Hello! After the incredible work from the team, custom formats are now available! This means I was able to implement my own custom format called Legacy Select. This custom format is a celebration of the first 25 years of the Pokemon TCG, having a small subset of cards from the entire series.
My goal was to create a fun format that allows some older, iconic strategies to come back while allowing some weaker ones to finally get a chance to shine. A lot of effort has been put into this format to so make at least every card useful. Every single Pokemon in Generation 1 and Generation 2 are represented with their full evolution lines, along with many of their other regional forms.
The focus was on encouraging players to evolve and not get dunked on too easily, like in more modern formats. To ensure this playstyle, I also had these restrictions when selecting cards:
No mutli-prize cards, such as ex or V-Pokemon
No format-specific mechanics, such as Dark Pokemon, Pokemon BREAK, Lv. X, etc.
No Delta Species or Baby Pokemon
Only 1 Pokemon of each name
Only yellow-border cards can be selected
Rules for the game come from the 2020 ruleset.
Ready to play??
If you’re interested in playing, you can check out all the cards and some information on the format website that made, here: Legacy Select Format - By Jonathan Holmes (crait) (This website also has a deck builder with 35 additional starter decks.)
If you’d like to give it a shot, I’d suggest taking a look at the 35 starter decks that I’ve made to give you an idea of what’s possible. Each deck has also been created on TCGOne so that you’re able to use it, clone it, modify it, etc.
“No Delta Species” booooooo, delta species is the best species.
In all seriousness, this seems kind of interesting, and I hadn’t realized custom formats were this far along in development! Hope you’ll be able to tweak the lists as testing is done, though!
Also, Acerola’s Premonition isn’t on TCGONE, right? You might to replace it for Ghetsis or something like that in the Ghost Lock deck. Unless there’s been a big expansion update I’m not aware of as well as a custom formats update, the card pool only comes up to Chilling Reign. (As a matter of fact, Double Turbo Energy is in a lot of these decks.)
Rapid Barrier needs Air Balloon or Float Stone or some similar card instead of Escape Rope. Or at least Recycle Energy.
(Wait a minute, I thought this was a format for pre-constructed decks, but these are just samples.)
Haha. I love that set, but it misrepresents the identity of some of the Pokemon that I wanted to keep in tact. There are still some cards from those sets, but no type-shifted Pokemon.
Yep! These are examples that I came up with. Some can surely be more optimized, but I didn’t want to spoil the fun for some people. I know of one specific deck that could be greatly overhauled with the removal of a single card and a few tweaks, too, but I also don’t have enough time to update things since these are just examples.
I do plan on doing a few more revisions after enough people play and find some broken combos or obvious missing pieces that would make things more fun, so I’m open to suggestions and changes. However, the current list has basically been locked in for over 2 years, at this point, so I’d like to keep the current list around for a little before changing it.
Fortunately Eelektrik NVI is an easy replacement for Flaaffy EVS. Gladion or Town Map is probably the smart replacement for Hisuian Heavy Ball, Narrow Gym can replace Collapsed Stadium, Ghetsis could work well as an Acerola replacement, Acro Bike is similar to Trekking Shoes, and Cursed Shovel is similar to Spirit Mask.
Parasect does not keep the cards in the Discard pile for Riptide, in that Feraligatr deck. If Riptide doesn’t shuffle any cards back into the deck, it doesn’t do any extra damage. Just a heads up. See the WOTC Erratas page.
