Team Rocket Returns - Prerelease

I surveyed the room from the top step of the three-step riser. Uh oh. What was I thinking. The room was laid out in rows of tables with chairs on either side. To my left the line was already forming to get registered. They say the definition of poise is knowing how to look at ease in unfamiliar situations. I took a breath, grabbed my ten-year old daughter by the hand, and descended into the room.

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About a month prior I had encouraged my Pokemon loving daughter, Sarah, to attend a local Pokemon Gym meeting run by an IT geek buddy from work. In casual conversations with Kim, the bud, I'd discovered that he was pretty hardcore, having been invited and underwritten to travel to Florida to be a judge in the World competition of Pokemon TCG. I was impressed. He told me about the local Gym he runs and I thought of Sarah. She wasn't really a card player, but the way I see it, Pokemon is a great strategic and mathematical game and I'm always keen on ways to involve her in activities that make it cool to think. LOL.

So, we went on Friday night.

The Gym meets in Dan's chem lab classroom at the local high school. Dan and Kim run the Gym together, with considerable help from Kim's wife, who also plays. As we walked to the room the first time, Sarah clutched her card collection in the obligatory notebook with the clear card holder pages. I brought a book and some grad student papers to read. We walked down the unlit deserted hallways, surrounded by endless banks of shiny lockers. We turned the corner and there it was: an open door with a carpet of light spilling out on the sidewalk. On the door hinge a small sign hung, declaring this a Pokemon Gym.

Inside I was immediately struck by the variation in ages of the boys, yep, all boys. No. Wait. There were two girls, not counting Sarah. The ages of all ranged from around eight years old to high school, and then of course, the adults. A couple of adults had brought things to do while they waited out the time.

Sarah is very poised, partly from being dragged around to various events I have to attend as a professor. She quickly slid in to the action, and before I knew it she was playing the card game with another kid. I tried to read. Then I tried to grade papers, but I was drawn in to the scene. I watched two high school kids play. They barely spoke, and when they did it was either goofy high school banter or exclamations about cards played. Eventually, one won and both immediately stuck out their right hand and said "good game."

By the end of the night I was thinking about making a deck and giving it a shot.

By the second visit, I was playing. Losing, but playing.

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So here we were, we two, at the Prerelease of the new Team Rocket Returns theme deck. We recognized our new friends from our local Gym. We chatted with them, and listened to them chat about cards they anticipated in the new deck.

This would be a terrific competition for us newbies. You could not bring your own deck. Everyone would get half an hour to make a deck out of the new series of cards, and we would play with the deck we made, in a round robin tournament. The big bonus was keeping the cards.

Neither Sarah nor I won a game. But we got to meet interesting people! At one point I was sitting at the last tier table with three college age kids who were joking with each other about their failures. "Dude, we're at the loser table. We went to Worlds and we're at the loser table. How did we get here, man?" Lots of good natured laughter about it.

Team Rocket Returns is a great theme deck of DARK Pokémon cards. I couldn't resist and have made my first deck (the one I keep tweaking and playing) a dark deck. Of course that leaves me vulnerable to other sorts of cards, but hey, I'm just trying to win a game once in a while.

More on deck tweaking in another entry.