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Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

Pokemon the video game, not the TCG. The video game requires no money aside from the cartridge, and the strategy is surprisingly deep: https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/ss-ou-metagame-discuss...

Magic is the superior TCG in my opinion, thou Pokemon TCG is fun. In any case, don't play the 'pay to win' formats.

Instead, play draft or sealed, which are much more fair.

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Pokémon gameplay can be deep but it’s pretty impenetrable for a kid just playing the game on his own. Most kids will just use the biggest attack moves, and that’s absolutely fine for the difficulty of the single player story made last I checked.

I wouldn’t really want kids getting deep into an online community meta personally.

Even if the kids are just using the highest-attack moves and switching pokemon, that's still a deep game. That's the basics of "Pivoting" and "damage sponging".

Many pokemon have self-recovery moves (slack off, recover, etc. etc.). Even when I was 10, I knew that if my sponge took a hit, and recovered the damage faster than my opponent could deal damage, I'd force them to switch.

Set-up sweepers, hazards, status effects and ability combos get complicated for sure. Taunt vs Substitute, Prankster vs Dark, there's too much to memorize here. But kids don't need to reach that level to still have the importance of bluffing, reading, and predicting.

Seems like a pretty low bar tbh

And if you want to play Showdown, you don't even need to pay for cartridges either. Plus there's no grinding for EVs, IVs, moves, and items.

It can be a good way to spark interest in programming as well! :)

https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/569688211158511616?...

(definitely stealing this technique, we'll see if it pays off in... nine years or so?)

Or use proxies. Cockatrice is a good client for MTG as well, it doesn't enforce the rules but provides everything you need to play online with friends.

Hmm, interesting, I went through the guides and I have no idea what this game is about.

Is it just regular Pokemon game but somehow you play against others online?

Yes

You choose a team of 6 Pokemon out of 898, each Pokemon chooses 4 moved out of thousands. Each Pokemon has 2 or 3 abilities to choose from depending on how you breed them.

Both players take turns simultaneously choosing attacks until they KO all opponent pokemon

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