One of the most played Pokemon cards at the moment is Azelf from Legends Awakened. Its Poke-Power “Time Walk” is often taken for granted, but it seriously is one of the best Powers in the game.
Being able to rescue a Magikarp or your Luxray LV.X from your prizes is huge. In the past, you would have to hope to pick the right prize when you got a knock out. There was much more luck involved, so you would be forced to play multiples of certain Pokemon to make sure your prizes were never an issue.
Azelf has eliminated this need and allows you get away with playing singles copies of Pokemon in your deck without losing any consistency.
Aside from being able to pluck a Pokemon from your prizes, you get to look at all your prizes. If you can remember what your prizes were when you put them back down, you will essentially be playing with your prizes face up the remainder of the game. This is crucial because it allows you plan your turns even better than before. You now know what your bonus card will be for getting a knockout. This is incredibly important and can literally help you snatch victory from the jaws of defeat if you play things correctly.
I really like to drop Azelf early on if possible…turn 1 or 2 is best. You will know exactly what prizes you are working with for the whole game and can plan accordingly.
How are you going to remember what your prizes are if you put them face down again? I admittedly am not very good at memorizing what my prizes were and how I positioned them, but here are some things I try to aid my memory.
I am a big fan of mnemonics, so I try to organize my prizes using memory aids. For example, there are 3 basic different types of cards: Energy, Pokemon, and Trainers. What I will do is put my prizes back, grouping them by which of the 3 types they are. I arrange them like this:
Energy (top)
Pokemon (middle)
Trainers (bottom)
I arrange them in that order so it is alphabetical and I won’t forget which are where.
Next I will put the cards back in their rows in alphabetical order. For example, say you have a Roseanne’s Research, Bebe’s Search, and Expert Belt prized. You could put them down in alphabetical order, Bebe’s Search, Expert Belt, then Roseanne’s Research.
But what if you forget which cards you had prized? Just putting them in alphabetical order won’t help you too much.
What you could do is use the first letter of each card and make an acronym or acrostic. BER would be the acronym for these cards in the current order, but you could arrange them any way to help you remember better. You could think you have “beer” prized, and that might help you remember Bebe’s, Expert Belt, and Roseanne’s.
If you make and acrostic, an example might be “Babies Eat Rutabagas”. Anything to help you remember the first letter of the card.
Of course, you are going to have to think of these memory aids fairly quickly. Maybe during your opponents turn after “Time Walk” would be a good time to think out how you want to remember your prizes, as they should still be fresh in your mind at that point.
One last thing you can do is turn a card sideways if you either know you need it or don’t need it. For example, you might want to turn a Call Energy in your prizes sideways if you already started with one.
EDIT: There is a ruling that you cannot orient your prizes differently than they were to start, so you can’t turn a card sideways or change from 2 rows of 3 to 3 rows of 2, or anything like that; you have to keep them how the were to start, only changing the positions of the prizes. My bad!
Thanks for reading and please comment with any techniques you use to help you remember your prizes.
-Adam
