Remember when the Ex: Deoxys set came out? Well, here, they had a pre-release tournament. I saw the flyer in a store, and I just had to go. I persuaded my mom by showing her how many cards you got for that price. I don't know if I would have been able to if my only reason was my love for Pokémon, and the desire to compete. XD

Anyway, we each received 6 packs of cards to start, and we then built our decks with supplied energies. It was really cool, because there were many older people there, adults even, who were clearly still into Pokémon. I heard people cry things like, "I got the first Deoxys!" and things like that. I didn't, because I was concentrating on building my deck, but it was neat.

Well, I had a nice deck going, with some Rayquaza and Deoxys, and anything else that would help, and the battles began.

I lost two of them. I don't remember one, but the one I do remember was against a boy who was maybe two or three years older than me. His deck focused on a Beautifly. It had a PokéBody that allowed it to deal double damage after it had a certain amount of hits. Dang, that worked beautifully.

I had several tough Pokémon on my side, but it was no match for that bug. He creamed me. After the battle, we sorted through the cards, collecting ours. I looked at his Beautifly. "May I look at this?" I asked him, reaching out towards the card. "Sure," he said.

The holographic card seemed to be of legendary status. To work that well against a deck... it seemed like a single Pokémon had destroyed my deck, instead of 45 cards. I knew I had to try to get one of these. Handing the card back to him, we told each other "Good game," and waited for our next battle. Even though I lost, seeing that kind of power in trading cards was fun.