's kind of interesting, really--sometimes, when I play against these people, as soon as they see my bizarre dice, they immediately take out their dice and ask me heads or tails. If they don't trust my nice, how can I be sure I can trust theirs?

I suppose the biggest difference is that, while I had been playing in tournaments for several years too, I have never actually been a part of any real-life Pokémon-based community. I'm sure that people of these communities would recommend certain places to buy certain objects, or they see someone they kow using these objects and look to get one of them for themselves.

And I definitely remember those Spacemakers. They're still around now. Come to think of it, those old deck boxes are what I least commonly see--but I also never seem to see the deck boxes they give out at pre-releases, at least at the uppermost ranks. Why is that? When you get to the upper-middle or middle ranks, they're everywhere.
 
3-sided die? 3-sided die? Is that even possible in 3 dimensions? I know about 4-sided dice, but 3?
It seems like those little dice that fit neatly into those little plastic boxes seem to be the only type of dice they trust. It's kind of interesting, really--sometimes, when I play against these people, as soon as they see my bizarre dice, they immediately take out their dice and ask me heads or tails. If they don't trust my nice, how can I be sure I can trust theirs?
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I believe the reason behind that isn't necessarily that they don't trust your dice - it is that the only dice legally allowed for randomizers have to be cubic, transparent/translucent, 6-sided dice. They also have to be visibly different than dice being used to mark damage counters. (It's part of the Tourney Guidelines.)
 
3-sided die, as far as I know, are sort of a triangular prism with curved or very small bases so that it never lands there. It's not truly a 3-sided shape, but it does the job.

How would one even use an odd-sided die to flip for first turn/other effects? To make it fair, it would have to take more than one flip/roll, at least sometimes.
 
Scizorliscious said:
3-sided die, as far as I know, are sort of a triangular prism with curved or very small bases so that it never lands there. It's not truly a 3-sided shape, but it does the job.
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https://www.google.com/search?q=3+sided+die&hl=en&prmd=imvns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=wcYtT6q_AYjo2AXugpzvDg&sqi=2&ved=0CEEQsAQ&biw=1024&bih=643

Because rolling a 6 side die and saying 1 & 2 equals 1, 3 & 4 equals 2, 5 & 6 equals 3 is too hard.
 
I know the discussion's kind of gone away from rogues and stuff, but here's a video about rogues and stuff by Pooka from TheTopCut. It's not necessarily about making them, but about how they work and the point of creating them.

About there being no room for surprises, you never know. Kyle (Pooka) says many times in the video that everyone thought that everyone had the metagame figured out, yet someone kept managing to come in and take Worlds/Nats by storm. You just need to know your meta, and know what works together. And if you want to win with a rogue, play a rogue that can win. Not a rogue that seems fun. If it's both fun and good, then power to you, and good luck surprising the meta :p
 
Scizorliscious said:
How would one even use an odd-sided die to flip for first turn/other effects? To make it fair, it would have to take more than one flip/roll, at least sometimes.
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DNA said:
I believe the reason behind that isn't necessarily that they don't trust your dice - it is that the only dice legally allowed for randomizers have to be cubic, transparent/translucent, 6-sided dice. They also have to be visibly different than dice being used to mark damage counters. (It's part of the Tourney Guidelines.)
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"DNA" stands for "read my post". :p
 
I don't use any odd-numbered dice to decide heads or tails. That's pretty obvious. (And yes, the 3-sided die is a triangular prism with rounded edges. They also have R, P, and S written on them, which stand for Rock Paper Scissors.)

I do have cubic, transparent, 6-sided dice. I know the rules, so I always carry at least one. What I'm wondering is why all the dice seem to be those roughly 4-millimeter ones that people pack into a small plastic box approximately four dice thick, four dice wide, and umm...five dice tall, I think. There are bigger ones too. The cubic, transparent, 6-sided die I use is a full-size one about 3/4 inches on each side, and resembles an ice cube. Is there some appeal to having dice as small as possible? Or are those just the most easily available dice?

That I find something different from someone else is pretty much an endless source of fun for me--I want to discover something, so that video would be pretty useful. Though sometimes, I do go into a tournament with no intention to win, but just to mess with anyone I'm paired up against. For instance, I once combined Misdreavus (Legend Maker) with Hypno (Delta Species). It didn't really win matches as it works too slow, but it did just outright stopped my opponents from doing anything most of the time.

EDIT: All right, I saw the video. It doesn't seem to be done for people from quite the point of view as myself, but rather, the general message seems to be for competitive players to not discriminate between archetype decks and rogue decks, that one isn't necessarily better than another. Thanks for providing a link to the video though. (I think the example above shows that I'm not really in it for the glory, but just to mess with people. I cannot stand when something is too rigidly organized, with little malleability. I feel like I want to break it down. I don't mean like a bomb-throwing anarchist, of course; I just want to loosen things up. This is possibly why I want to be in charge of design for a fighting game sometime--so that I can break down a rigid metagame as often as I want.)
 
It's 3 wide, 3 thick, and 4 tall usually, for a total of 36. They're most commonly used because they're the most easily available.

For instance, I once combined Misdreavus (Legend Maker) with Hypno (Delta Species). It didn't really win matches as it works too slow, but it did just outright stopped my opponents from doing anything most of the time.
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trolltrolltrolltrolltrolltrolltroll
 
I have small hands, so I usually prefer smaller dice. I used to have a whole bunch of smaller dice that I used back when I played a lot of PnP role-playing. Now I stick with the smaller d6 because they're less obtrusive when I use them as damage counters. I have larger official Pokémon dice that I use for rolling heads/tails; they're actually really cute! Once die has a picture of a Pikachu head with evens and a Pikachu tail with odds; the other has a red pokéball on evens and a greyed out pokéball on odds.
 
I see. So it's just that the dice are the most easily available kind. Are they mostly obtained from hobby shops? When I first got dice for the card game, there used to be this mall shop called The Gamekeeper (it's out of business now), which was the most accessible hobby shop for me. They sold dice in each of the platonic solids in a plastic tube. I STILL see those dice when I visit other hobby shops, and I don't see the little dice as much. (And all right, so it's 3x3x4. Got it.)

(And yes, it was totally a troll deck. That's the wild card that I am.)

I've never seen official Pokémon dice. What do they look like, and where did you get them? I must have one!
 
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