Some beginner tips (more coming later, once I get more time to put more tips down):

If you're a total beginner:

Buy a pre-constructed deck, preferably one without Fire. For reasons explained later, Fire isn't a very good choice right now, especially for beginners. After you've got your deck, play four or fivegames, and if you like the game, buy a few booster packs. Now that you've got some cards to trade, look at the cards that you have in your deck. Which cards didn't help you? Find at least five cards that you didn't like, and either replace them with your boosters, or trade for replacements. Now, play some more, and continue the "find and replace" idea. After you've run out of cards to trade, as well as cards to change in your deck, it's time to find a good deck type to emulate. To find this, check the Basic Deck Types section on this site. If you're really bold, you can figure out your own type, but it'll probably cost you a lot of money to find a good type by trail and error. After you've found a type you like, check you deck to see what cards go along with you chosen type. You should try to buy some more cards, if you can, and trade for some cards that go along with your deck type.

Later on, look at this:

As cool as Charizard looks, he will rarely win you games. He takes waaaay to long to get out, and you'll have a very hard time attacking with him, especially if you've drained all of your other fire energy on other stuff. He's a huge newbie magnet, and if you can get him in a pack, trade him to newbies for a LOT of cards.

Bill and Professor Oak are both very good cards. Try to get three or four Bills, as he is cheap, and thus, won't cost you much if you get him from someone who has lots of cards. Oak might be harder
(or at least more expensive to get), as he's less common.

Always put cards that have resistance to the weaknesses in your deck. If you play Psychic or Fighting (weak to Psychic), put Clefairy/Farfetch'd/Chansey. If you play Water (weak to electric), pair it with Fighting.

Include lots of energy! Although energy might seem like a waste when you you have "better" cards to put in. If you don't yet have lots of Bills and Prof. Oaks, put at least 24. If you play with lots of the aforementioned cards, you can likely get away with 20 or 21.

Energy Removal is always good. Super Energy Removal is alwmost always better. Both of the cards totally disrupt your enemy, and are thus very good. Put them in to lots of different decks, and see if they work for you as well as they work for me... ^_^

Try these tips out! The, tell me what you think of them, as well as any else you would add! My email is gomf@angelfire.com, or, you can post your tips on the Bulliten Board, and I'll add them to this page if I think they're good.

The creature on the POKeMON page are from the game POKeMON, and they are creatured by Nintendo, Creatures, and/or Game Freak, and are their property. The layout of the GOMF site, as well as much of the content, is made by me Tim Reilly/Moogle/GOMF and is copyright 1997,1998,1999