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.
On your turn, you may wish to do one of several things before you attack. One of these is retreating a Pokemon. Let’s say your Pokemon has a lot of damage. You might want to think about retreating it to the bench. To retreat a Pokemon, look at the bottom of the card, and you’ll see something called a retreat cost. This is the amount of energy you must discard from an active Pokemon before you can retreat it to the bench. If you don’t have enough, you can’t retreat the Pokemon. Also, if your Pokemon is asleep or paralyzed, it can’t retreat either. Sometimes, no energy is needed to retreat a Pokemon, and when this happens, we say the Pokemon has free retreat. When the Pokemon comes back to the bench, all damage and attached cards stay with that Pokemon. However, all special conditions go away. Last, if a Pokemon is asleep or paralyzed, they cannot retreat, no matter what. If you retreat a Pokemon, you must send another Pokemon from your bench into the active position. You can’t move back the same Pokemon you retreated, though. It has to be a different one.
