Net Decking
Perhaps, after reading this guide, you decide you’d prefer not to try building a deck from scratch. It’s understandable—many people are apprehensive about the complexities of deck building and often resort to Net Decking—or copying a deck list from the Internet. Often, players will copy winning deck lists from recent tournaments exactly or tweak a few cards to better suit their play styles. These top-performing decks are often referred to as Meta Decks. Other players will instead take inspiration from winning decks, instead of copying them exactly.
The website Limitless TCG provides great resources for these purposes.
Decks that are similar to one another form an Archetype. Decks of the same archetype will most often share the same strategy and many of the same Pokémon, especially the same main attacker. Decks of the same archetype differ not only because of the play style of the player who built the deck, but also because the player who built the deck prepares the deck to handle the other decks it is likely to face—or the Local Meta. An archetype Variant is formed when differing approaches are taken to a building the same archetype. Often, these variants will have their own strengths and weaknesses and the popularity of a specific variant may dependent on what other archetypes are popular in the local meta.
Even players who do not rely on copying a deck list from the Internet often review winning deck lists to see what cards their opponents are likely to include in their decks. This not only helps them to refine their own decks by honing them to handle their opponents’ decks, but helps them to learn their opponents’ decks’ strategies so that they can work toward stopping them. Decks that are built to either directly counter meta decks or to surprise an opponent with unexpected strategies are referred to as Rogue Decks. Often, these rogue decks will exploit a common weakness in how popular meta decks are built and will utilize strategies that a meta deck is not designed to be able to handle.
In addition to the valuable deck lists and tournament information available at Limitless TCG, this guide includes a handful of helpful meta deck lists and a handful of budget deck lists to help you get started.
No matter the route you take to building your deck, it’s important to remember that decks that use more expensive cards generally perform well because of those cards. It can be tempting to try to build budget versions of pricier decks, especially decks that have placed well at recent tournaments. As a general rule, if you’re after a less-expensive deck, it’s better to build a deck that already works well with less-expensive cards.