Pokémon TCG Pocket is currently a virtual landscape of possibilities. With only one set and one mini-set out now, the potential for players to set or break records in the game is quite palpable. As such, some players are, indeed, trying to set records, and one YouTuber already has.
On Friday, January 10th, YouTuber SneakyDragon posted a video on their channel announcing that they set the record for most damage in a single Player-versus-Player match of PTCGP. The YouTuber meticulously calculated things beforehand. Ultimately, it came out to 3,530 damage over the full span of 30 turns of gameplay.
How Did SneakyDragon Do This?
SneakyDragon and a colleague of theirs named Coby planned everything out quite carefully. Tons of forethought was put into setting this record, down to the need for the two to time their Red Card uses. Red Card was a big part of this plan, optimizing and reoptimizing their draws where needed.
But the core of the game plan was to use Celebi ex, Serperior, and Lilligant to amass a critical amount of Grass Energy for maximum coin flips and a heightened probability of maximum damage. We covered Celebi ex in a recent deck tech, but we didn’t cover the Energy-amassing potential of Lilligant. Still, its usage in the Venusaur ex Solo Battle event could not be emphasized enough. In that event, the card was a veritable menace to deal with, speed-wise.
All that in mind, this plan had a few potential setbacks.
Pokémon TCG Pocket‘s Limitations
The biggest potential pitfalls SneakyDragon and Coby had to contend with when trying to set this record were as follows:
- There’s always the potential for either player to get bad hands and subsequent draws. The mitigation by way of Red Card may not always be enough to stop plain rotten luck.
- The established maximum amount of damage an attack can deal in a single given turn caps out at 990. What this means is that the attacks that Celebi ex does in this effort have to yield 20 heads or the potential will be stifled.
- There are only 30 turns before the game determines a tie in PvP Pokémon TCG Pocket. For this reason, the second player is generally afforded 15 Energy attachments with their once-per-turn allotment. The first player is afforded only 14. This means that SneakyDragon would have to go second for this to work and have Celebi ex and Lilligant ready to go almost immediately, with Serperior Benched in the wings before Celebi can begin to cement the record.
- While PvP only has 30 turns, Celebi ex would need to defeat three opposing Pokémon by the 30th turn. For that reason, Celebi ex would need to be at its critical mass by the 26th turn or else SneakyDragon would not be able to defeat enough Pokémon in time.
- On the other end of things, Coby would need to be able to heal back as much damage as possible dealt by Lilligant before the 24th turn, as well as suffer zero points lost to SneakyDragon. However, this could not include damage prevention or mitigation by ways that stifle incoming damage.
How They Mitigated Factors
To this end, the pair devised two decks with optimal strategies. One, SneakyDragon’s, relied on setup for an offensive blowout at the end as mentioned. The other, Coby, relied on damage healing through a pair of copies each of Butterfree, Erika, and Potion. There was one more issue to factor into this record, but we will discuss that in a moment.
How Did This Record Go?
To put things bluntly, the record-setting effort went exceptionally well. You can see from the video below that the game went exactly to plan in the end, with SneakyDragon’s attempt yielding 3,530 damage altogether between Lilligant’s setup and Celebi ex’s final blowout.
However, you’ll see in this video that SneakyDragon had to reach out to The Pokémon Company and DeNA regarding one major issue with Pokémon TCG Pocket. This issue was that when flipping coins there is a small, yet significant delay between the flipper flipping and their opponent seeing the results of those flips. The problem comes when that attack knocks out an opposing Pokémon but does not yield the final point to win the game. The opponent has only a set amount of time (15 seconds) to choose their next Pokémon. If they don’t or can’t, the player times out. However, during that delay, the timer still runs, meaning the opponent has even less time to choose their next Pokémon.
That said, SneakyDragon and Coby miraculously got this done without scuffing the record. We don’t know if setting such a huge record will give them anything more than positive notoriety online, but one can always hope that it’ll do them some good in a bigger way too.
What other records are there to set in Pokémon TCG Pocket? Surely there must be many at this time. It’s the Wild West out there, and the getting is still good.
