Dylan Lefavour
Author Archive
Bio: I’ve been playing Pokémon since July 2004. I won the 2008 world championship as a senior, New England Regionals in 2011 and in 2013. I finished in top 4-of U.S. Nationals and top 8-of Worlds in 2011. Founding member of the New England Pokémon retirement home. I currently work in esports, where I run the official Hearthstone collegiate program at Tespa.
Revisiting Regionals, Adapting Old Favorites, a New Night March, and the Future of Frogs “The only tournaments that we really care about at this point happened on the third weekend of the Spring Regionals series: M Rayquaza won Massachusetts Yveltal/Max Elixir won Utah Night March had exceptional performances in Kansas Vespiquen/Flareon took down Edmonton Honestly, Rayquaza and Night March seem like the only Standard viable decks out of the four, and FCO made little impact on either. The winner of Massachusetts played the most basic speed Rayquaza build you can get. Rayquaza does well in Standard, but takes a hard loss to Night March. Expanded is dominated by Darkness decks, making Rayquaza an exceptional deck…
Bridging the Gap Between Night March and All the Rest “I took YZG to a 5th place finish at the New Hampshire State Championships this past Saturday. I went a clean 5-0 in Swiss rounds and drew my way into 1st seed. This actually not the exact list I played — I subsequently swapped a Super Rod for an Yveltal BKT. I found that with Puzzle of Time, the Super Rod that I played was excessive. Yveltal BKT’s Ability offers too much utility against Night March to pass up. If I could do Saturday morning over again, these are the 60 cards that I would play. My Top 8 opponent was a very good…
Building a Better Mewtwo and Long-Standing Decks to Finish Cities Strong “Manectric-EX has been a strong, consistent, and linear deck choice for a long time now. It isn’t terribly difficult to play, but the deck tends to be matchup dependent. Lucario/Crobat decks were all around in Tewksbury Massachusetts, my third City Championship of the season. In this case, I ran into enough Lucario decks to eventually push my record to two losses. Lucario is not an impossible deck for Manectric to beat, but it can be an uphill battle, especially if Enhanced Hammer is a popular choice. Manectric wasn’t the best play for this City, but it is a strong deck…
New Manectrics, Refreshed Toads, and the Timely Return of Bait & Switch “The first deck I have for you is, as you might have guessed, a Manectric deck. It uses Regice AOR to limit the opposing player’s options. Regice is my favorite new card to play with. Its Safeguard effect is very tough to penetrate once Regice gets 3 Energy under it. Doing so isn’t that expensive when you factor in the utility that Turbo Bolt brings to the table. Regice improves on Suicune PLB in almost every way. While Suicune was a great card in its day, Suicune and Regice alike are only as good as the Pokemon that they can block the attacks…
75 Flip-Filled First Turns with Shiftry NXD “Generally the deck’s first turn has two main phases. The first is the hunt for Forest of Giant Plants. Until it hits the board, the Shiftry deck is just a useless brick of cards. The key to success with Shiftry is going hard to find FoGP while conserving the devolution effects like Devolution Spray and Super Scoop Up to let you combo off later. Ultimately, (spoiler alert!) this is one of the biggest problems with the deck in the long run. If you draw FoGP in the first few cards of your deck you almost always are going to have…
It will bravely challenge any opponent, no matter how powerful. This Pokémon benefits from every battle—even a defeat increases its strength a bit. (Rookidee)
Tuning Up Decks for the Final Weekend of States “So what is up with the metagame? It tends to shift more quickly when the most influential players start putting in overtime. This whole year has really been an innovative one. If you’ve been playing for a short time you won’t see it, but I’ve noticed that out of all the years I’ve been playing Pokemon, no metagame has moved more quickly than this one. Mid-level players seem so much more motivated this year because Worlds invites aren’t limited to the best of the best anymore. 300 Championship Points isn’t too hard to get at all. Basically, as mid-level players…
Pioneering the Primal Clash Metagame “I say this literally every time a new set comes out: there’s no reason cards can’t be better. Every card doesn’t have to be good or playable even. What cards should be is more interesting. The new Lombre PRC is about as exciting as watching somebody else get roses on Valentine’s Day. Of course, the only reason to play Lombre is to get to Ludicolo (if that), but still, why would the creators of the Pokemon TCG want my Ludicolo journey to be so dreadfully boring? Right now the dominant strategy in regards to Stage 2 Pokemon is to wait until…
A Longer Look at Primal Clash “Kyrogre-EX, Primal Kyogre-EX Instead of organizing this list by collection number or some other method that makes sense, I’ll order my list by levels of hype surrounding them. So you’ll probably see your EXs first and sleepers toward the end. So in proper order, let’s begin with Kyogre and go from there. The EX and its Primal counterpart are unfortunately a matched set. Giant Whirlpool is a poor attack for its cost. In a format where the splinters of the Blastoise archetype set the standard for Water Pokemon, Black Kyurem-EX PLS and Keldeo-EX are strictly better attackers. Tidal Storm and…
On the Tail of the Big Three “Rebooting Genesect Handling Yveltal Revisiting Aromatisse Mewtwo Strikes Back Conclusion Nicholena’s last article is a great resource for lists of popular decks. Everything that her article didn’t cover, Dylan Bryan’s did. Even though there haven’t been a ton of articles strictly focusing on deck analysis lately, both of those authors covered everything my article here won’t. This is the time of year that rewards risk taking and quick thinking. Below you’ll find an article that I hope can guide readers to being more proficient at both. I played in my first event of the season last week at a diverse City Championship…
A Look at the Evolution of Communication in Pokémon TCG “Pojo was the original hub for the competitive community, and it shows. An interviewer asked a 14-year-old Colin Moll what he had for lunch, and I couldn’t help but laugh. Pojo is a true artifact of its time, emoticons, unedited interviews, text speak and all. To be honest, I don’t know what was appealing about the website in the early 2000s, but I have a feeling it was because content elsewhere wasn’t any better. Articles about Pokemon TCG were undoubtedly hard to come by. It wasn’t until the player base expanded that experienced players had any incentive to write quality…
In ancient times, it was unbeatable thanks to its powerful lower body, but it went extinct anyway after it depleted all its plant-based food sources. (Dracozolt)
The Dunning-Kruger Effect in the Pokémon TCG “So you play Pokemon. Since you also have an internet connection, it’s more than likely you’re aware of the infamous Virbank City, origin of all that is toxic. After reading what must be a lifetime quota of profoundly ignorant Facebook comments, I decided to examine what it is about public expression that makes people so noxious online. Some background: Virbank City is a nearly five thousand-member Facebook group, originally known as HeyFonte. Eventually, as the group got bigger, Jason Klaczynski decided that the group needed some moderation. Since the name no longer fit the mission statement of the group (free…
The Spooky-Good Impact of Phantom Forces “Digression on Set Design Ghost in the Machine Virizion/Genesect: Reloaded Black and Yellow (but Not Mellow) A New Dimension for Dropping Tools The Phantom Menace Conclusion If you’ve been following me on social media, forums, SixPrizes, or anything else really, you might have picked up on the fact that I used to really hate the direction the powers below are taking the game that I love. If you really don’t care about my rants, I’ll surmise. I believe that: A. Sets are too simplistic. Not to say every card in a set should be good, or even playable for that matter.…
Weighing In on Furious Fists Entering the Ring “Although Furious Fists is primarily marketed towards the glory of the Fighting type, there’s a card that excites me far more than any of the Fighting options in the new set. Dragonite is my boy, and they stuck Legendary Ascent on it (that’s what we called the Ability back in my day, I guess it’s “Bust In” now) in a format with Super Scoop Up. I couldn’t ask for much more, except maybe for the Ability’s name to be changed back to Legendary Ascent. Since 2009, I’ve resigned myself from having pet decks. Dragonite though, is my new guilty pleasure. I haven’t had…
The Uncertainty of the Post-Flashfire Metagame and a Look Back at Plox and Sablelock “But first, I want to give you guys a look at something else I have been working on. Players love taking a break from the current format. Outside of tournament games, some of my favorite things to do include: playing The Resistance (a great strategic role-playing game, similar to internet Mafia or Werewolf), throwing a Frisbee around outside the venue, and playing games of Pokemon with out-of-format decks. Constructing and playing decks of old is a craze that is becoming increasingly more popular as more resources to build those decks are resurfacing in the community. Being able to relive old…
A 2014 New England States and Spring Regionals Rewind “Okay, first, let’s take a trip back in time. It’s the second week of States, mid-March, and the world is still frozen. It feels as though an entire season has come and gone since. I had just barely missed cut in Rhode Island with Yveltal/Garbodor. I played a list almost identical to that of my Complaint Box allies, SixPrizes’ own Ray Cipoletti and Chris Murray (who doesn’t belong to SixPrizes, but is equally cool). Chris ended up winning the event, felling a fellow side of the Box, Jon Bristow, in the finals. Instead of giving the list I played in Rhode…
Its hairs work like muscle fibers. When its hairs unfurl, they latch on to opponents, ensnaring them as tentacles would. (Grimmsnarl)
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@DylanLefavour
