u/Better_Armadillo8703

I'm a newer player and i'm amazed by how strong dragapult is, but from what i can understand we used to have much stronger stuff around.

At this point i wonder: what is the best deck of all time? I don't mean the one that outperformed everything else in its own rotations, but like, if you played every card ever printed all together, what deck would be the absolute best and why? How does that deck work in short?

I can't find a lot of info on the expanded format, but if it literally is "you can play every card ever printed" then i guess my question is really "what is the best deck in expanded as of now".

Bonus question 1: how would something like current dragapult or similarly strong deck compare to the power level of the best deck of all time? Not talking about direct matchup, just power level in general.

Bonus question 2: what about the single best card of all time? I realize this is a very broad question so feel free to give your own spin to it :)

Newish player here.

I started out with mega lucario as recommended by some friends, i learned it and i like it, it's very solid.

It's still my main deck so to speak, but i've started to explore other stuff, and one thing i really didn't like about lucario is that it's a huge 3 prize if it gets knocked out.

I naturally got redirected to single prize decks, and out of the bunch my favorite was absolutely alakazam, so i started playing it a lot and i'm having success with it, probably more than lucario.

What bugs me about it is that it seems to be extremely repetitive. I know that all decks more or less would like to follow the same lines, and lucario is no exception of course, but i feel like alakazam genuinely does the same exact thing every game. All i'm doing is just dumping every resource i have in my hand to search and build as many alakazams on the board and fill my hand, and looping dudunsparces to draw even more, in order to see more of the same cards and do even more of the same stuff on the following turn.

It's pretty fun per se, but i feel like it's not developing my skills as much as lucario. Lucario (at least my list) has lillie's and judge that force me to think whether i should use them or not. I have to decide if i should bet on building lucario and attack with it immediately or protect it with solrock and try to get a sneaky ko with it. I have to figure out if my pokepad should look for a second riolu to build it with aura jab, a backup solrock/lunatone in case they get sniped, or a makuhita in case i need boss orders in a pinch.

I feel like my brain is working way more when i play lucario, and I'm wondering if this work is useful while i'm growing as a player. Should i drop alakazam for something more engaging like lucario or possibly other recommendations? Or should i keep playing alakazam but in a different way?

A few days ago i made this post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/pkmntcg/s/PFrvcT0cuj

First of all i wanna thank everyone and say that this is probably the nicest community i've ever interacted with.

I was asking about possible decks with single prize, single color and base pokemon only; the idea is to just place down the mon, attach the fewest energy possible and attack immediately for consistent damage.

I got a lot of good answers, so i tested some of your decks and wanna share my thoughts. I'm not gonna quote anyone in here but if you recognize your own decklist feel free to comment!

- Okidogi: possibly the overall best. As a lucario player i am already familiar with lunar cycle, but this is somehow even faster than lucario with higher burst damage, while also being single prize. It's not exactly a "single color" in the sense that okidogi needs a dark energy to function, but special energies do the job well enough. Amazing, will probably be my new main deck

- Ursaluna without okidogi: more of the same but honestly worse than okidogi. I didn't enjoy it too much, relying on ursaluna can slow down the game. I guess it's technically closer to what i was asking since you actually just need fighting energy, but it's lackluster

- Honchkrow: very satisfying but not my thing. On paper it's sort of similar to what i was asking since it's single prize, although technically it's not base pokemon and the energy color is hard to define since it uses only special energy. The issue is that it ends up playing almost in an opposite way to what i was asking, you need big swings of damage with trainer cards and all that. It's a really interesting playstyle and kinda reminded me of gholdengo or bolt in my limited playtime with those

- Alakazam: technically not exactly what i asked for since you need to evolve basically all of your pokemon, but it's an amazing deck, possibly the strongest i have played in this testing. I enjoy okidogi more because it starts attacking quicker, but this is the kind of consistency i was looking for. Close second to okidogi

- Mega floette: honestly not a big fan. This one has everything except the single prize, with a bunch of ex cards and a mega, but they are at least base mons. What i didn't like is that you start pretty slow and start flooding the board with mons and energies only in the mid game. I don't wanna call it slow because in the grand scheme of things it's actually quite fast, but i find it easy to lose before i even start to do my thing. If i have to risk a 3 prize i'd rather play my lucario

- Tauros: funnily enough the only truly perfect deck for what i was asking. Everything is base, single prize and works with a single type of energy. It does a surprising amount of damage for only one energy once you have a few tauros on the board, and the bunch of power premium pro and similar cards do a lot of heavy lifting. However it's objectively the worst deck of all these, basically if you don't have the stadium in your opening hand you never start your game. I also found it to be probably the only deck to be really weak into pult out of all these, which is never a good look. I guess if you don't accept at least one tradeoff between having to evolve your mons, having multiple energy colors, and being multi prize, you end up with something which is just not powerful enough like tauros. Makes sense but i'm happy to have tested it

Thanks for every input on the previous post and looking forward to new discussions! It's been a blast playing the game and interacting here. If you have more suggestions knowing what i'm looking for, i'm open to trying new lists. Okidogi it is for now

Hey there, this is very specific and i'm pretty new so i'm sorry if it's a dumb question. Since i've started playing, i've seen that the most powerful attacks will naturally come from mons that have various tradeoffs, like: being a phase 2, giving multiple prizes, requiring many energies and sometimes different colors, and discarding energies. I'm more about doing consistent damage with less drawbacks, so i've been advised to play lucario and so far it's cool. I like that it's only a phase 1, requires 1 or 2 energy to attack and the energy is only one color, but of course you gotta be wary of losing your lucario because it gives a whopping 3 prizes. I learned about festival lead, which seems to be something i could like, but i was wondering if there's a decent option for something even more extreme: a single prize with only a single color energy and basic mons. Basically you just draw basic mons, swarm the board with it and attack consistently without caring if one is taken out. I realize this may not be very meta and will be worse than the lucario i'm playing now, but i'm playing for fun anyway

I'm an engineering msc student and i have taken a very basic quantum course, basically just the derivation of the schrodinger equation and the time solution vs space solution (i think). I know for a fact that, unlike say in EM fields where we use complex numbers just for convenience and then always take the real part at the end of every proof, quantum actually needs complex numbers to work. This always kinda bugged me but the layman explanation was that unitary complex numbers (or any isomorphic thing like idk SO2 matrices i guess) are able to change their phase while keeping the amplitude at 1, and this is necessarily what needs to happen because amplitude means probability (squared) and so it has to equal 1. Now, i'm finally taking systems theory & control theory and what i just find out is that marginal stability is exactly the same thing. For a system to be marginally stable you need to have the real part of the eigenvalues exactly equal to 0, which means you need complex numbers, and the result is that such a system will keep oscillating forever, ie only changing their phase and never dampening their amplitude. Is this not exactly what a quantum system is doing? Or what am i missing?

Hi, i'm practicing for a local and i'm having a good time with the rain team that cut the grand champions festival:

https://pokepast.es/d466236588ebde30

My only issue is that i actually never bring my mega, which is venusaur. Most gameplans seem better off with either sableye or pelipper for rain/support, and the 3 big hitters.

So my question is: i've seen many variations of this rain core with a different mega, including scovillain, dragonite, and scizor. So why venusaur? What does it do? Would i be better off with a different mega?

Thx