Table Rules

1. Flip a coin. The winner picks who goes first.
2. Shuffle your deck and draw 7 cards.
3. Put one Basic Pokémon face down in the Active Spot, and up to 5 more face down on your Bench.
4. Set the top 6 cards of your deck aside, face down. Those are your Prize cards.
5. Both players flip their Pokémon face up, and the game starts.

No Basic Pokémon in your 7 is a mulligan: show your hand, shuffle it back, and draw 7 again until a Basic shows up. Your opponent may draw 1 extra card for each mulligan you took beyond their own, and any Basics they draw that way can go straight to their Bench.

A turn is three parts, and only the middle one is a menu.

Draw a card. Not optional. If your deck is empty when your turn starts, you lose on the spot.

Do any of these, in any order:

Action

How often

Put Basic Pokémon on your Bench

As many as you want

Evolve your Pokémon

As many as you want, but nothing that came into play this turn

Attach an Energy from your hand

Once per turn

Play Item and Tool cards

As many as you want

Play a Supporter

Once per turn

Play a Stadium

Once per turn

Retreat your Active Pokémon

Once per turn

Use Abilities

As many as you want

Attack. Attacking ends your turn, so it always comes last. You can also pass without attacking; just say so.

On the game's opening turn, the player going first skips the attack and can't play a Supporter, and neither player evolves anything. That turn is for setting up.

Most attacks are simple. Check the Energy, announce the attack, do the damage. When one gets complicated, this is the official order of operations:

1. Announce the attack, with the Energy attached to cover its cost.
2. Apply anything that could stop it, including the Confusion flip.
3. Make the choices the attack asks for, and pay what it asks you to pay.
4. Work out the damage, and place the counters.
5. Do everything else the attack text says.

The damage math in step 4 runs in one fixed order:

1. Start from the number printed beside the attack.
2. Add effects on your side, like attack boosts and Tools.
3. Double it for Weakness.
4. Subtract for Resistance (30, on modern cards).
5. Apply effects on their side, like "takes 20 less damage."
6. Place 1 damage counter per 10. Zero or less places nothing.

Two lines worth memorizing:

• Placed counters skip all of it. An attack that puts damage counters ignores Weakness, Resistance, and every damage shield.
• The Bench has no Weakness. Damage that reaches Benched Pokémon is never doubled by Weakness and never shrunk by Resistance.

After the attack, check every Pokémon that took damage, yours included. Anything with damage at or past its HP is Knocked Out: it goes to the discard pile with everything attached, the other player takes the Prize card or cards, and its owner promotes a new Active from the Bench. No Bench to promote from ends the game right there.

Between every pair of turns the game runs a maintenance step. Special Conditions fire in a fixed order: Poisoned, then Burned, then Asleep, then Paralyzed. Anything else that says "between turns" happens here too, and the player whose turn comes next picks the order of those extras. Then any Pokémon out of HP is Knocked Out, Prizes are taken, and the next turn begins.

1. Take your last Prize card.
2. Knock Out your opponent's last Pokémon in play.
3. Your opponent has no card to draw at the start of their turn.

Both players can win at the same moment; a double Knock Out on the last Prizes will do it. The answer is a tiebreaker game: set up fresh, 6 Prizes each, and the first Prize card taken wins. If you each win once but one of you wins in two ways at once, the double win takes it.

• Bring a deck list. Championship events want an exact, card-by-card list of your 60, and judges spot-check decks against it at any point from sign-in to the last round. The list is a promise that your deck hasn't changed mid-event.
• Sleeves are a uniform. All 60 must match: same design, same condition, solid single-color edges, nothing reflective. Official Pokémon art sleeves are fine when the border is one solid color. A scuffed or distinctive sleeve counts as a marked card, so bring a fresh set.
• Real cards only. No proxies and no altered cards. The one exception is a proxy a judge makes for you when a card gets damaged mid-event.
• Keep the table clear. Good-luck charms are welcome; food and drinks are not.

• Shuffle in the open, then offer the cut. After every shuffle, your opponent cuts your deck once or gives it a brief shuffle of their own. Either of you can ask a judge to do the shuffling instead, and nobody is allowed to be offended by that.
• Keep the board readable. Energy visible under each Pokémon, Prize cards spread out and countable at a glance, one discard pile, the Stadium between the two Actives. A judge should be able to read the whole game from a photo.
• Some questions must be answered. How many cards in your hand or deck, how many Prizes left, what happened this turn, and the text on anything in play are all public information. Your hand and what's still in your deck stay private.
• Notes are legal. You can write and read notes during a match on a sheet that starts blank. No codes and no ciphers; a judge can ask to read them, and a phone is not a notepad.

• A coin flip counts when it starts at shoulder height, turns over at least three times, and lands flat inside the play area. If you disagree about a flip, a judge decides, and a flip a judge has ruled on never gets redone.
• Dice have to be transparent or translucent cubes with rounded corners. Even is heads, odd is tails. You can always borrow your opponent's dice or coin.
• Keep a lively pace. The handbook's guidelines give a mid-game deck search about 15 seconds and the pause before playing a card about 10. Deliberately milking the clock is stalling, and stalling is a penalty.

• Most events play matches as best of three. After game one there is no coin flip; the loser of the game decides who goes first in the next one.
• Time being called doesn't stop the game dead. The players finish 3 more turns between them inside a 15-minute overtime.
• In a Swiss round an unfinished match usually lands as a tie; the exception is time called between games one and two or during game two, which hands the match to whoever won game one. In a knockout round somebody has to win: fewest Prize cards remaining takes it, and a dead-even game goes to a sudden-death tiebreaker game where the first Prize card wins.
• Show up on time. A player who was late, or who wandered off without a judge's permission, loses any match still unfinished when time runs out. The handbook calls it the Tardiness Clause, and it outranks every other tiebreaker.

Call a judge. If you are unsure of a ruling, disagree with your opponent, or saw something odd, call a judge. Penalties climb a ladder from a verbal caution, to a recorded warning, to Prize penalties that hand the other player a head start of 2 or 4 Prizes, then game loss, match loss, and disqualification. Honest mistakes live at the bottom of the ladder, and any penalty can be appealed to the Head Judge.

Sealed events like the shop's Build & Battle nights run smaller. You build a 40-card deck out of just the packs you opened plus the shop's Basic Energy, matches play to 4 Prizes, and the 4-copy limit is waived because you play what you pulled. You get 30 minutes to build, and there is no wrong deck.

The single biggest mental shift from the casual deck. In Gengar Gang every Pokémon is worth 1 Prize, so "knock out more stuff than they do" and "win" are the same sentence. In an ex format they come apart:

Pokémon type

Prizes

Non-ex

1

Pokémon ex

2

Mega Evolution Pokémon ex

3

Two Mega Knock Outs is a whole game. You are not playing a war of attrition; you are playing a sprint where each turn is worth a third of the game.

Before the first attack, decide which six Prizes you are taking. Three Knock Outs on their 2-prize attackers is the standard plan. Two on their Megas is faster if the chip math is there. Six on single-prize Pokémon is a race you will lose; do not plan it.

Then ask the mirror question, which Shadowy Concealment rewrites in your favor: which of yours can they afford to Knock Out? In the Dark Box the answer is "almost everything," and that asymmetry is the strategy.

If your attacker needs two turns to Knock Out and theirs needs one, you lose, regardless of HP. Chip damage is not a nice extra in ex decks; it is the difference between one-shotting and losing. The Dark Box's answer is game plan 3.

Boss's Orders wins more ex games than any attacker, because in an ex format the whole game is deciding what you are allowed to Knock Out. The Dark Box runs three, and drawing one starts a plan; it does not fill a turn.

• Going first, you cannot attack. Going second, Toxel's Call for Family makes the free attack a real turn.
• ACE SPEC: exactly one per deck, total. Not one per name.
• Shadowy Concealment does not stack. Three Megas in play still reduce by exactly 1.
• Rule Box Pokémon cannot be discarded to Gwynn. The Dark Box does not run her, and her presence in Gengar Gang is one more reason the two decks stay separate.

Habit from Gengar Gang

Why it fails in ex

Leading with the best attacker

It is worth 3 Prizes. Lead with something cheap.

Trading freely because everything is 1 Prize

Trades have prices now. Score them first.

Building the widest possible Bench

Wide boards feed Dragapult's spread and every Bench-damage attack in the format.

Treating chip damage as optional

It is how 230 beats 350.

Saving Boss's Orders for the end

The end arrives on turn four.