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Who gets to choose how damage counters get put on, or are there rules for it?
I have a Primeape with the attack:
Karate Chop Does 80 damage minus 10 damage for each damage counter on this Pokémon.
If it has 50 damage on it in five 10-damage counters, that attack will do 30 damage, but can I combine the 50 damage into one 50-damage counter so that it does 70 damage?
Primeape from Plasma Freeze has this ability, Karate Chop, however the ability doesn't care if you consolidate counters into something else like higher value counters or dice, counters as referred to by this are the standard 10 damage counter. Changing to some other method to show the 50 damage on the primeape does not change the effect of the ability, effectively the ability does 80-[the total damage Primape has taken].
Generally though I would suggest using Dice to mark damage, it's a lot simpler to have 2d6 on the card than it is to cover it with 8 counters (as the 9th would knock it out) This is however an opinion there, and temper it with how things are enforced where you play and by your opponents.
Yes you may, damage counters are only used to denote if the pokemon card still have enough HP to keep fighting. If you have watched official tournaments, you may notice they would rather use dice to show the damage counters since it require less component. Each die can be used for 6 different damage values. You can rotate the face of the dice to denote the damage (x10pts). It's more efficient since most tournament pokemon have huge HP. So two or more dice is enough for each pokemon instead of 20 or more 10pt counter tokens.
