Calculating Damage

Quite frequently when a beginner is evaluating which cards to include in his/her deck, they come across Pokemons with attacks that involve flipping a coin for total damage. A few of these attacks are Primeape's Fury Swipes, Giovannis Machamps Hurricane Punch, Dragonair's Slam, and Exeggutor's Big Eggsplosion.

When you're evaluating the attacks of a card, you should never take into account the maximum damage of a card. Rather, you should consider the average amount of damage done per attack. Moltres's Dive Bomb does 80 damage on heads, but if tails, it does NOTHING. The average damage that it does is 40 damage per attack, and at a cost of 4 Fire Energies, this is NOT a very good attack.

Consider Nidorina's Double Kick. It does 30 damage times the number of heads from two coins and it costs 1 Leaf and 2 Colorless to execute. Sure it has the potential to do 60 damage per turn, but it also has the potential to do ZERO damage that turn. So basically, it does 30 damage on average, and for 3 energy cards on a stage 1, that's only decent.

I generally like to avoid Pokemon's with flipping attacks. Of course I use them, but if there was an equivalent Pokemon that didn't require coin flips, I'd use it. Why? Because you'll know exactly how much damage will be done each and every round. By knowing that, you'll be able to think ahead easier and anticipate what to do in the coming rounds.

The same kind of thought should be applied to Trainer cards. PokeBall allows the retrieval of any Pokemon card from your deck if you flip heads. But if you flip tails, the card is useless and discarded. So on the average, only 1 out of every 2 PokeBall Trainers will be used. That's why it's not really a good card. The same goes with the Trainer Energy Charge and Fossil Egg.

One last example before I close the article. Consider the Pokemon card Geodude. For 1 Fighting and 1 Colorless, Geodude does 10 damage each time you consecutively flip heads with his Stone Barrage. Geodude has the capability to do unlimited damage to the opponent. So this is a great card, right? WRONG. Geodude really sucks, and sucks bad. Remember that if you flip tails the first time around, the attack does nothing. Basically for 2 energies, Geodude does 0 damage 50% of the time, 10 or more damage 50% of the time, 20 or more damage 25% of the time, 30 or more damage 12.5% of the time, 40 or more damage 6.25% of the time, etc. On the average, Geodude's attack probably does around 10 damage (I'm too lazy to calculate it all). For 2 energy cards with no status effects, that's an incredibly poor attack.

So next time you're considering which cards to put into your deck, don't be impressed by their maximum damage. Rather, consider the average damage of the card and compare it to other cards.