My Strangest Pokemon Game

The strangest pokemon game I ever played was when using my Wildfire
stall deck against a standard Water Blast theme deck.  I won the game
(by decking out my opponent) without ever doing a single bit of
damage to any of his pokemon!!  At game's end, none of his pokemon
had damage counters on them, and no prizes had been taken by either
of us (he had several Potion and Super Potion cards in his hand, but
never used them).  I wasn't trying to avoid damaging his pokemon, it
just happened to work out that way!

He led off with Rhyhorn, and I led off with Moltres.  Since Moltres
was resistant to fighting, Rhyhorn couldn't touch him, and I started
to Wildfire his deck away.  (Rhyhorn could Leer, but that only might
delay the Wildfire attack, while I built up energy on Moltres.)
Rhyhorn has a retreat cost of 3, so it took several rounds for him to
power up Rhyhorn enough to pay the retreat cost, but as soon as he
did I would Gust of Wind the Rhyhorn back up again, and continue
Wildfiring.  He was able to do a little damage to me during those
turns when he retreated the Rhyhorn, but nothing serious and I was
able to keep from having any pokes knocked out by using Pokemon
Center or Scoop Up.  Meanwhile I kept bringing his Rhyhorn back with
Gust of Wind (sometimes digging it out of my discard pile with Item
Finder), and he was forced to waste his energy in retreating it,
since there was only one Switch in his deck.  Once I used Lickitung
to confuse Rhyhorn, which caused more wasted energy in attempting to
retreat.  At another point I had Chansey up, stalling and taking
damage while waiting for another Gust of Wind card, but I scooped it
up before it was knocked out, and then brought back Moltres to face
Rhyhorn again (thanks to Gust of Wind) and continued to Wildfire. 

That was a truly strange game, for him to lose and yet have all his
pokemon totally undamaged.

The lesson learned here:  If your deck has any cards with high
retreat costs, then the deck should also contain a few Scoop Up (or
at least Mr. Fuji) so that, if your opponent starts using one of your
own pokemon for a wall, you can remove that pokemon from the playing
field and put a stop to it.

Bruce Long
bruce@asu.edu