Please post this under TCG strategies Pojo! This took a while to type up.

Hi, this is Allen, with an article discussing each type. I will not say a
type is bad because I don't like it...I'll talk about the good and bad things
for each type.

Fire: Fire pokemon usually have strong, cheap attacks, but with the sometimes
annoying discard cost. Before fossil, almost all fire pokemon had to discard
energies to use strong attacks, Ninetales, Arcanine, Charizard (this guy
sucks though). All with the exception of Rapidash, and plus fire never really
had a *strong* starting basic. But now, fire has fossil magmar, a *VERY* fast
basic with good HP and a low retreat cost. This also gave Haymaker more
choices, as they could use fire now...for 1 energy, fossil magmar does 10
damage with the smokescreen effect, for 2 fire it does 20 damage with the
chance of poison, this card is just plain good.

Water:  About 9/10 water decks are based around Blastoise, as this gets
annoying, because it's the same old thing over and over again...2nd turn,
breeder in blastoise, evolve into gyarados/dewgong, you know the rest. Also,
before fossil, water never had a *strong* starting basic, the same thing with
fire. Now water has Articuno and Lapras. Lapras also stops mime from
destroying rain dance. Lapras is a good and fast starting basic. But with
Articuno, what you have is a slow starting basic, and works only good with
blastoise's rain dance, because its attacks cost 3 or 4 water energies. As
for the bad part about water, most attacks take up a lot of water energies to
do good damage. Also good pokemon for the water type are Poliwrath and
Golduck. Both of them remove energies.

Fighting: Fighting usually has low cost attacks for big damage, but not very
much effects to the attack besides damage. Fighting used to be a good type to
use, but now I don't think it will work very well by itself. The main reason
is with every single type having at least one pokemon with a resistance to
fighting. Scyther is also being put into a lot of decks. It has an OK basic,
Hitmonchan, the reason why it's OK is because of all the fighting resistance
that a lot of pokemon have.

Lightning: Lightning might not be a very good type to play by itself either,
mainly because of the weakness to fighting. Every lightning pokemon except
Zapdos has a weakness to fighting. But Zapdos isn't enough to prevent the
weakness to fighting because every single one of its attacks (for both
Zapdos') use 4 energies, so it's very weak to energy removal. Lightning also
has good pokemon that use good bench destruction attacks, but it tends to
hurt itself a little too much. It has a good basic, Electabuzz.

Grass: Most grass pokemon use attacks that have status effects, although the
attacks usually don't do very much damage. Overall, Grass is a pretty good
type, except for the huge weakness to fire, because *most* grass pokemon with
a weakness to psychic aren't that good. It has probably the best basic in the
game, Scyther.

Psychic: This is my favorite type in the game. This type is based around have
attacks and powers that do something with damage counters. Some examples are
Curse, Damage Swap, Invisible Wall, and Meditate. Before fossil, mr.mime used
to be excellent, now, it's not as good because more and more pokemon are
showing up with ways to counter mr.mime. Also, most psychic pokemon have low
HP. This type has the most incredible basic in the whole card game, IMO, it's
the movie mewtwo, this card does a quick 40 damage, and when used with
Computer Search or Item Finder, you can discard psychic energies to make it
like the discard cost is a good thing! This card can be powered up in 2
turns, ready to do 40 damage.

There, i've talked about every single type, talked about its good and bad
points, and listed some good basics for the type.

(Pojo, please don't post my e-mail address, people can reply by sending their
own articles, right?)

-Allen