Hello readers and welcome to my first official blog post. As you will come to know I am in fact a huge nerd. I play video games, card games, board games and generally tend to put on Lord of the Rings or Star Wars to fall asleep to. I spent a year in Japan and watch anime when I can and wear my Doctor Who shirt proudly when I go out in public.
Now if I look at the way spend my time in any one week I spend a ridiculous amount of my time on Magic: The Gathering. I’m constantly coming up with new deck ideas, or thinking about sideboard options, or wondering if I would have blocked the wolf token. Now recently friends of mine have started to play quite a bit of a grade school favorite of mine the Pokemon card game. Now the only handhelds I have missed playing was the Hoenn region games, not due to interest but more of a lack of a gba. So I when I saw the enthusiasm of my friends I couldn’t help being caught up in it.
Luckily for me there was also the Pokemon Northwest Regionals around the corner. And while I didn’t have a deck ready, and had no idea about the general metagame of Pokemon, my friends invited me to come along as I had the most big tournament experience out of any of them. (Seeing as my grand achievement so far is missing out on day 2 of a Grand Prix by a tie its not really that much experience but it was more than they had.) And what can I say I love big tournaments. So even though I figured I would just be a glorified gofer I was pretty excited to go.
Now problem wasn’t the professors wearing labcoats , that was pretty awesome and if I was one I’d damn well wear it around, or the no photography sign, let’s face it there are some sick fucks out there, it was with the fact that the second I tried to watch me a Pokemon card game I was told, by a guy who looked like I just shit on his lawn, that if I was finished with my match I would have to leave the area.
Obviously I hadn’t played any matches and told him so. He told me there were no spectators allowed for the games. Now this is where I have a problem. Mainly, I think because I don’t understand why. Pokemon has some of the least flexibility of game play after deck construction I have ever seen, one of the reasons it is so good for the kids. There are no interactions on your opponents turn, there is no sideboard, and if I started baseball signing to let someone know what was in their opponent’s hand I think a few people might notice. You can’t even willfully mulligan for God’s sake.
Now I have been to Grand Prix’s in Magic and even at the level I have never been told I can’t observe a game. Magic players, in general, enjoy watching each others games. I have learned as much from watching others play magic as I have from playing myself. I am inspired from watching other players and seeing other decks. Some of the best decks I have built have been based off of decks I have seen at these tournaments. The fact that Pokemon would deny that to their player base tells me that they couldn’t care less about the player’s growth and creativity as competitive players. Along with the rule on changes that make competitive Pokemon more friendly to stalling out, it really seems to me that Pokemon TCG is staring to turn shitty. I’m not sure if the player base is to blame that these did decisions had to be made by Pokemon, I did notice that the Pokemon players did tend to act more like douchy Yu-Gi-Oh players, or if the Pokemon organization acted on their own whims, but either way the future looks bleak for competitive Pokemon players if this trend continues.
Everything & Nothing 