[Retro Pokémon: How do I play?] Part 4 - Extra Resources

Other than actually playing, you'll probably spend a good amount of time learning about the relevant cards and strategies in the various retro formats, coming up with decklists, and, if you're like me, posting about it online. This is not an exhaustive list but a few good places. 

The Pokemon 1999 discord is full of friendly people and good ideas for decks and strategies. There are also webcam leagues played there for those interested. Their website has links to other good blogs, videos, and resources, so I'll only call out a few of my favorites here.

Jason Klaczynski's blog gives a good overview of many retro formats including the official rules, key cards, sample decklists, and historical context. It's well-written, so I recommend reading through even for the formats you aren't considering playing.

Daydream Holic Night (the name google translate gives me) is a very cool resource from a Japanese player who is active in the Base-Neo Hall of Fame format. In addition to tournament reports and decklists, they also created a ranking of every card in the Base-Neo format with discussion about each one! This is excellent for learning about the strategies associated with those Japanese-only cards.

Retro Pokemon TCG has well-tested competitive lists and analysis primarily for the Prop 15/3 format. Posts are regularly updated with new tweaks to the decklists, which gives an inside look into the refinement process not often seen.

Pojo has a good explainer of the classic format rules as well as many extremely “of that time, of that place” deck lists and commentary from the meta as it developed.

Limitless is an online tournament software with a very nice deckbuilder app. You can set a few filters (set, type, trainer class, etc.) to quickly look through available options for a given format, then add them all into a clean, sorted decklist. Especially good for duplicating decklists and versioning them if you want to track changes. It also has a testing mode that allows you to draw out a few starting hands/turns to see how easily your deck bricks. Even if you are building your deck on TCG One and not using paper cards, I like to make it in Limitless first rather than the slightly clunkier TCG One interface.

Pkmncards is a more exhaustive database than the Limitless app and allows advanced searching, like searching by the text or color type of attacks. I find Pkmncards to be better for getting into a new set and Limitless for reviewing cards I already sort of remember what they do.

Bulbapedia has the complete text and setlists of all TCG sets, Western and Japanese.

That's all I have to share at the moment. Happy playing!