The Deck Out goes global: Spain

Burgos Cathedral in Burgos, Spain

Hi everyone!

As promised, this week, I’ll be making 3 entries and that’s why there will be another entry already today. I’ve been very busy during the last few weeks so I’m happy to get back to normal rhytm and concentrate on the blog.

Today’s The Deck Out goes global’s country is a country, which I’ve personally visited – Spain. Did you even know that Spain had an Organized Play? I didn’t and in fact they don’t even have a one! However, that doesn’t stop them from playing Pokémon TCG and hoping that once their community is big enough, they’ll one day have an Organized Play in their country, which will lure even more players into the community. So, let’s look what The Deck Out goes global has in store for today!

SPAIN


Population: 46 million
The most famous living person: Enrique Iglesias
The most famous company: SEAT
Currency: Euro
Fun fact: Bullfighting is considered an art as well as a sport and popular attraction. It is also the biggest and most controversial sport in Spain and is an integral part of Spanish history, art and culture with bull rings in all major cities and beyond.

Local Player Profile


My sources for this entry is a  12-years old Spanish player who has been playing the Pokémon TCG for 3 years and a 20-year old Spanish player who has played for one year. The 12-year old player is studying at Secondary School and he enjoys playing both Pokémon TCG and Pokémon Video games. He has won the Videogame Nationals of Spain in 2010. The 20-year old source is currently studying Fine Arts career at university.

It’s good to have two sources that are so different from each other because that way, I can get a realistic and two different points of view into Spanish Pokémon TCG.

Non-competitive playing and leagues

First of all, Organized Play doesn’t exist in Spain. I was very surprised to see so many Spanish players in ECC because of that. However, I guess all you need is Great Spirit of the Game and community and you are able to get players into Pokémon, no matter where you live. Since Spain doesn’t have Organized Play, they don’t have any official tournaments like BR, CCs, States or Even Nationals.

However, there is a very lively Pokémon TCG community in Spain in some card stores for example in Madrid and Barcelona.   In those stores, they Spanish players buy the Pokémon singles, booster packs, boxes, tins etc. and play and organize tournaments.

In Spain, there are no official leagues either since there is no organized play. The Madrilean players are working hard to change this fact by proving their competitive prowess. Popular Pokémon TCG-dedicated websites like SixPrizes and The Deck Out have helped them to stay updated on decks used in the current metagame around the world.

In Madrid, they have Pokémon TCG tournaments every week, Wednesdays and Saturdays. Each Wednesday there are about 9 or 10 people, but on Saturdays there are around 18 players. They use the current format to play, but in other communities they play with DP-On or EX Ruby and Sapphire-On since the tournaments aren’t official.

  

There aren’t a lot of competitive decks in Spain due the fact that not everyone is playing with the official format and most importantly, there aren't enough players that play the Pokémon TCG card game to have enough competitive decks.

Atmosphere

The atmosphere at Spanish tournaments is neither relaxed nor competitive, well, it also depends of the players that are attending to the tournament. If the most of the tournament players are very well-known players because of winning many tournaments, there is a tense atmosphere, if not, it's quiet.

People take care of their cards and decks when playing or trading, but some young kids left their cards on tables when playing or going to buy anything.

The atmosphere is mostly laid back, but Spanish players do get very competitive during matches because it’s a race to get that valuable cards everyone wants. By playing according the current format metagame, they improve their skills in order to prepare for the official international tournaments. This is part of their commitment to get organized play in Spain as soon as possible. Of course, they don’t forget the fact that they are playing to have fun, to relax and spend a good time with the rest of the group. Also, players don’t have any problem in lending their cards to other players.

Competitive playing and tournament organizing

TPCi is sending Spanish players the English material and also Spanish one, but most players prefer the English cards due to the scarce Spanish legal sets, which are: HGSS-UL-BW-EP.

The game is getting better in Spain; TPCi is thinking about visiting one of the tournaments in Spain and then think again, if it would be a good idea making an OP in Spain.

The number of tournaments depends on the area, Barcelona and Canary Islands have very few tournaments per month, but Madrid has them every week.

The tournament's organizers are always the same - the boss of the store - which the tournament is taking place organizes all the tournaments-

Spain’s local distributor is Asmodee. The company started giving Spanish players Pokémon TCG material with HGSS, before this, they had a horrible distributor called Panini, who gave them misprinted cards and not giving them important sets such as MD,RR,SV,AR etc.

Spanish players communicate and talk about Pokémon TCG in a website called  www.cartaspokemon.es . Players who read English use sites like SixPrizes, The Deck Out and PokeGym. Spanish players also have their own blog and forums, Pokémon Supporters (www.pokemonsupporters.com), where they offer the latest news of the TCG in Spanish, tournaments, decklists, articles on future expansions, etc. In the forums, Spanish players discuss in depth about any TCG-related topic about the current or future format.

Most players are creative due to the high price of some cards and make their own Rogue decks. People who built Tier 1/Tier 2 decks are also creative since they put in unbelievable techs - in my source’s opinion - that work for most match-ups.

Additionally for Madrid, there are also tournaments in Jerez, Tarragona, Valencia and Tenerife. Twice a month, there are tournaments in Barcelona, but they only play with cards in Spanish, so they are lagging behind the current format. What Spainlacks are official league leaders and professors to get every city coordinated to the same level.

To stay with the current format, Spanish players have to import English cards, but even then they have some troubles to get material. By the time when ECC was just around the corner, a big shipment of Next Destinies was supposed to arrive a week before the ECC, but only SOME OF IT had arrived ONE DAY BEFORE THE flight DEPARTURE to Arnhem. All players were quickly opening packs so they could lend the Mewtwos to the Spanish team. Thankfully, for Spanish players, there is such thing as team work.

Player base

 

The average number of people that comes to our tournaments is around 14 people and the number is increasing since Pokémon TCG is gaining more popularity at Spain.

However, the truth is that their entire country can't compete in Worlds because right now if a player wins a match against someone, almost every time he'll win against that guy. There are no more than at least 50 players that play competitive decks and most of them are from the Master Division, so the only Spanish' competitors that could make their way to TOP-xx of world would belong to Masters age division. In my sources’ opinion, the game has to increase faster than it's doing if Spanish players want to do well in every age division in the Worlds Championships.

Since game is getting bigger and will get even bigger in the future, new players are appearing and newer sets are coming to Spain. My source is hopeful that there will be Organized Play when a new rotation takes place, where they’ll have almost all sets in their national language. There are no age group division in Spain due the fact that the player amounts are still very low.

There aren't any players in Spain that almost everyone knows of, what my other source thinks are good players at his area such as Arturo Oviedo for being one of the best players at Madrid and for winning a Yu-gi-oh tournament at Worlds 2010,or Marco Casero for opening the first Spanish singles store, www.coleccionistapokemon.com .

The number of players in one of my sources’ area was almost non-existent. He remembers that, when he played my first tournament back in July, the average was hardly about 4-5 people. After they began to promote the game through their blog and spread the word, the number raised to a solid 22-23 people in a matter of a few months. He has no doubt that the potential for this game in the country is high, and that it can keep growing up. They made that much progress in just a few months, and he’s sure more people would be interested if there would be official tournaments in Spain.

The age division’s percentages go about like this in Spain: 85% Masters, 5% Seniors, 10% Juniors.

This year a Spanish team wnt to Arnhem for the European Challenge Cup for their first Play!Pokémon tournament. Mostly made of players from Madrid, the team had 10 Masters, 1 Senior and 1 Junior. Their best result in Masters was 5-3, so no Masters were able to reach the top32. However, they still had a great time because their Junior player Raúl Peña Azcueta finished 4^th in his first P!P tournament. The other Spanish players worth of mention are the  rest group who went to the ECC: Marco Casero, Damián Broens, Antonio Peña (PokéDad, father of Raúl Peña), Fernando Picatoste, José Yago de Alberto, Fernando Márquez, Jerónimo Márquez and Álvaro Carpio.

My source thinks Spanish players do have the potential to play and build decks at an international level, now their objective is Worlds and they are working to get to that goal. In only one year the player base has grown a lot and it will keep growing even more.

Conclusion

As you can see Spain has a lot of potential. It’s a big country with a lot of people so the potential for Pokémon TCG is huge for Spain. Getting an Organized Play in Spain would probably help them to get even more players just like my sources think and I’m impressed how much volunteer work, the players have already done to promote the game for new players. I’ve been there myself because I was there when we started to build the Pokémon TCG community of Finland from a scratch. And when I look at what the Finnish players and community has achieved worldwide, I have no doubts about Spain’s success as long as PCI gives the OP. I encourage PCI to give Spanish players a chance to grow their community by giving an Organized Play to them!

Thanks for reading and feel free to leave comments!

P.S. Remember that there will be a third update this week and it’ll be the first entry of the “Ask Esa” –series. It’ll probably be published somewhere around Friday.