How to get a Pokemon TCG Online collection started fast! (Part 1 - Trainer Supporter Stadium)

Howdy y'all, my job for several years has been buying and selling TCG (trading card game) goods. Because of this, I have also had a lot of time to play around on the online side of things - it counts as actual work! Simulating trades and trying to figure out what cards are good both end up being a justifiable use of my time ;)

Anyway when you start out online and think "how the heck do I make a good deck", it can be awfully intimidating trying to get started owning enough cards to have anything actually decent thrown together. Losing games repeatedly by a hopelessly large margin is a discouraging experience for anybody, and can turn you off from the experience forever.

In the Pokemon TCG, the most important cards in most metagames end up being the various supporters and trainers. These are actually really easy to trade for online! What might cost $2-10 per card to get in your deck IRL costs very little online, at least if it comes from recent sets. Fortunately that currently goes for everything you need to play in the standard metagame.

First step you will need a few unlocked packs, either from your own "real life" booster packs, or maybe purchased from a place like ebay or another community. Second step, you also probably need to play some tutorial games (although you can play on the ladder too) to earn some tokens - you need at least 8 tokens to make a trade happen. If the trade works you get the tokens back so you can trade again, otherwise you are out of luck ;(

Third step after getting any packs or tokens you can navigate to the trade section with this button and then click trade, and create public trade

Fourth step there are some pretty straightforward 1 pack trades you can make to get nearly every single standard trainer, supporter, and stadium. I put off 1 normal set, Guardians Rising; because this set is the newest set you need to wait a week or a few weeks and the same type of trade will absolutely work at that point. Much more complicated are the 2 specialty sets, Double Crisis & Generations; because of their very limited & limited releases respectively, they can be hard to obtain; I will try to update with simple trade solutions for those later. ANYWAY the rest of these trades worked in 1 try within 8 hours :)

Fifth step just to clarify which codes you do need - in the case that I offered a Guardians Rising pack or Sun Moon pack (most of the time), it was because the set has some cards that are especially good or the set has an extremely high amount of trainers to pick up, so I would caution that trying other codes will probably burn some tokens or not work at all. Other standard packs (besides Roaring Skies) are all less valuable than Guardians Rising and Sun and Moon.

Primal Clash

Roaring Skies

Ancient Origins

Breakthrough

Breakpoint

Fates Collide

Steam Siege

Evolutions

Sun & Moon

That's it, you now have the majority of cards you need to make most possible decks! Without opening hundreds of packs, you can get started playing in a day or two. For any non-players you must be thinking "where the heck are the pokemon?" Fortunately, the common, uncommon, and even rare pokemon remain pretty easy to pick up. Unfortunately, the holo rare and ultra rare pokemon cards that you want can get a lot harder to pick up! In part 2 I plan to tackle how to get the rest of the cheap stuff, and in part 3 how to start picking up the more expensive stuff.

Please leave below: any advice for formatting if you thought this was an eyesore, questions about trades if you have them, excited "wow pokemon cards!" or "the heck am I looking at!" comments, or any other comment below :) and much love for any upvotes or resteeming <3