Alex Schemanske
Author Archive
Bio: I’ve played Pokémon for a majority of my life. I’m a student at Eastern Michigan University. Apparently, I look older than I am?
Thoughts on Players Cup II, Theories on the Play! Pokémon Team Challenge (the What??), and the Archenemy of My Dear Centiskorch, Inteleon VMAX/Frosmoth “The announcement of this event was something that I fully expected, and was happy to hear about. There are a lot of similarities between this event and the first Players Cup, but there are also some notable differences. My favorite change is that there’s no longer an invitational where one of the favored players gets to skip the hardest part of the Cup. There is also the new method of qualification. Rather than rely on Event Tickets, we now have Tournament Keys, which are exclusively for the Players Cup. The Tournament Rep system has also been redone into a much…
Thoughts on the Format as a Whole (Spoiler: It’s Fast) and Centiskorch VMAX/Scoop Up Net “Oh where to start? ADP? Sure, why not. Unless you’ve been living under a proverbial rock in regards to the Pokémon community these last few weeks, you’ve surely heard the calls for a ban of ADP. And you’ve also heard the people defending the card. I’ve mostly been on the side of the former, as I believe that ADP is bad for the game as a whole. There’s a lot that can be said about ADP right now. I personally believe ADP is more of a symptom of the actual problem rather than the whole problem. The game has sped…
Thoughts on the Now Completed POG 2020 and Five Decklists to Kickstart TEU–DAA “I loved this deck so much before rotation. Sure, I completely butchered my original list in order to play Pokemon Catcher in POG, but the deck was really solid when built correctly. Aside from Escape Board, this deck didn’t really lose anything to rotation. In order to combat the loss of Escape Board, I decided to cut Jirachi and add more consistency cards. This list is frighteningly close to what I should have played in the UPR–DAA POG format. Obviously Jirachi is gone, but that might not be the end of the world. This deck is going to want to…
Malamar for the POG (UPR–DAA) and Charizard VMAX Post-Rotation (TEU–DAA) “That’s right everyone. Malamar isn’t gone just yet. I feel obligated to at least try and make this deck viable for the last event it will ever be legal for. Michael Catron posted a list on his Twitter last week, which is going to be pretty similar to mine. This is something that’s mostly been sitting in the back of my head for a month or so, but I did at least put it into PTCGO at some point. Aside from the sentimental value that it has for me, Malamar is actually not that terrible of a deck in this…
Out in T64 of the Players Cup, Thoughts on the Event, and a Darkness Ablaze Set Review “For those of you who follow me on Twitter, you already know that I’m no longer in the event, and it is somewhat ambiguous if I’m even allowed to publish my list yet, but it’s 2 cards off from the list I published a while back. I went into the event knowing that no matter what deck I played my run would be determined by the matchups I would hit. So, me being me, I decided that taking a very mediocre PikaRom matchup was somehow a good idea. For four whole rounds, my rather unintelligent view was valid. LucaMetal/Zacian pretty…
As it digs, it swallows sand and stores it in its neck pouch. The pouch can hold more than 17 pounds of sand. (Silicobra)
The Five Archenemies of UPR–RCL (and How to Thwart Them), Universal Techs, and Picking a Deck for the Players Cup “There are a lot of cards in the current format, which means there are inevitably going to be cards that win certain matchups almost all on their own. In an event like the Players Cup, where two losses means you’re out, and one loss means you’re playing a lot more rounds, taking auto-losses to certain cards or decks is not something that you want to do. I still contend that this deck is a trap and never beats competent players, but it consistently does alright whenever the timing is right for it. There are a number of ways that the…
Players Cup Positivity and a Cluster of Cool Concepts, Including Zacian/Galarian Perrserker, Cryogonal/Absol, Cryogonal/Cradily, Archeops, and Meganium Box “At first glance this deck seems really weird. However, it’s probably the most “meta” deck that I’ll be talking about today. The theory here is that I can 1HKO literally any Pokemon in the game with Zacian V. The deck caps at 340 damage, but in reality you’re probably not ever going to need to hit that. 320 is much more realistic and is conveniently enough to 1HKO Dragapult VMAX. The thing I really like about this deck is that you can play it in so many different ways. I think that it has favorable matchups against every other Zacian…
Zacian/LucaMetal, Learning Lines of Play, the Players Cup, Growing as a Player, and on Using Articles “Before anything else, I feel the need to briefly touch on the subject of the Players Cup. The qualifying system itself is terrible, and requires an undetermined amount of Event Tickets on PTCGO, rather than any semblance of skill, to earn a spot in the Online Qualifiers. There’s also this tiny little issue with the leaderboards not showing all of our earned “Tournament Rep.” For me at least, it doesn’t show around 66% of my Rep, and I’ve seen and heard of similar numbers throughout the community. However, this is actually not a huge problem in my opinion. If everyone…
Grimmsnarl w/ Fighting Techs (to Give It a Chance Versus PikaRom), Updated Since You May Have Saw It on Azul’s Stream “So, when RCL first dropped, I looked at Grimmsnarl and said, “This card is a really cool gimmick, but it is probably awful.” Part of that first impression was correct. The card is really cool, but it’s not totally awful. You don’t think about it much, but the ability to force your opponent to attach an extra Energy in order to attack is actually insanely broken in this format. As it is, multiple Energy attachments are already required for literally every top deck to be able to attack. Welder and Metal Saucer are there for acceleration of course, but those…
Vikavolt and Early Impressions of the UPR–RCL Format So Far (or: a Tentative Tier List) “A lot of people who are close to me can vouch for the fact that I’ve been talking about this deck a lot. When I first saw Vikavolt RCL, I was amazed that they were allowing Twin Energy to count as 40 damage for Powerful Storm. At this point, I hadn’t even remembered that Charjabug UNB was a card, and I already thought the deck was decent. And then I remembered that there’s 160 damage in free attachments just laying around in Charjabug. The really high damage numbers needed to be viable in this format became obtainable for Vikavolt. I…
Smart enough to use tools in battle, these Pokémon have been seen picking up rocks and flinging them or using ropes to wrap up enemies. (Corvisquire)
A Retrospective on My First Worlds, the Fateful Beaches, What I Top 8’d With (Terrakion/Eels), That Awful/Great 2012 Format, and My Most Important Lesson, a Loss “The 2012 Worlds format, HS–DEX, is notoriously terrible, but I built the format and tried to find a bit of light in this proverbial abyss. 2012 was the first step into the “Big Basics” format that has been around for most of the time since. This was coincidentally my second year in the game at this point. We were still under the Elo rating system, and I had just come off of my second straight year of missing top cut at Nationals. The details are really blurry at this point, but if I’m remembering correctly, I was 1 DCE away…
My Other Standard Go-To, Magcargo-GX (for UPR–SSH Online Tournaments) “This has pretty much been my go-to deck when Mill is for some reason unplayable, and is definitely what I would be playing in the first Limitless event if I could convince myself the time investment was worth it. I’ve spent a decent amount of time with this list, and I think it has a pretty solid ADP matchup. ADP is the gatekeeper of the format, and will likely remain that way for a very long time, which is why I’m so bent on having a good matchup against it. A lot of people play Magma Ring Slugma CES in…
Salazzle Mill (for Toronto) and Morpeko VMAX 2.0 (for Charlotte), or What Would Have Been “I’ve probably never played more games with a single deck than I have with my Salazzle list. Even before OCIC, I had the deck built and was testing it. Unfortunately, I decided against playing it in favor of a “safe” deck in PikaRom. Local players have seen me play this at a few League Challenges now, and can attest to how broken it seems. I was going to bring it to Toronto, where I’m pretty sure I would have seen success. There are a lot of weird counts in this list, but this was ultimately the best way to build…
Morpeko VMAX/Dusknoir in Collinsville, Flaws with Our List, Updates, Matchups, and Briefly on Standard “As a note, whenever I say “we” in this portion, it generally refers to some combination of Alex Krekeler, Wes Hollenberg, Patrick Littleson, and me. Leading up to the event, I was frantically testing Expanded, and everything felt terrible. I didn’t want to play TrevNoir because I knew the mirror match would be common, and I didn’t want to play Zacian because of how linear it is which made it easy to counter. This led me to try out rogue decks that had no business being good. Ironically, I built Cramorant V/Mew FCO on Monday, but eventually tabled the deck…
Preliminary Expanded Decklists ×4 and Mew3/Fire Box + Green’s Blowns for Standard “The biggest things to happen in Expanded with the release of SSH are easily the emergence of Zacian as an archetype and the turn 1 no Supporter rule. Both of these things have had a decent impact on the format, and made some of the old archetypes much better and some much worse. In my initial breakdown of SSH I mentioned some of the cards that got better, so check that out for that info. I believe that I may have initially overvalued EggLet in this format though. I initially thought the card, and the deck, would be incredibly good,…
Powerful legs and jaws made it the apex predator of its time. Its own overhunting of its prey was what drove it to extinction. (Dracovish)
59 articles written
8× Worlds qualifier
Playing since 2010
@aschemanske
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