MKCrimson Teaches Pocket - The Overkill Principle

Pokémon TCG Pocket's win condition is fairly easy to understand; get three Points before your opponent does to come away the victor. However, if our goal is to win as often as possible, we want to imbalance as many things in our favor as we can. This includes the core win condition of the game!

Point Values And You

Before going too deep, let's take some time to go over the Points values that exist in TCG Pocket as it currently stands:

1 Point: All non-ex Pokémon are worth 1 point. Generally, they will be more frail and provide some utility/damage. The most extreme example is something like Chingling, which has a miniscule 30 HP but gets to retreat for free and deny our opponent the use of Items. On the other end is something like Greninja, which is a mediocre attacker on its own but more than compensates with its Water Shuriken to either get past HP breakpoints or enable Cyrus.

2 Points: All non-Mega Pokémon ex are worth 2 points. To compensate for their increased risk (2 points is twice the progress towards victory than 1!), ex Pokémon are gifted with additional HP and threat potential. Compare something like Greninja ex to its non-ex counterpart; in exchange for being worth 2 points, it gains a whopping 50 HP and 40 damage on its attacking move while still providing valuable utility from its ability slot.

3 Points: New to the B series, Mega Pokémon ex instantly end the game when KO'd. The ones that are playable are absurdly tanky and either provide broken utility or broken damage. Mega Charizard Y ex is the most extreme example of the latter, able to delete literally anything (well, besides Oricorio) with Crimson Dive. Even a Stage 1 Mega ex such as Mega Altaria ex has relatively easy access to a 130 damage Mega Harmony while still possessing an astronomical 190HP, which is on par with the absolute largest non-Mega ex Pokémon.

No Kill Like Overkill - Imbalancing the Trade

Remember that the basic win condition is to score 3 Points worth of KOs. Any amount of Points more than 3 is Overkill - you do still win the game, but some efficiency was lost scoring the excess points. So the big question becomes how do I force my opponent to lose efficiency to win? The answer is to force the opponent to always Overkill us!

An easy way to force an overkill can be found in the following deck:

Suicune ex is a broken card draw engine thanks to Legendary Pulse, so we're incentivized to throw it into the Active slot as quickly as possible. At 140HP for a Basic, it also is unlikely to die quickly, meaning we can leverage its high HP to draw into our win conditions (Cyrus, Rare Candy, Greninja, Greninja ex) while keeping it healthy thanks to Indeedee ex and Irida. We are also still presenting an efficient damage threat with Crystal Waltz, so our opponent will eventually need to KO it. When they do, our opponent has 2 Points. Since we're trying to force an Overkill, our goal should be to make them KO another ex Pokémon. This turns their win condition from "score 3 Points" to "score 4 Points." If we can win a 3 Point game while our opponent is forced to win a 4 Point game, we come out ahead on efficiency.

Notably, we can almost always force a 3 Point game for ourselves thanks to the Greninja + Cyrus combo. If our opponent has a stray one-pointer on their Bench and tries to force a 4 Point game of their own, we can completely bypass that by dragging a frailer 1 Point KO target directly into play at any time. This is also part of how Mars became a premier disruptive piece in strong decks. She shines the brightest when forcing a 4 Point game from the opponent, as they now have far fewer resources after KOing a Pokémon ex. Scoring the last two points when effectively playing off the top of your deck is hard, doubly so if you are reliant on Cyrus!

Megas Are Broken - Overkill Plus

What's even better than forcing a 4 Point game? Why, forcing a 5 Point game! The concept is simple: Mega Pokémon ex have to be Bigger And Better to justify their extreme risk, so they're already innately efficient threats (again, assuming they're playable). Using their innate efficiency in conjunction with the Overkill principle, we can trivially force a 4 Point game with literally any fodder and a 5 Point game if we have two Pokémon (or one ex) that we don't mind using to build up our Big Bad Win Condition.

Laugh if you want, but this Mega Steelix ex brought by mrbass to Frappédrinker's Ice Cold Clash utilizes the Overkill principle to perfection. Skarmory is an absurdly efficient 1 Point threat, consistently threatening 50 damage for 1 Energy - 70 with a Rocky Helmet attached to it! Meanwhile, we're more than happy to use Brock to build up a benched Onix that we can then convert into a giant metal snake, ideally with a Heavy Helmet and support from Pokémon Center Lady to keep it in play and swinging as long as possible. Note, again, that Mars is here to make it even more difficult to convert Mega Steelix ex into Points.

Overkill On Another Axis - Oops! All One Pointers

Of course, we aren't bound by blood oath to just run ex Pokémon to imbalance the point trade. HP bars are another resource in addition to points we can use to force our opponent to Overkill us. If our opponent has to deal 200 damage to KO a 70 HP threat, that additional 130 damage was also wasted. Alternatively, we can run one-Point threats that have more HP than they're "supposed to" have for their point values.

Let's get one elephant out of the room now: Oricorio is broken. A lot of how we're going to win with this deck is forcing our opponent down to a Pokémon ex and no other threats and then slamming the cheerleader bird in front of them to tickle them to death. Think of this as a pseudo-infinity Point game we're forcing on our opponent.

Oricorio aside, the concept is of this deck is to win the games we actually have to play out with the Magnezone line. 150HP isn't a small amount by any means and is honestly unfair given that your opponent gets a whopping 1 Point if they manage to KO Magnezone. Mirror Shot adds a lot of "fake" HP as well; if our opponent needs two 120 damage attacks to KO Magnezone (say, from that Mega Steelix ex from earlier), the math is on our side that it can take three or more turns to actually KO us. Our Overkill metric has suddenly become our HP bars!

What Have We Learned Today?

The Overkill Principle can be summarized as "Force our opponent to inefficiently win the game by Overkilling us."