A Discussion of the Privacy or Lack Thereof of Decklists at Livestreamed Events “About a week ago, Jeremy Jallen posted in HeyFonte, a competitive Pokemon discussion group on Facebook, asking the community how they felt about featuring their deck lists on a livestream in the middle of the tournament. He was gearing up to host a stream of the Dallas Regional Championships and looking for interesting content to provide for the viewers at home. Many players in the Pokemon community, myself included, love watching streams of tournaments when they can’t attend themselves and usually want to receive as much information as possible. Presently, we usually see pictures of standings hitting the internet on…
Alex’s London Internationals 2016 Tournament Report “As many of you saw from my last article, I was very heavily favoring Greninja before London. I put countless hours into perfecting the deck, almost only playing the deck against Yveltal/Garbodor. Christopher Schemanske and Connor Finton have my utmost gratitude for playing the matchup over and over with me; I surely played it over 50 times in 10 days. Unfortunately, I slowly found the matchup to favor Yveltal, especially as the Yveltal player grew more and more experienced with the subtleties of Greninja’s play. I tried every tech I mentioned in my last article, and they all seemed to…
Rayquaza, Gardevoir, and Greninja for London, the CP Bar, and the Top Storylines Heading into the Weekend “The first deck I want to cover today is Rayquaza. The deck has a handful of unfavorable matchups in the format, most notably Yveltal/Garbodor. This is due to the oppressiveness of Fright Night, as well as the combination of N, Parallel City, and Garbodor shutting you out of many games. Rayquaza also struggles with most other Garbodor decks in the format, is unfavorable against M Scizor, and has only an even matchup with Volcanion. So you’re probably thinking, “Why would I ever consider Rayquaza?” There are two matchups that I really favor Rayquaza in: M Gardevoir and Vileplume. Gardevoir is…
Philadelphia Regionals Report, Top Performers, Meta Trends, and Future Frog “After a growing feeling of discontent with the decks in Expanded during my testing, my friends back in Michigan told me they were finding Night March to still have a strong place in the metagame. While it seemed like Karen would finally eradicate everyone’s least favorite deck, very few decks had any real reason to play Karen. Even if they included a copy, Night March could play around it by conserving Battle Compressor and Puzzle of Time in the early game to restore their damage output. Realistically, Karen would have to be paired with Seismitoad-EX and/or used multiple times per…
9th Place Orlando Regionals Report, Vileplume in Depth, Volcanion for Fort Wayne, and Random Thoughts from the Drive Home “The first time I realistically considered Vileplume of any sort in the Standard format was around 8 PM on Friday, the night before the event. The loss of AZ made the Toolbox version seem very inferior to other decks in the format, as a single Lysandre put you in a very tricky spot to come back from. The loss of Battle Compressor and the addition of Karen made the Vespiquen version fairly unplayable in my eyes (although Fred Hoban proved me wrong with a 6-1-2 performance this weekend). However, a few texts from Sean Foisy and Christopher Schemanske about the deck’s strong…
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)
Rounding out the Standard Format with M Rayquaza and Rainbow Road “The first deck that I started working on in this format was Vespiquen/Yanmega, modeled after the Jesper Eriksen’s Worlds-winning deck. Even with the loss of Battle Compressor, there are plenty of ways to get Pokemon into the discard pile and fuel Bee Revenge. Unown and Klefki can quickly be discarded and each Yanmega BREAK that gets knocked out adds 3 more Pokemon to the total. The deck also plays very fluidly and elegantly addresses the consistency problems that plague other decks in the format. Here’s the list I settled on: Unfortunately, the deck is very weak to Garbodor, and with the…
Alex’s Worlds 2016 Tournament Report, Meta Trends, and Top 4 Round-Up “This year was one of the worst years for me as far as my testing regimen leading up to the World Championships. Between my move, starting a new job, and buying a car, I was incredibly busy for the months of July and August. When I did find time to test, Ninja Boy was not working on PTCGO so I wasn’t able to try out some of the crazy ideas I had like my Vileplume Toolbox. I also couldn’t properly test Waterbox, as I believed that Ninja Boy was going to revolutionize the deck by giving you late-game options to…
On Perfecting the Netdeck, Tips for the Night March Mirror, and Early Favorites for Worlds “The first time I heard of Zygarde/Vileplume was at breakfast the morning after the Origins Win-a-Trip tournament. Sean Foisy was reading off results from the Japanese Mega Battle tournament and I instantly scoffed at the idea. Sean was not so quick to write it off; he had tried to perfect a Fighting Toolbox type of deck during the week and it was only because of my insistence that Night March would always emerge victorious that we stopped testing it. The deck later bubbled out of Chilean Nationals which garnered the concept even more attention, but I was still skeptical. It…
Origins Prep, Night March Some More, Yveltal/Zoroark, and Water Toolbox v1.2 “It’s fitting to start today’s discussion with Night March as it was the most successful deck at State Championships, the most recent circuit of Standard tournaments. Night March is a deck that has constantly evolved since its inception with the release of Phantom Forces in November 2014. This ability to adapt and counter new threats is what makes the deck so strong. Night March has been talked into the ground but the release of Fates Collide gives it a new tool and a few new threats to counter. Let’s look at a list: This list draws heavily from the Expanded list…
Four Distinct Ways to Play Trevenant and Two to Counter the Current BDIF “There are a lot of different ways to play Trevenant. While there is nothing fundamentally wrong with Aaron Tarbell’s winning list, I’ve found that I like the deck better with a few changes. The problem is, I can’t choose which tech cards I like best. Before I jump into the full lists that I’ve been testing, here’s the skeleton that I usually start with: Total: 49 cards This skeleton list is pretty tight as Trevenant needs a certain core around it to function properly. I think this Pokemon line is nearly perfect. I have never found a need for Trevenant BKP,…
It spends its entire life inside an apple. It hides from its natural enemies, bird Pokémon, by pretending it’s just an apple and nothing more. (Applin)
How We Turned a Terrible Idea into a Lot of CP “Christopher Schemanske and I pride ourselves on our State Championship deck choices, especially for the first weekend. In fact, our friendship and testing teamwork both stem from when we worked together on a Landorus-EX/Garbodor deck for Ohio States in 2013 (which took 1st place in both Masters and Seniors). This year, I felt very prepared for the first weekend. The metagame was very easy to predict as it usually is. For the first week of States, the most popular decks are almost always whatever was popular at Cities with a small amount of the new hyped decks that came about from…
The Less Talked About Decks of the Standard Format “This is something that I’ve had to learn the hard way from testing with BKP legal is to do all you can to have more than 3 cards in your hand. Delinquent can come out at any time and discard a sizeable chunk of your hand. Especially in a format without N, it is often better to not use Ultra Ball to discard unwanted resources to instead pad your hand size and keep more than 3 cards. Often, you can’t help but put yourself in situations where a Delinquent will get rid of your whole hand. And even sometimes when you…
VA Regionals Results Rundown and the Game Plan for Week 2 “Thanks to the power of the internet and social media, we had the standings from Virginia along with decks of all Top 32 competitors mere minutes after Top 8 had been announced. Shout out to Andrew Wamboldt from The Charizard Lounge for compiling these results into an easy-to-read format. Yveltal and Vespiquen were the two most successful decks to no one’s surprise. Both decks are incredibly consistent and stack up at least evenly against most of the metagame. They both have favorable matchups against Sableye/Garbodor which was one of the most hyped decks going into the first weekend. Interestingly, even though these two decks…
The Top 8 Decks to Start Testing for Winter Regionals “Yveltal (without Archeops) Vespiquen Night March Sableye/Garbodor Yveltal (with Archeops) Seismitoad/Giratina Seismitoad/Crobat Blastoise One of the themes you’ll see with the lists in this article is consistency. You’ll need a dependable deck that can set up 18+ games in a row to do well at Regionals. For that reason, this Donphan list is light on tech cards and heavy on 4-ofs. I don’t want to burden the deck with situational cards — I would much rather focus on strengthening my good matchups than giving myself an outside shot at the iffy ones. Jolteon AOR is the most notable tech card…
A Detailed Look Back on the First Half of Cities “Note: You may click on the deck names to find the lists that I played at each event. I encourage you click between the decks and my event reflections as you read. Each of my deck lists is accompanied by reasoning for specific card counts and techs that I included for my expected metagame. What Won the Previous Cities: Nothing; this was the first Cities of the season Expected Metagame: The two biggest decks at the Standard LCs in the area were Mega Manectric/Regice and Lucario/Crobat. I didn’t think that would change very much as people usually stick with what…
Brave and prideful, this Pokémon dashes airily through the forest, its steps aided by the psychic power stored in the fur on its fetlocks. (Galarian Rapidash)
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