Tempo and Card Advantage in Pokemon Pocket

For someone who’s been playing one card game or another for over 25 years, I’m not particularly good at them. I don’t have the temperament or time to play at a competitive level, so I focus on playing casually and at local events. Still, I’ve always tried to improve at the games I play, finding a lot of enjoyment in understanding why games turn out the way they do, or breaking down what the purpose of each card in a deck is. This deeper understanding helps me build my own decks and find interesting plays making it easier to play the game in my preferred style. There’s also a lot of satisfaction in seeing my self improve–even if I never become “good”, I do become better.

A turning point for me was back in the mid 00s when I decided to get better at Magic by understanding the theory that the top players were using instead of just trying to play a lot. This gave me the tools I needed to analyze my games and decks in a more deliberate and critical way. And, though I originally learned of them through Magic, I found that these tools were useful for understanding lots of different types of games, not just other card games.

The two most important concepts I learned are Tempo and Card Advantage. I learned of them from Introduction to Tempo by Scott Johns and Introduction to Card Advantage, both articles part of a series that WotC ran dealing with various aspects of Magic theory. The ideas are older and you can see them forming in Philosophy of Fire and Who’s the Beat down? by Mike Flores.

Card Advantage

Card Advantage is the simpler of the two concepts and the one with the least impact of in Pokemon Pocket, thought it is still important. Simply put, Card Advantage is about having access to more cards than your opponent. It’s relatively straightforward to measure, just count how many cards you have and compare to how many your opponent has. It’s also zero-sum, meaning every point of advantage you gain is a point your opponent loses. The theory is that the greater card advantage that a player has, the more likely they are to win.

Measuring Card Advantage

As straightforward as it seems, there’s actually a bit of nuance when it comes to figuring out what does and does not give card advantage. For me, it helped to break down Card Advantage into four possible sources.

Positive Card Advantage

Positive Card Advantage is the most obvious–it’s drawing more cards. The clearest example of this is Professor’s Research. You spend 1 card to draw 2 and get +1 Card Advantage. The other clear sources are cards like Meowth and Sigilyph, each of which replaces themselves after a single attack and start generating advantage with each subsequent attack. Pokemon which generate advantage are interesting because you don’t subtract a card until it’s discarded. So, when you play and attack with Meowth you’re at +1, but will lose that once Meowth is KOd.

Negative Card Advantage

For Negative Card Advantage you decrease the opponent’s access to cards instead of increasing your own, most often through discard or destruction. This is very rare in Pokemon Pocket where the only direct source would be Persian. You do naturally gain this kind of advantage when you knock out a Pokemon, especially Stage 1 or Stage 2 Pokemon since those require 2 and 3 cards, respectively.

Virtual Card Advantage

Not all cards can be played in every situation. Some cards have specific requirements that need to be met in order to be played, or are only good against a particular class of card. If these cards can’t be played they are effectively “blank” cards and might as well have not been drawn. When you “blank” your opponent’s cards, you have created Virtual Card advantage. This is a lot harder to count in a real game because it requires your opponent to draw a blank, which you won’t be able know, and also because a “blank” card could become live if the game state changes.

In Magic, the classic example is playing a creature-less deck against a deck with creature removal. For Pokemon Pocket, the examples are not as clear cut. One example would be having a duplicate Pokemon on bench or not having a bench at all against a Sabrina. In both cases the board state remains the same after playing Sabrina. I also think that bench snipers like Hitmonlee provide at least partial card advantage against Druddigon. I don’t think it counts as a full card of advantage because in most scenarios you’d probably want to attack with something else.

Card Quality

Imagine a game where for every card you played, your opponent had to use two cards to keep pace. Over the course of the game, each card you drew would be worth two of your opponents. When you play better cards than your opponent, you’re generating advantage through Card Quality. This is also difficult to measure since it’s hard to know exactly how much better one card is than another. The ex mechanic suggests that an ex is twice as good as a non-ex, but surely Gyrados ex is more than twice as good as Gyrados? At least in the current meta.

Gaining quality advantage can be tricky since player’s generally don’t put bad cards in their deck. A way you can do this when both player’s are putting the best cards in their deck is by just drawing better cards. Chatot is a good example of a card that tries to generate advantage through quality. When you choose to attack with it, you know what cards are in your hand and you’re goal is to get better cards, even if that means ending up with the same, or even fewer, cards in hand. Pokeball and other “deck thinners” also provide this kind of advantage by not only turning into something (hopefully) useful, but by improving the overall quality of cards left in your deck.

It’s important to note that Red Card, is not a form of card advantage. You opponent isn’t playing bad cards, so by forcing them to redraw you’re really just trying to keep them off a single card. Jeff Hoogland mathematically explains why that doesn’t work in this video. Making things worse for Red Card, drawing three random cards is often times a net gain. After all, players play Chatot all the time, why would you use a card to give them another round at it?

This form of advantage is the one that, in my experience, is most overvalued. Aside from just playing good cards, which you should be doing, I don’t think players should go out of their way to add cards that only thing their deck or reroll their hand. Spinning your wheels like this mostly wastes time. The exception would be decks that heavily rely on a specific card to win–such as Gyrados ex where attacking with Chatot until you get one seems like a solid plan.

Limits of Card Advantage

With all that said, why do I think Card Advantage is not as impact full as Tempo? The biggest reason is that Pokemon Pocket games are fast. Traditionally, decks that win through card advantage do so after many, many turns. In Pocket, you can get 3 points with as few as two KOs. There just isn’t enough time for card advantage to take over.

The small deck size also limits the effectiveness of card advantage. At 20 cards, you’ll likely run through your deck in any game that does go long. When you do, your opponent naturally makes up any difference in card advantage by drawing one card while you draw none.

These things combined make Pokemon Pocket a game that revolves around Tempo, where Card Advantage is import only in that it can be converted into Tempo. You convert Card Advantage into Tempo Advantage by playing the cards in your hand. In general, the more cards you have played, the better you’re doing. When an opportunity present itself that allows you to play card to gain advantage, you should take it.

Tempo

Tempo, as the name suggests, has to do with time. It comes to Magic and other card games from chess. The fundamental unit used to measure this time isn’t seconds or minutes, but turns, and what you want to measure is the number of turns until the game ends which is called your clock. If you can get your last point in 2 turns, you have a 2 turn clock.

This means that Tempo comes down to how much HP your opponent’s Pokemon have and how much damage you can do each turn. This division problem (opponent’s HP divided by your damage) gives you both player’s clock. With this information you can determine how many attacks a Pokemon can make before it’s knocked out.

Gaining Tempo

With all this in mind there are a few key ways we gain Tempo during a game.

High damage attacks

If you deal more damage than your opponent, you win the tempo race be being able to knock out their Pokemon faster than they can knock out yours. Farfetch’d is a good example of a Tempo card. Dealing 40 damage for a single energy is above rate for a Basic Pokemon, allowing you to get ahead in the race early.

Attaching additional energies

You’re constrained in your ability to use high damage attacks by the amount of energy the attack needs. If you’re able to attach additional energy and get to your big attacks sooner, you have gained tempo. Misty is a great example of this, but cards like Serperior also function in a similar way.

Going second provides a natural advantage here because you have one more energy in play than your opponent–they will be stuck playing catch up. That energy can determine games, especially for slower decks that are usually not able to attack for a few turns anyways.

Dealing More damage

Sometimes, a temporary boost is all you need. Cards like Giovanni give you a tempo boost for a turn that becomes a permanent one when you KO your opponent’s Pokemon. Changing a 2-turn KO to a 1-turn KO is huge and one of the best ways to take control over a game.

Evolving

Stage 1 and Stage 2 Pokemon tend to have more powerful attacks than their pre-evolutions. Evolving a Pokemon generates Tempo because you can now deal more damage. Evolving Pontya into Rapidash means you’re dealing twice as much damage for the same energy investment.

Limiting Opponent’s Tempo

Sometimes it’s not enough to shorten our clock, we need to increase our opponent’s. It doesn’t matter if we win in two turns when our opponent will win next turn. Here, we sometimes give up a bit of our tempo to slow down the opponent enough to pull ahead on the following turns.

Evolving

Another thing that happens when you evolve is you have more health! This means your opponent’s 2 turn KO on Ponyta now became a 3 turn KO on Rapidash. Evolving is a pretty powerful thing and being able to evolve first is the main advantage you get when going first. I think at some point we may see decks that would rather evolve quickly than get the first energy, but for now I feel like all the decks would rather have the first energy.

Healing

Taking a Pokemon out of KO range with a Potion or other healing can sometimes snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Getting an extra turn with a Pokemon does not just deny your opponent a point, but also give you an extra turn to attack or set up another Pokemon.

It is here we can see just how much more important Tempo is than Card Advantage because it’s often correct to use two potions to get just one more turn out of a Pokemon.

A thing to keep in mind is that being at full health does not matter, what matter is how many turns the Pokemon is going to live. Using a Potion on a Pokemon that would get knocked out regardless is always a mistake. Whenever you use one, you should know what you’re surviving. Is it just the next attack? Or the next attack plus a Giovanni? If you can’t answer that question, you shouldn’t use your healing cards.

Damage Prevention

Damage Prevention is more limited than Healing. You’ll notice that Blue only prevents 10 damage while Potion heals 20. On the surface this seems more inefficient, but the power of cards that prevent damage is in turning a 1-hit KO into a 2-hit KO, something that no amount of healing can do.

Especially late game, when attacks can often 1-hit KO any Pokemon, a Blue can let your Pokemon live to KO whatever huge attack your opponent just made. Just like with Healing, you should know what you’re planning on surviving prior to playing Blue.

Recurring sources of damage reduction can be very powerful. At the simplest level, reducing damage by 20 is similar to having 20 additional HP. However, against Pokemon that want to make multiple attacks it’s much stronger. A Melmetal would normally be 4 hit KO’d by a Farfetch’d. But thanks to the reduction, it takes 7 hits to KO. This doesn’t come up often, but when it does you’ll want to find something that can efficiently attack into such Pokemon.

Retreating

Finally, retreating into a fresh Pokemon to tank a hit can also be a way to slow your opponent down and buy you a turn or two. This can be risky when you don’t have X-Speed or Leaf because you also give up Tempo by discarding an energy card. Retreating too often can slow you down, giving your opponent a chance to spread damage and set up consecutive KOs.

Retreating into a powered up attacker can also be a way to gain tempo. You swap out a weaker attack for a stronger one, shortening your clock. Crucially, one of your Pokemon being knocked out means a free switch in. While your opponent gains a point, you should hopefully be able to send in something much more powerful to take down your opponent’s remaining Pokemon. In some scenarios, if you don’t have an answer to the opponent’s follow up, it’s correct to delay the knock out until you draw into one.

The “Fourth” Point

In the Pokemon TCG there’s a concept called the “7th Prize”. Ever since the introduction of Pokemon ex in EX Ruby & Sapphire from 2003, there have been multi-prize Pokemon in the TCG. These change the math on how tempo is determined because they give up 2 (or in some cases 3) prizes instead of 1. This means that instead of having to KO 6 Pokemon, you only need to KO 3. The trade off is that Multi Prize Pokemon are much stronger than their single prize equivalents. The “7th Prize” refers to switching in a single Prize Pokemon at some point during the match to force your opponent to effectively win “7 Prizes”, i.e. 3 ex Pokemon and 1 single Prize Pokemon. This extends the game by 1 turn.

In Pocket, you’ll hear about the “4th Point”. I think it’s important to note that this concept is fundamentally different than in the TCG. The “4th Point” in Pocket just means forcing your opponent to fight the much stronger ex Pokemon, either by having to knock out 2 in a row, or knocking out 2 single Prize Pokemon followed by an ex Pokemon. This strategy does not increase the number of KOs needed to win–it will always be either 2 or 3, but does make it harder for your opponent to get those KOs. In practice, it’s hard to say how effective forcing a fourth point is in terms of generating Tempo. If you send in a Pokemon that can live multiple turns, you have bought yourself time and slowed your opponent’s clock. But if your opponent can one-shot whatever you send in anyways, it doesn’t really matter if it’s a Pokemon ex or not.

Closing Thoughts

It took me a long time to wrap my head around Tempo and Card Advantage, and I’m learning new things about it every day. The definitions and examples I’ve listed here are what I think about whenever I’m playing a game or building a deck and I’ve found that doing so has made me better at the game. Hopefully some of this stuff will make sense to you and help you get better as well!