This article was produced in collaboration with our partners Pokémon Organized Play.

Building a Pokémon Trading Card Game deck is a hugely exciting task, but if it’s your first time, it can be quite an intimidating one. How much Energy should you include? How many Pokémon cards? How many Supporter and Item cards? These are the questions you’ll be asking throughout the process, whether it’s your first or 50th deck, so don’t worry too much about getting everything right the first time around.

In this guide, we’ll take you through how to build your very first Pokémon TCG deck to get it tournament-legal and competitive, while also giving you some tips that you can take into every deck you build thereafter.

Before you start throwing cards into your deck, you first need to be aware of the basic rules around building a Pokémon deck.

These are the absolute basics to get right with any new Pokémon deck-building exercise, and these rules cannot be bent or broken. The good news is that restrictions like these help keep the game fair and balanced, while also offering a starting point for building a new Pokémon deck.

Energy is a crucial component of any Pokémon deck. You need Energy to attack with your Pokémon, but it’s a resource that ends up in the discard pile for several reasons, and you can’t always rely on having the cards in hand to get it back.

As such, you want to start any deck with between eight and 12 Energy cards.

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