What you're playing

If you've ever opened a pack of Pokémon cards and wondered what to actually do with them, start here.

The Pokémon Trading Card Game is a two-player battle game. Each player brings a 60-card deck and races to take 6 Prize cards. You take a Prize card by knocking out one of your opponent's Pokémon. First to all six wins.

That's the whole game in three sentences. Everything after this is detail — and the detail is where it gets good.

The table

Before any of the vocabulary lands, it helps to see where things go. This is your half of the table.

Five things to notice, because every later lesson leans on them:

• Your Active Pokémon is the one doing the fighting. There is exactly one, always.
• Your Bench holds up to five more. They're safe from most attacks, and they're where you build up your next attacker.
• Your Prize cards are six cards from your own deck, set aside face down at the start. Taking them all is how you win — so your Prizes are also a countdown timer.
• Your Discard pile isn't a graveyard. A lot of cards pull things back out of it.
• The Stadium is shared. Only one can be in play across both players at once.

A game, start to finish

1. Both players shuffle, draw 7, and set up a face-down Active and Bench.
2. Each player sets 6 Prize cards aside.
3. Players alternate turns: draw a card, play cards, attack.
4. When an attack leaves damage on a Pokémon equal to or above its HP, that Pokémon is Knocked Out and the attacker takes a Prize card.
5. First player to take all 6 Prizes wins.

Games run about 15–30 minutes. The rhythm clicks after two or three.

Standard and Expanded

You'll see two formats mentioned:

• Standard is the current competitive format. Only recent sets are legal, and the pool rotates roughly once a year.
• Expanded uses a much larger pool going back further.

If you're new, you only need Standard. It's what tournaments use, what most decks are built for, and what Dexter checks against by default.

Where Dexter fits

Half of this game happens at the table. The other half happens before you sit down, when you decide which 60 cards to bring — and that's the half where new players get stuck.

These ten lessons cover the table half: enough rules to play a real game, correctly, without stopping to look things up. Then the Trainer Quiz, then your badge.

Next up: the cards themselves.