Deck Strategy
A Deck is a set of sixty cards that work together to execute a strategy to win. In the Pokémon Trading Card Game, there are three ways to win:
Draw all of your Prize cards.
Knock out all of your opponent's Pokémon in play.
Cause your opponent to run out of cards in their deck.
With these three ways to win in mind, it’s now time to begin crafting your deck. To start crafting our deck, we’ll need to pick a basic deck strategy.
Basic Deck Strategy
In the Pokémon Trading Card Game, there are four prominent strategies players use to help them defeat their opponent—the most common of these by far is the very straightforward Aggression strategy, but Control, Mill, and Stall strategies also exist in the Pokémon Trading Card Game and can likewise be used to secure a victory against an opponent.
Origin Forme Palkia VSTAR with Kyurem VMAX is a great, recent example of a deck that uses the aggression strategy. In this video, Omnipoke discusses and plays the deck on PTCGO.
Aggression
In a phrase, "Hulk smash!" The goal of a deck whose strategy is aggression is to take decisive knockouts against the opponent's Pokémon as quickly as possible. The aggression strategy generally takes one of two forms, the first of which is Direct Aggression, where the player knocks out their opponent's Pokémon, one at a time, in a way that will allow them to draw all of their prize cards before their opponent draws all of theirs.
The second form of aggression, Spread, instead of focuses on pooling damage on the opponent’s side of play so that, through the use of additional waves of spread damage or through a damage redistribution effect, the player using said strategy can take multiple knockouts at once or in very quick succession.
Decks that focus on the aggression strategy have a secondary focus in setting up and maintaining a constant stream of attackers to knock out their opponent's Pokémon. This focus on streaming battle-ready attackers is critical to winning the Prize Trade—the exchange of knockouts each player takes against their opponent and the prizes they draw from those knockouts.
OmniPoke examines and plays Sander Wojcik’s Top 4 Mewtwo V-UNION control deck from the 2022 North American International Championships.
Control
The goal of a deck whose primary strategy is Control is to cut off the opponent's avenues to victory, denying them access to energy, trainer cards, abilities, and other deck resources necessary to execute their deck's strategy. A control deck often slows down the pace of the game so that it can execute a second strategy, like stall or aggression, driving the opponent toward more and more desperate plays to free themselves from the control deck's grasp.
Mill
When a player's deck focuses on mill, it actively drives the opponent toward losing by Deck Out—or running out of cards in their deck so that, at the beginning of their turn, they cannot draw a card. A mill deck does this by focusing its efforts on discarding cards from the opponent's deck and hand. In addition to driving the opponent closer to deck out, mill decks deny the opponent access to their resources by sending them to the discard pile.
Andrew Mahone of Tricky Gym breaks down Centiskorch Mill, a casual mill archetype that emerged with the release of Blastoise from the Pokémon GO TCG set.
Stall
The goal of a deck whose primary strategy is Stall is to deny the opponent the ability to take prize cards. This is done using Pokémon with high hit points and abilities, items, stadium cards, and supporters that remove, reduce, or prevent damage. By preventing the opponent from taking knockouts and drawing prize cards, the stall strategy drives the opponent toward deck out.
Azul Garcia Griego (AzulGG) examines and plays the Stonjourner VMAX stall deck that would go on to later take Top 16 at the 2022 Baltimore Regional Championships.