As I played a match vs. my friend the other day I suddenly realized why I was so bored with the particular match.  Not to sound arrogant or anything but because I have a pretty steady income I have the ability to buy loads of cards whereas he doesn't.  So, I decided that the boerdom was from always winning him.  So I sat and thought and came up with these ideas for making the game interesting.  Here goes...

1.     Make a deck with absoloutly NO Trainer cards.  
   This causes you to HAVE to run many more Pokemon and energy.  I suggest filling in the extra space with multiple Evo. Lines.  It is a fun and challenging twist on things.

2.     If you want you can alter the above challenge by saying only common Trainers.
   It is almost the same thing but now you stand a chance against your opponent.  Try to limit the number of Trainer Cards you include.  This will make sure of fairness.  Say 10-15 Trainers at most.

3.  Use no rares at all.  
  This is a hard one for me to swallow.  I used to build decks with only one rare.  Then I found Pojo.com.:)   Now I find it hard not to include 3 or 4 of everything.  It is hard, when you have hoards of rares and most of them holos, to exclude them from a deck but just try it.  There are other cards out there that are quite good.

4.   This one is from the year 2 badgebook from Pokemon League but I find it a very, shall we say challenging challenge.  Allow your opponent to collect 2 less prizes in order to win.  This means that for the first half of the game you are just playing catch up.  A very difficult thing for me.  When my opponent pulls ahead of me prize wise I loose it. :)

5.     Play with 3 or more energy types in your deck.
  Collorless is not a color so therefore you can't count it as your third color!  This is a hard thing to do.  I can rarely play 3 colors and win.  Of course I want you to limit your usage of rainbow energy down to 2 instead of 4 and you have to have at least one evo. line in there as well.  Now swallow that one!  It is a very challenging way to play and makes things much more interesting than "Oh, I won the coin toss so I win the match."

Now for a few last words.  You can mix and match these ideas in a few different ways to add some flavor to your battles.  Do any combo or rules 2, 3, 4, and 5.  They will no doubt make you a better player and once again bring an element of fun into the game of Pokemon.

                         This has been The NatsumeGengar, until I abducted him.
                                                   NatsumeGengar@cs.com