Transcript
Hi, I’m Joe D’Andrea, a Pokemon professor at Comic Cafe in Warren New Jersey, and we’re here to show you how to play the Pokemon trading card game.
Pokemon are the different creatures that appear in the trading card game, and here’s one — say hello to Emboar. Now Emboar is a Pokemon. He’s a stage two Pokemon, and there are various parts of the card. I’ll go through them here. On the top left, you can see the evolution of the Pokemon — Emboar’s a stage two. There’s the name. On the right, there’s the number of hit points, sort of the life force, if you will. When that drops to zero due to damage from attacks the Pokemon’s knocked out. Below the picture of Emboar is an ability, special abilities that they have, powers that they have. These were previously called poke-powers or poke-bodies. Below that is an attack. This attack requires four energy — two of them are fire and two can be any kind. The name of the attack is heat crash, and you have a damage of eighty. Below that on the left you have weakness and resistance. They’ll affect how the Pokemon reacts to different Pokemons’ attacks. In this case, Emboar has a weakness of times two to water and no resistance. Below that are four colorless energy symbols. That’s the retreat cost, that’s how much energy is required to back out of the active position. Also on the card you can see below the picture, the card number, the height and weight, the type of Pokemon. Down below there’s a little paragraph that describes what the Pokemon does, the illustrator, that’s all called flavor text. And on the bottom right, you have a couple numbers. Emboar is number twenty out of one hundred fourteen. Pokemon releases cards in sets, and this particular set has one hundred and fourteen cards, and this is card number twenty in the sequence. And on the far right on the bottom is the symbol that identifies the set. Pokemon cards are the main attraction of the Pokemon trading card game. There are over six hundred different Pokemon. You can find them online on Pokemon.com in something called the Pokedex. A single Pokemon can appear on many different cards, each card with different abilities. You can never have more than four of the same Pokemon in a deck, even though the Pokemon themselves may have different abilities.
