There’s a used bookstore near my in-laws that I enjoy stopping by when we’re visiting. One of the best offerings of this store (at least in kiddo’s mind) is the bin full of Pokémon cards up near the comics. The deal is that you can stuff a provided plastic bag (the kind that comes in board games to hold components) as full as you dare, take it up to the register, and they’ll just charge you a flat five bucks, no matter how many cards you fit into the bag. (You can also fill a larger box for a higher fee, or you can stuff a bag full of Magic cards from the next bin over, but our interest has always been in bagging our own Pokémon cards).

I’ve recently followed a couple of bots on Mastodon that promise to show “Random Magic: The Gathering Cards” or “Every Pokémon Card.” Following both of these reminds me how much I like trying to think through how the unique abilities of different cards (or miniatures, or whatever else) can be combined to win a game. The last time that I’ve really scratched that itch was when I was in grad school and got really into the X-Wing Miniatures Game. After spending a ton of money on the First Edition and realizing that I still wasn’t great at the game because I couldn’t be bothered to follow “the meta,” I got disillusioned when the Second Edition came out and made all my purchases semi-obsolete and the little skill I’d built up totally obsolete.

Turns out that explaining to kiddo how to pull off a victory against long odds in the Pokémon TCG scratches the same strategic itch as doing it myself, so she got to beat me, and I still had a satisfying game.