Pokémon is a great game! I have a 6 year old and he’s been into the cards for about a year. I’m in my 40s and I used to play Magic: The Gathering back in the mid 90’s when Pokémon came out. Back then, the hit points and damage were low and the overall mechanics were fairly weak. Fast forward to last year when I hadn’t touched a CCG in well over a decade and a half. My son wanted the cards because they’ve been all the rage during the pandemic and I finally took a closer look at Pokémon The Trading Card Game.
Turns out things have changed a lot since the original cards game out, and 25 years in, this is a refined, complex game that requires strategy and planning! Naturally, it was hard for me not to dive back in, and now my son and I have epic Pokémon battles with the decks we’ve been constructing. But what I don’t see much of is decent analysis of how to actually use those cards! Most of the kids I talk to don’t even know that you can play a game with the cards, much less the quality of the game itself. In fact, since my son started playing about a year ago, he’s learned to read all the cards and their abilities, and he’s adding and subtracting three digit numbers in his head to calculate damage totals and healing abilities for his Pokémon’s hit points!
With that in mind, I wanted to take a look at how to use one of the more recent promotional card sets that was released. Chances are there were more than a few kids who got some Pokémon for Christmas and one of the most popular boxed sets out there is the Pikachu V-Union Celebrations box. This is a weird set of cards that looks absolutely awesome. However, what a lot of players might not realize is that it’s also an incredibly powerful set of cards if used properly, so I’ve decided to show you how you can use it! On top of that, I really believe it’s important to look at your cards and try to use a variety of commons and uncommon that are often ignored!
The Pikachu V-Union is actually 4 cards in one. It is exclusive to the Celebrations promo box, and comes with the 4 cards that make up the Pikachu V-Union, a promo Professor Burnett, 4 packs of Celebrations with 4 foil Celebrations cards in each, and two more packs (usually Battle Styles or Chilling Reign). And while it looks cool, the Pikachu V-Union can be a little confusing, not only in what to do with it, but also with how to even play it, so I’m going to give a bit of a breakdown here before we get into deck-building.
To play the Pikachu V-Union, you have to discard the four cards that make it up into your discard pile. You cannot play them individually, and you can’t just play them all at once when you have them in hand. Now, that sounds like an intimidating process, but don’t worry, it can be done! And if you look at the sheer power of the Pikachu V-Union, it’s more than worthwhile as well. Once all four V-Union cards have been discarded, the V-Union comes out of the discard and onto your bench. But how do you make a playable deck out of throwing away cards without crippling your chances of winning?
First off, there’s a solid clue with the inclusion of Professor Burnet in the boxed set. She allows you to search your deck for up to two cards and simply discard them. Bam, that’s half the V-Union in the bag! But you can’t just pull Professor Burnet in a pack…she’s a promo card that’s fairly uncommon. Not expensive, mind you, but not something you just happen across every day and chances are you’ll need more than one! So to build an effective V-Union deck, you have to include multiple ways to discard your cards without crippling your deck and tossing away things that are vital. Now, in this deck, I’ve managed to scrounge up 3 Professor Burnets (via trading with a friend). But that won’t cut it, so I went through all my trainers. Professor’s Research was a given, but those cards are lost, so you have to be careful using that one! As an aside….the full-art Professor’s Research we got from a pack of Celebrations is absolutely AMAZING-looking!
Anyway, the other trainers that seemed to work best were Alistair, who is basically a Hop/Hau that also lets you discard 1-3 cards of your choice (I only have 2), Milo (discard up to two, then draw 2 for each discarded card), and Zinnia’s Resolve which lets you dump two cards and then draw a card for each of your opponent’s Pokemon in play. With a mix of these trainers, you can easily cycle through cards, dumping V-Union cards in a variety of ways. This is a fairly trainer-heavy deck though, and because of that, some of those faster item effects get left by the wayside. However, you work with what you have on hand when building a deck and this is what I had to work with!
But just drawing and discarding isn’t enough. You need a bit more than just a single V-Union to make a deck, so let’s look at the Pokemon that I’ve used to make this V-Union deck. First off, there’s the Pikachu V-Union of course. Not only does it only require 3 energy to power its abilities, they’re utterly overpowered. You can pump energy into it from your discard pile, Paralyze an opponent and do 120 damage, block them from playing items and do 150 damage, or just thrash them with a full 250 hp hit. But powering that Pikachu up fast isn’t the only thing that wins a game. However, digging through our cards, I found an Electrode from XY Evolutions. Toss a Voltorb out, evolve it into the XY Electrode, and then when your V-Union drops, you can use Buzzap Thunder to attach the Electrode to your V-Union, immediately generating 2 Electric Energy and allowing you to use that V-Union right out of the gate if you have a 3rd energy to drop!
To get that V-Union out fast though, it was time to get a bit creative. The two cards I chose were the common Eevee from Evolving Skies and the uncommon Spiritomb from Sun & Moon Team Up. This is a $.25 uncommon that’s easy to come by if you can buy singles. I pulled one in a pack a while back and I ended up buying the other as a single for a quarter. Spiritomb has a colorless activation attacked called Spirit Compressor that allows you to search for up to 4 Pokemon from your deck and discard them. Yup! One energy to pull and ditch the V-Union then drop it on your bench (assuming there are no parts in your prize cards). And Eevee is almost as good with Vee Search, letting you pull up to three V cards from your deck and put them in your hand.
But what if you don’t pull them? To compensate, there’s a Furfrou and a Pachirisu, both with “Find a Friend” that lets you search your deck for a Pokémon and put it into your hand. Any card with the right energy requirements and the Find a Friend ability will work though! Toss in a few V Pokemon and some decently powered attackers and you’ve got yourself a good lineup! I used Togekiss-V from Vivid Voltage because I had one, and added a Raichu & Alolan Raichu GX Tag Team (alternate art) we got from a Sun & Moon – Unified Minds pack because my son really likes the card and it’s decently powerful. The remaining 6 or 8 Pokemon you choose don’t really matter, but it’s always good to have some complementary abilities! This is what I could manage with our card collection and they seem to work fairly well.
That’s about all there is to our Pikachu V-Union deck! There are some trainers and items tossed in to augment the core cards, but they’re mostly staples like Switch, Bede, Level Ball, and Sonia. Overall, only about half of the cards used in making this deck are really essential to running the V-Union mechanics, leaving opportunity for experimentation and tweaking to refine its effectiveness. My son and I have played this deck against some of our more powerful ones and it seems to hold up quite well. Out of the last five games, two of them ended up with a Pikachu V-Union out by the third turn, one of them with it fully powered as well. A couple times it was actually possible to get the V-Union out but it was harder to pull the energy than perhaps it should have been. Energy is generous in this deck at 19 electric, but like any card game, it’s still the luck of the draw!
Hopefully this gives you some ideas on how to use your new Pikachu V-Union cards in a deck! And have fun playing Pokémon! It might take a while to build a great deck, but that doesn’t mean you have to spend a fortune on the most powerful cards! Use what you have, mix and match, tinker with the balance, and most of all, have some fun! This is a deep game that’s well worth even adult players’ time!