A common rhetoric I hear about TCGs is that they’re just ‘games of chance’ that require you to be lucky rather than skilled. At the end of the day, you are drawing a random card every turn, so how could it not come down to luck? Today I’ll be showing you why that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Let’s start by looking at the data, specifically Pokémon’s, one of the most notorious TCGs for “luck-based gameplay.” Some cards require you to literally flip a coin to get a better effect, yet even in such a luck-based game, skill is still the deciding factor. We can see this demonstrated by the 2026 world champion, Andrew Hedrick.
Hedrick began playing the Pokémon TCG competitively in April of 2020. Since then, he has competed at 33 regionals and has an average placement of 25th across all of them. For context, these tournaments have an average player pool of around 2,500, so at every tournament Hedrick attends, he’s consistently beating 2,475 other people.
The data shows that luck isn’t the main factor for doing well, but what, then, is making the game skillful? You start off with seven random cards and you draw a new random one every turn. How in the world does Hedrick keep winning?
One of the key ingredients to performing well in a TCG is oftentimes the most overlooked: deckbuilding. When you enter a tournament, you can only bring the 60 cards that you designated beforehand, no more, no less. Each turn, you’re drawing a random card from your deck, so your job as a deck builder is to maximize the statistics in your favor.
The reason why every TCG puts a max on how many of a specific card you can have in a deck is simple. Statistics is incredibly important, and being able to push the numbers just a bit in your favor is a complete game changer.
In the vast majority of Pokémon decks, people use four copies of Lillie’s Determination. Most of the time you won’t use all of them in one game; that’s not the reason that you play four copies. You put four copies of one card in your deck just to increase your odds by a small percentage.
With one copy of a card in your deck, you have a 2.17% chance of drawing it each turn. With four copies, that number jumps to 8.7%. Your goal as a deck builder isn’t to build a deck that can win a game; it’s to build a deck that can win games consistently.
Beyond the statistics there’s an even more, albeit much less quantifiable, skill in playing TCGs. Every turn you can have anywhere from zero to 40 cards, depending on the TCG you’re playing. As your hand grows in size, and the options on your board grow, the number of permutations of decisions that could be made grows exponentially.
Chess is one of the hardest games ever made, and there are typically around 20-40 possible moves on the board at any given moment. Most TCGs follow those numbers relatively closely.
If you play one of your seven cards, you’ll open the option of two attacks being used. If you play a different one, you could draw six new cards that then create a whole new array of possibilities. In TCGs, there are always an incredible number of moves you can make, leading to only the best players being able to find which ones are actually going to win them the game.
At the end of the day, you draw a random card every turn in TCGs, and some games do just come down to luck. The vast majority of the time, though, truly skilled players can win through a combination of game knowledge, skilled decision making and knowledge of their probabilities for what that next card is going to be.
Thanks for reading this week’s edition of the Card Corner! On an unrelated tangent, for those local to the Storrs area, there’s a TCG trade night at Action Packed on Oct. 23rd at 5 p.m. Alongside that, there’s a tournament on Nov. 7th at 2 p.m. for Pokémon! If you’re interested in TCGs, show up to the events! The community is incredibly kind and very welcoming; I hope to see you there! Until then, have an amazing mid-terms season, and I’ll see you back here in two weeks for another edition of the Card Corner!
