As a master kid strategist, Zane Nelson likes adventure, creativity and a good challenge.

He also likes to pull a few card tricks.

When it comes to a particular trading card game, few are better than the 15-year-old Auburn boy.

Nelson, a sophomore at Auburn Mountainvew High School, recently put his board game skills to the test. He captured his division at the Pokémon Trading Card Game Regional Championships in Salem, Ore., on April 18,

finishing with a first-place ranking and earning an invitation to compete in the June 27-28 national tournament at St. Louis.

Pokémon TCG tournaments – based on the ongoing Japanese animated series revolving around colorful combatant characters – provide an opportunity for youth to succeed at an intellectual sport and test their gamesmanship.

“It’s really fun and I like strategy games,” said Nelson, who finished in the top eight nationally at age 12, his highest placement on the game’s big stage. “This type of strategy is easy to learn and hard to master, so I enjoy doing that.”

Nelson went 12-2 in games played during the one-day tournament, culminating in a three-game finals victory against Enumclaw’s Quinn Warner. Regional champions received a trophy, a travel award to the nationals and a scholarship of $1,500, along with a Pokémon prize kit.

“He was a great player but he just had a minor problem that I took advantage of,” Nelson said of his battle against Warner. “He filled up his table with (non-attacking) cards that he couldn’t use.”

Competitors can put only six Pokémon in play at one time. Players draw and use Pokémon cards, each with individual strengths and weaknesses, in an attempt to defeat their opponent by “knocking out” their cards.

“I like sly, deceiving-type Pokémon, but they don’t always work,” Nelson said. “I generally like to play the powerful ones who can attack through anything.”

Nelson has been playing Pokémon TCG since he was 6. In that time, his card collection has grown considerably, to an estimated 100,000 cards. He said he has at least 12 cards of each of the 152 original Pokémon, whose roster has grown to nearly 500 characters today.

Pokémon has been a player in the Nelson household. David and Niki Nelson are tournament organizers who have been invited to judge the nationals. Their son, however, is the winning whiz kid.

“It just takes a lot of practice,” he said. “After you’ve been playing the game three or four years, you start to recognize patterns and what type of cards make a good, consistent deck.”

Nelson also plays tennis and baritone saxophone. He one day would like to become a computer programmer.