You Lost Because You’re Bad – Pokemon TCG Article

Introduction

The Pokemon TCG is a very silly game. Anyone can have a God-like run throughout a tournament. Players who can’t even sequence their turns properly are going 8-1 day 1 (like this idiot) and I’m sat here at 4-4 after grinding live non-stop for the past 2 weeks. This guy must have just had a lucky run, or maybe he even cheated. “Yeah… all I need to do is perfect my play, maybe I should play a better deck or tech for that bad matchup. Then if I keep going I will get my lucky day”

I started playing this game 15 years ago. Back then, my problem was all about not having the ‘resources’ to compete fairly with all the older players, that could copy the successful and refined lists. I could never afford all the good cards; I could never afford to change my deck. I always felt my deck just wasn’t powerful enough, other players ‘teching’ for me or, (the best excuse) I wasn’t lucky enough. “This is a card game after all, you can’t win without a little bit of luck. I just keep getting the short end of it.”

After COVID, I started travelling to tournaments in 2022. I qualified for Worlds twice in 2024 and 2025. It was only after my first World Championships I was able to get my first day 2 at a major event in Dortmund 2025. My 2 good friends who I frequently travelled with didn’t quite share in my struggles achieving high placements, while I was still wallowing at the mid-tables. It frustrated me because at the time, “I could absolutely hold my own in practice games, I was absolutely playing at their level, they respect my abilities too, so why couldn’t I break that barrier?”

After I started getting some day 2’s under my belt I started to have a lot less fear of ‘good players’. At the end of the day they only have 60 cards from the exact same cardpool you have and certainly aren’t playing their deck absolutely perfectly. I also noticed “the absolute drivel that I see other players are playing at these high tables.”

At the end of these opening 4 paragraphs I have put into quotes what has passed through my mind while experiencing certain difficulties throughout my career. I also have a feeling that the sentiments expressed here are not exclusive to myself. I would even go as far to say that You, my reader, have also allowed your mind to ponder similar thoughts. These are excuses, some more subtle than others, but excuses nonetheless. We make excuses as a defence mechanism to protect our pride, however if you’re able to move past that and fully comprehend your mistakes, there is no limit to how good you can get.

Prior to a tournament you are in control of 1 thing, the deck you submit. During a tournament you are also in control of 1 thing, your play. If someone makes cash and you haven’t made day 2, odds are they have done at least 1, most likely both, of these things better. You can call it luck all you want, however over the course of 8 rounds best of 3, the factor luck plays into your results dramatically decreases from what you’re likely perceiving. If you’ve attended many cups/challenges/locals and never really had a strong result, this also applies. The problem is you.

Now, the last thing I want to do in this article is to hurt your feelings (maybe I shouldn't have used such a mean title...). In this article, I’ll be going through some general examples of common mistakes people make, which are typically followed by them immediately blaming the match result on luck. If you find yourself acting along these lines, then I strongly recommend you stop blaming other factors and start using it as a reason to change how you approach the game. I’m a very competitive person (as in I hate losing), so I hope you’re ready for some tough-love over-analysis of my favourite children’s card game. While Pokemon is a game that should be played for-fun, I’ve noticed that basically everyone has much more fun winning than losing. So let’s get you some more wins. ;)

You need to accept that good players are good for a certain reason, they’re doing something that you’re not. Over the years I’ve heard it many times from players who are better than me and countless times from players who are worse than me, that they lost because one or a few things during a game out of their control didn’t go their way. While death and taxes are guarantees in life, very few mention a TCG player exclaiming “OH MY GOD, let me just take a picture of this trash starting hand” for 3 likes on twitter. Everyone gets bad hands.

Every time you draw a card, that is a random roll of the dice, sometimes it’s good and sometimes not so. While it is true that randomness can largely determine the winner of a match, every decision you make, even the tiny ones, will also contribute to the final result. The smallest missequence, the slightly inaccurate line you go for in a matchup, the information you reveal to your opponent for free, your lack of prize checking, your choice of 60 are all areas of the game littered with trap-doors which can lower your chances of winning. These are all things you are in control of and these are the things that top players are focussing on in order to maximise their chances of winning.

I’m trying to keep this article timeless, however for ease of demonstration I’m going to use Boss’s Order’s for a lot of my examples here as this card, or an equivalent, will likely remain a permanent fixture in the game. The ‘out’ to Boss could be something like, but not limitted to, Meowth ex, that can search the deck for a Boss’s Orders using its ability “Last-Ditch Catch”. I will also be referring to ball-search cards, which are merely cards that can search the deck for a Pokemon e.g. Nest Ball.

In Game Decision Making

Missequencing

People who complain about luck a lot while also not getting strong results, usually share this same symptom in their play. For example: A player is in a position where they require 2 Boss’s Orders over then next 2 turns to win the game. They have an ‘out’ in hand that will allow you to search your deck for a Boss.

They play their turn as follows:

• Slam this ‘out’ and search their deck for Boss

• Realise they have a way of drawing cards and draw 3

• See a ball-search card in their hand (it was there before they drew 3) and searched a Pokemon

They didn’t hit a Boss on those 3 cards which is ‘annoying’. Next turn, they need the 2^nd Boss and they don’t get it as fate had left them with “2 Boss’s in the last 5 cards of the deck”. They can’t believe how unlucky they are and say they’ll just “play a real game like Yu-Gi-Oh or bridge instead.”

You’re probably reading this and are immediately realising where this player could have played better. A very simple rule of sequencing, while looking for a specific card is Thin-Draw-Search. In this scenario, the player only needs to randomly draw 1 Boss at any point over the 2 turns as they already have an ‘out’ in hand. In order to maximise their chances of hitting Boss they should wait to use their ‘out’ at the last necessary moment, so instead they could have played their turn like this:

• Thin that Pokemon from the deck first using your ball-search (this is a ‘dead card’ that you don’t want to draw).

• Draw those 3 cards, did you hit the Boss? If you didn’t...

• Search your deck for Boss using your ‘out’ as a last-resort

You have a much higher chance of hitting Boss on those 3 cards before you take one out of the deck (~1.5 times more likely) like in the example. If you hit Boss here, you save your ‘out’ already in hand so you can play it next turn to have 100% chance of winning the game instead of leaving the next turn to chance. This is 1 decision that has had a massive impact on the result. You wouldn’t believe how often I’ve seen such obvious poor sequencing being played and then that player immediately blaming the result on luck. By blaming luck here you are robbing yourself of a premier opportunity to up your game very quickly with relatively low effort.

Situations like this one are very common in the game, especially in metagames where we have a lot of on-board draw through Pokemon abilities. You can also apply this logic when you are trying to get multiple Pokemon in play e.g. draw cards first before you use your ball-search ‘out’. Every time you do this successfully, your chances of winning increase a small amount. Doing this multiple times over the course of a game and you’re accruing multiple chunks of compound interest towards your win%.

Playing The Matchup Suboptimally

A lot of the issues here are very similar to the missequencing issues as they come down to inaccurate decision making. Your opponent has 2 attackers ready and can easily win if they draw 1 specific card next turn. You KO the active and hope for the best. They have a Pokemon on their bench that allows them to draw 3 cards, they do it and draw that card for game. You shout “Argh! I would have won if you didn’t draw that card there!”. In your hand you had a Boss before you attacked.

You could have minimised your opponents chances of winning by using Boss and KO’ing that Pokemon that allows them to draw 3 cards. This is another obvious example how a small mistake can have big consequences in this game. In reality this will come up in more subtle plays where you could have played 1 card here, so your opponent requires 1 more card in their turn and 3 turns later they don’t have that card any more to win that turn. Even top players don’t always realise these small plays until after the match has concluded and they could have taken a slightly different line. Practising your matchups is key. Understanding how they flow, what your opponent wants to do, what they are likely to have in hand and how best to disrupt their plans are all things good players try to learn in preparation for a tournament.

No matter how good you are, I recommend after every game, reflect on how you could have improved your odds of winning by considering changes in your sequencing and changes in how you approach that matchup.

Information

Giving Your Opponent Free Information

This one’s really simple, when a good player sees you shaking your head or say “my hand sucks”. That gives them an opportunity to change their play into a more aggressive line which will improve their chances of winning. If you stay silent and give them no information, you may be able to buy an extra turn to top-deck that one card that can get you out of this predicament. The game isn’t over until it’s over and if the game’s not over, how do you know if you’ve actually been unlucky or not?

Prize checking

If you prize check, you know exactly what resources you have available to you at any one time. Just like in the previous section, any information is extremely useful to both players and can allow you to make better decisions improving your winning chances. “My last Boss was prized” you say with gritted teeth after playing your out to search the deck for said Boss and pack up your cards, frustrated that you hit the “1 in 20 chance I lose this game”. If you had prize checked early, you could have planned to avoid this scenario and mitigate this misfortune e.g. you use 1 less Boss earlier in the game to save it for the resource for the late game.

Deckbuilding

Making bad changes to a successful list

Specifically at larger tournaments, the decision of what deck you submit will have the greatest sway in your results. Whether you are considering changing 1 or 2 cards to improve your consistency or to include tech-cards to help in a tough matchup. Both scenarios will hypothetically result in you losing a game you otherwise would have won had you played the other card. Your job as a competitor is to make the decision that will result in the best possible win% for the tournament based on the information you have. If a player takes a list from limitless and cuts 1 or 2 consistency cards for experimental tech cards and bricks when they play. “Seems like you have to get lucky with this deck, couldn’t be me” they say. What they fail to realise is that many hours of testing has likely gone into that list and removing key cards to the consistency backbone will massively effect how well the deck functions.

Playing a bad deck

Again, pretty obvious, but if you’re playing one of those league battle decks, your chances of winning are much lower than a refined and successful list on limitless. But in this section I’m also referring to a scenario where a player is playing a strong deck at a tournament that is just unfavourable into a lot of the decks in the room. With this poor deck choice, they are in a situation where the only way they can win certain matchup is if they get a strong setup and a lot of variables go their way. When they don’t get this immaculate start they claim they are “unlucky” and blame that instead of their poor deck choice for the metagame.

Experimentation is a very good thing in this game and it’s something you should absolutely do. It is what allows the greatest players in the world to be pioneers in the metagame. There’s always a balance here where experimentation is good and will be vital to success. All decks are “bad” until they get results. With that said, the best time for experimentation is during your tournament preparation. The second best time is actually during a tournament, however your result is dependant on a lot of unknowns. If you’ve made it this far into the article, I hope you now know what not to do if your experiment doesn’t work out in this scenario.

Conclusion

Game-play mistakes are fine, however blaming your poor results on luck will only stifle your potential. What I've covered here certainly aren’t the only areas I or you could improve at. The more you play and the more you look at how you approach the game more critically, you will find more ways for you to improve and grow as a player. Hope you have found this helpful and thank you for reading!

This is my first article on competitive Pokemon and I plan for more in the future. All feedback is welcome, but please keep in mind I have an extremely fragile ego.

Scans of cards used in this article were taken from: pkmncards.com