How to play Pokémon

When it comes to Pokémon, you're either intimately familiar with it and have been following the games, anime, movies, trading cards, and everything else, or you're completely confused by the Pokémon craze that's currently sweeping the Internet.

Pokémon is a Japanese anime, manga, video game and many more. Pokémon means “pocket monsters.” If you want to know what a Pokémon is, it's a monster that you can train to become stronger for a battle. You can get different types of Pokémon like grass, fire, water, steel, dark, psychic, electric, rock, ground and a few more.

How many cards do you need to play Pokémon TCG?

Each player is dealt a deck of exactly 60 cards, which includes Pokémon, energy, item, and trainer cards.  Aside from energy cards, you can't have more than four cards with the same name in your deck.

How to play the Pokémon Trading Card Game.

The Pokémon TCG's basic flow of play is straightforward to understand, but there are a few things you'll need to learn before your first battle.

How do you start the Pokémon TCG?

To determine who plays first at the start of a game, players can flip a coin. The decks are then shuffled, players are dealt a seven-card hand, and the top six cards are placed aside as prize cards; you add one to your hand each time you defeat an opponent's Pokémon, and you win if you collect all six before your opponent.

Both players can use one basic Pokémon card as their active Pokémon and up to five additional basic Pokémon on their bench. If you don't have any basic Pokémon cards in your hand after drawing your first seven, expose your hand to your opponent and draw seven more. You can do this as many times as you like until you have at least one basic Pokémon, but each time you do, your opponent gets to draw an extra card.

A player can have a total of six Pokémon in play at once, although only one - the active Pokémon - can perform attacks during each turn. The rest remain on your bench - a row of cards behind the active Pokémon where you hold five other Pokémon who wait to battle it out against your opponent, a bit like your party in the Pokémon video games. Both active Pokémon and benched Pokémon can be evolved and have energy attached to them. If your active Pokémon is defeated, you must replace it with one from your bench; if you have no Pokémon on the field at all, you lose.