What are good principles for making a deck?
I’m currently trying to make a toolbox deck and am thinking about what the fundamental principles are that make decks good to help in building one and wanted to know what other people’s views were or if I’m way off the mark, also maybe people who are veterans to the main line tcg can provide insight too for things that apply to pocket. But this is what I’ve come up with so far:
Minimum rng (consistency). Having decks that win based on rng aren’t fun and are a nightmare to plan around, you have to adapt on the fly to your rng as well as react to your opponents strategy at the same time. Sleep, misty, zapos, etc. as some examples seem crap. Winning based on a flip isn’t rewarding either as your wins are down to probability rather than skill. There’s already enough rng in your deck order and the hand you pull. I try and avoid any coin flip based cards at all unless it’s possible to still win assuming I always flip tails. Anything that reduces rng is always helpful.
Minimum evolutions. 2 stage evolutions seem to not be great as they’re very slow to set up and aren’t good unless you have a solid wall to hide behind. They add a lot of useless bulk to decks in the case where the first 2 stages are useless in active. And even then they can be played around by hitmonlee/electabuzz, sabrina or rush decks knocking them out before they can set up.
energy efficiency. Decks that have better energy to damage/retreat cost ratios are better as you can output more damage quicker. Low retreat costs allow you to react to what’s on the field and high ones only work if you have a nuke in play that will just steamroll anything in front of it and has no need to switch once set up. Pika decks are the best examples of being energy efficient with low energy requirements.
Reliable energy generation if needed. This is essentially a solution to requiring energy efficiency. Serperior and gardevoir are good energy generators as they provide consistent energy generation (but are sadly 2 stage evos) Serperior is better due to doubling the amount of energy on the field but gardevoir is more consistent with slab. Moltres/misty are crap due to rng and worse than no energy generation in a way as you put energy-costly mons into the deck with the expectation you’ll flip decent without the guarantee you’ll get the energy. No energy generation can also work but requires low cost mons or a wall if they’re expensive. All in all current energy generation methods aren’t super reliable but this might change in the future.
No single type weakness. Having a single type weakness in your deck mostly means you’re scuppered if you go up against that type. This is difficult to avoid but type+colourless or fighting is better than any single type decks in this regard.
type effectiveness. Not really much to say here having multiple cards with different damage types to cover supereffectiveness is good but decks that are multi energy usually perform always worse and strictly colourless attackers of one type usually have poor damage. This might change in the future with new expansions though.
Damage output. a minimum of 90 damage basically means you can 2hko any Pokémon. But sometimes a hitmonlee + a ~120 damage mon is better suited. There’s lots of strategies in this department to get the points that don’t require high damage. Like victrebell, poke flute and pidgeot. So it’s hard to say what’s right here
At least One High hp mon to tank big hits. You could also play rush decks instead so they don’t have time to set up big hitters
Maybe cards will come out in the future that negate some of these points and there are existing strategies that already do, some of which I’ve covered. but I feel these are the fundamental building blocks.
EDIT: just to be clear this isn’t advice just my take on things, I know having a deck with all of these isn’t possible I just want a framework for evaluating a decks strengths and weaknesses based on what principles it excels or falls short in.