I saw a video yesterday claiming that my old Pokemon cards could be worth serious cash now that Pokemon Go have reinvigorated the franchise. I hope, for my sanity, that the video was blowing the actual figures out of proportion, since I got rid of my cards a while back. That's right--I traded in my nest egg for peanuts, which is why I'm writing this from a one bedroom apartment instead of a yacht somewhere.
To be honest, the scummy side of collectible card games (collecting, hoarding, selling online) never really appealed to me. I consider myself a gaming purist. I like to play the game, learn its systems, crack it open, and figure out what the best possible deck I can construct is. It probably reads as pretentious, but I'm just not a big fan of the parasitic collectors' mentality. It's about the love of the game, maaan.
Pokemon was my first card game. Well, as long we're not counting Go Fish and Bridge. I'm not exactly certain where I got my first deck, but I remember the first place I saw the cards: the school cafeteria.
The lunch table was our weekday battleground. Well before any one of my peers was old enough to really develop taste, fads were all encompassing. Nearly every kid in my junior high school at least brushed up against the Pokemon craze. It became such a menace to the faculty, that the powers that be even had to enact a ban on card games of all types. I remember the message coming across the P.A. system on the morning announcements; I still like to refer to it as "Black Friday".
(Of course when I mention "Black Friday" in a hushed whisper to my friends, they assume I'm talking about shopping, so maybe that day which will live in infamy needs a new moniker . . .)
There are always levels of fandom. For every five kids that bought booster packs and collected the cards, only one of them might actually know the rules to building a deck and playing the actual game. Heck, maybe one in ten even had a rulebook, since they only came with the Starter Set. So naturally a system of backyard rules developed.
In our "backyard rules", energy cards were mostly considered chaff and went unused. Players would drop their Pokemon on the play field willy-nilly, and the same would occur with Trainer cards. Attacks were declared without any thought given to their energy cost. Coin flips were rigged. Resistance to fighting type Pokemon was regularly ignored. Haunter could put your Pokemon to sleep effortlessly, and all you could do was fight back tears as he Dream Eater'd your Charizard three times in a row, uninterrupted.
It was anarchy.
A close friend of mine would later take on the Herculean task of teaching me the proper rules and how to go about building a functioning deck. I was a dense little kid, so I imagine it must've been a great deal frustrating to explain these rather abstract concepts to me. I still remember his game winning Scyther set up using the Double Colorless Energy, a combination that would result in a turn two K.O. of most starter Pokemon. Slowly but surely, gears started turning and the mechanics of the game made sense to me.
Then, of course, Magic: The Gathering happened. I don't want to diminish Pokemon in any way, but I always felt like Magic was Pokemon's more sophisticated older sister. The games were similar enough in their mechanics however, that the more I learned about Magic, the more I understood about Pokemon.
The Pokemon card game's time in my life came and went in about a two or three year window. I most fondly remember the first five sets (Base, Jungle, Fossil, Base 2, and Team Rocket). I vaguely recall getting some of the Gym Challenge preconstructed decks, but I'm not sure I ever used any of them. By then, Magic, D&D, and various and sundry other games were consuming my time and allowance.
The game continues to this day, although it is no longer under the Wizards of the Coast umbrella. Just like the video games and anime upon which the game is based, new generations of Pokemon creatures crop up every couple of years, making the game's tagline, "Gotta catch 'em all" even more of a bad joke as time wears on.
You can never catch them all, young padawan. But you'll learn that in time, just as I did. Thanks for reading as always, and you can drop me a line on Twitter (@ChrisBComics) or via e-mail (backissuechris@gmail.com).
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