Pokemon Deck Tester

Welcome to the Pokemon Deck Tester main page.  The PDT is a program specifically tailored towards testing decks with as few variables as possible.  As such, you play against yourself, or a decently competent AI, with whatever decks you set up.  The intention behind this is that sometimes you want to try a deck to counter a popular deck, but now you don't need to "own" the digital cards like in PTCGO or Live, and you don't have to hope that you'll eventually be paired against the proper deck that you're aiming to play against.  Of course, this is just one example, but maybe you just want to play the game without having to face a human opponent, or you don't want to test a new deck build against a bad AI using a deck that makes Theme Decks look professionally built.

For tutorial/guide videos aimed at helping players go from zero to hero, or for PTCG video content that isn't hyper focused on only meta stuff, check out my channel at:

https://www.youtube.com/@ProfShepard

Features of the PDT:

- Every card that the Expanded format covers 

- Deck Builder (obviously, kind of card to not have one)  with all cards available to use.

- A Database to let you search every card on many different conditions (3rd pic shows it)

- An "Inspire Me" tab that picks a random card for you based on certain criteria, which then also shows some related cards to help you build a deck with.  It's sort of in place of the Deck Wizard from PTCGO.  It doesn't just hand you a terrible deck, but instead shows you combinations you could use to make your own terrible deck from!  Or it might be good, I don't know.

- A Custom Card Maker, see pic 4 and 5.  I figured since you're playing against yourself that being able to play with custom cards would be pretty nice, plus I haven't seen anything quite like this done before.  It's quite complicated, so there's a lengthy guide under the Card Maker tab.  The short of it is that you grab/make a custom card image in your preferred image editing software, then the PDT handles the rest based on your input.

- A Custom Rule Set Maker.  Have fun making all sorts of rule changes, like playing with Prize Points instead of Cards, turning off certain Win Conditions, and even a rule that allows any pokemon to evolve into any other pokemon.

- A decently competent AI that you can play against, with it being able to handle using any deck you give it, rather than it being limited to certain pre-built decks.

So enjoy the Pokemon Deck Tester,  and do let me know if anything breaks or isn't working quite right.  I'm a one man army here, there's only so much I can find on my own.

When you get into the download link, there will be a few .zip files.  Grab the one labelled PDT.zip, and it'll have a ReadMe.txt explaining further.  You can then choose which of the remaining .zips to download, as I've split them so you don't need to re-download over 8 GBs of files every few months, since not everyone has super fast internet.  This will enable certain cards to be used, so for example, if you don't want to use the older Gen 5/6/etc. cards, just download the current gen's .zip file and that's about all you'd need.

There's no auto updates, at least for now, so you'll need to redownload the PDT.zip and the current gen .zip, then just drag and drop the files from the .zips to replace them where you have them on your computer to update the game.

Future Update Plans / Priority List:

1 - Staying up-to-date with new sets being released.

2 - Custom Content; I have the Card Maker and Rule Set Maker done, but there may be other custom content I could include that I currently don't have.

3 - AI opponent to play against; This is pretty well done, but at the same time will never really be done, seeing as I could take another year just tweaking numerical values to make the AI just a bit smarter.

4 - Cover every Pokemon card printed; Currently hahahaha no.  This is a VERRRY far off goal, simply because of how long it's already taken me to get everything done that I have so far.  This isn't to say I don't want to do it, it's more that I'm being realistic and only have so much time in the day to do this.