u/PicpoulBlanc

Pretty much the title. Checked in this morning to see if they had any cards and asked when they normally restock, and the lady at the register said they now do it randomly and only the manager puts cards out, because someone followed the delivery driver home one day. For safety the restock is now random.

Edit to clarify that I agree this is good. Every place should stock randomly and at retail price. Just sharing because people are getting wild out there.

I started playing and collecting with my 5- and 7-year-old kids recently, using Battle Academy to learn, which we’ve now played a handful of times. I have some premade decks on the way to play next, like the Melmetal vs Mewtwo set, Gardevoir ex, Lucario ex, and Team Rocket’s Mewtwo. We’ll play them as-is first and then probably upgrade them a bit, and then keep those as shared family decks.

My question is about building decks. We’re not looking to join tournaments at this point, so standard format doesn’t matter, and they’ll want to use fun cards from their collections anyway, regardless of which sets they’re from (and they certainly don’t care what’s meta). That’s obviously fine for home casual play, but at some point we’ll want to play other people—does anyone actually play extended, or should we also practice with some standard decks?

The Gym Leader format sounds like it could be fun, but I know they’ll want to at least use one powerful ex or mega card. Do people ever play games with slightly modified rules, like Gym Leader but you get one rule box card per deck? Or is that stupid?

There doesn’t seem to be any LGS in my area hosting games, and definitely nothing for kids. I own a non-alcoholic drinks shop and am considering hosting a night for casual play, trading, and learning, with decks on-hand for kids to borrow, Battle Academy, etc. Does anyone have any best practices or suggestions for building kids’ Pokemon TCG community?

Sorry for all the different trains of thought and questions. Appreciate any feedback!