Isaiah Williams
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Zoroarok/Control and Zoroark “Exodia” for the Dallas Regional Championships “The main goal of this deck is to deck your opponent out. You do this by repeatedly playing Red Card with Delinquent until your opponent is completely out of resources and cards and hand. You then lock them by playing multiple Trick Shovels every turn until they have no cards left in deck. Oranguru puts these resources back into your deck for you to use again, and Zoroark-GX with Exeggcute gives you access to these cards with no consequence. If you have not already, go check out my previous article on the deck from Portland Regionals. I really get into…
Looking at Gardevoir/Swampert/Solgaleo/Ninetales in Light of Roanoke’s Regional “3 Ralts/2 Mudkip/2 Alolan Vulpix/1 Ditto {*}/1 Kirlia/1 Marshtomp At first glance, this basic line seems a bit thin, however, in game it works out very well. Ditto acts as a 4th and 3rd count for all of these basic Pokemon which allows you to be very greedy with your counts. We play 3 Ralts so that they are able to stick to the board more easily in the scenario that our opponent attempts to target them down. There are really two first turn board states that are optimal depending on how our opponent is playing the game. If you…
A Look at Zoroark/Control from Portland Expanded and Into Lost Thunder Standard ” Even though we no longer have Red Card + Delinquent, I believe ZoroControl is still an extremely powerful deck especially with the inclusion of Lost Thunder. We can use Mt. Coronet and Metal Energies to act as a weaker Exeggcute for streaming Plumerias and Trade. We now have Custom Catcher which is extremely strong at dispositioning our opponents Pokemon as well as doubling as a consistency card. We also have Professor Elm’s Lecture that acts as a pseudo Brigette for amazing t1 consistency. The new Shuckle-GX allows us to poison our opponent’s active and then retreat into our Oranguru…
Isaiah on Zoroark/Garbodor for Portland’s Regional Championships “1 Zoroark (Stand In) In a Zoroark meta such as the one we should likely be facing going into Portland, Stand In Zoroark is a must have. He is the only feasible comeback card that exist in the mirror match given how oppressive Ability lock is in combination with OHKOs. With Stand In Zoroark, you are able respond to the OHKO with a single prize attacker that just takes a DCE for the return KO. Given the two rescue stretchers, you could easily set up a 2nd Stand In Zoroark to take another OHKO from that Position. You may notice…
Working the BDIF Within the Buzzwole/Garbodor/Shrine Meta “1 Oranguru UPR/Enhanced Hammer This is a really cute tech inclusion that works the best going into an unexpected heavy BuzzShrine meta. It may not be apparent, but when you play a single Enhanced Hammer and Resource Management Oranguru, you become heavily favored in the mirror match. The strategy is to actually deck out the opposing BuzzShrine player. We can achieve this by constantly Guzma’ing up your opponents Magcargo/Diancie/Oranguru. Most lists only play 4 Guzma and 1 Switch, giving them only 5 possible ways to move the Magcargo out of the active position, excluding attaching 3 energy to manually Retreat.…
As it digs, it swallows sand and stores it in its neck pouch. The pouch can hold more than 17 pounds of sand. (Silicobra)
Isaiah’s Look at Building Decidueye/Zoroark for Memphis Standard “This deck plays a bit differently than most decks we have talked about before. Often in a game, you play to react. You analyze the board state and then consider the cards you have/ have access to that are able to counter said board state. Think Guzma-killing your opponent’s main attacker so that their board state is less threatening. In niche scenarios where the advantage gained is great enough, we should still follow this strategy. But often times, with this deck specifically, the general strategy provides more value to your board state then attempting to counter your opponents would. This…
Isaiah on the Game’s Early Stages and Zoroark/Lycanroc for Philly “In our previous format, Brigette was the obvious answer as the best opening Supporter to play most decks—spare Buzzwole decks—due to its overall reliability. Being able to consistently get out three Basic Pokemon on your first turn was just an offer we couldn’t refuse. However, Brigette still had its limitations. The normal turn went something like Ultra Ball for Tapu Lele-GX, Wonder Tag for Brigette, and pass after using Brigette. This would leave us with only 4 cards in our hand assuming that we didn’t play any other basic Pokemon/Stadium/or Energy. Often, going for a turn 1 Brigette meant trusting…
Isaiah on Rayquaza/Garbodor for the World Championships “3 Wishful Baton This choice is where most Rayquaza-GX lists differ. When I first started testing the deck, I thought surely that Choice Band was the right secondary tool card to play behind float stone—it acts as a free energy attachment. However, in testing, I found the best tool was Wishful Baton. The pressure that having that tool provides is enough to often win you games. It is easy to say, “oh your opponent will just Field Blower the Wishful Baton so you shouldn’t play it,” but when it comes down to the turn against BuzzRoc, where they have to…
A Look at Dusk Mane Necrozma/Magnezone for Worlds’ Standard “US Nationals was very informative in that it showed us where we were headed with the play styles of the upcoming top decks. Both the 1st and 2nd place decks were focused around disruption, and the 2nd place deck attempted to do almost nothing but disruption. The reason decks like this are able to succeed is because they take advantage of a metagame where decks give up their safety nets to opt for high-power aggression, a.k.a. Buzzwole-GX. I would not be surprised to see our entire meta shift towards control decks as more and more players realize this strength. We…
Reviewing Malamar/Psychic for NAIC ’18 “Psychic Malamar is in an interesting position in the meta in that it is the only deck that has a reliably favorable matchup against what most consider to be the BDIF Buzzwole-GX/ Lycanroc-GX. The downside is that it also has the hardest loss to its bad matchup Zoroark-GX out of all 3 pairs in the triangle. Malamar is also quite a popular deck because, in my opinion, it is the easiest of the top 3 decks to pilot effectively. So, as a deck that is relatively easy to play and is able to boast a favorable matchup against the best…
__________ takes this form when enraged. It won’t stop spewing flames until its rage has settled, even if its body starts to melt. (Galarian Darmanitan)
Examining the Meta as a Cycle and Buzzwole/Lycanroc as a Future Play “This may be something that you have heard before, but I think that this is especially prevalent in the current meta. Right now, our meta is dominated by three archetypes—Buzzwole-GX/Lycanroc-GX, Malamar, and Zoroark-GX. This is quite a rock/paper/scissors format. We see this given the recent Regionals results. We started with a Zoroark dominant meta at the beginning of the year. Then we saw an insane spree of Buzzwole victories from Charlotte Regionals to Madison Regionals. We then, unexpectedly, saw a recent ZoroRoc win at Sheffield regionals. What caused such an upset in this Buzzwole dominant meta? The obvious answer to…
Isaiah Williams’ Look at the Ins and Outs of Zoroark-GX/Exeggcute “In the beginning there was Zoroark GX, and we saw that nothing beat Zoroark GX, so we said that Zoroark GX was good. This is essentially the story of how the deck was created. It all started when we were desperately trying to figure out how to beat Zoroark in Expanded. My testing group and I had actually built a Gallade/Focus Sash/ Gardevoir deck that was later featured in an article by Kian Amini. It tested really well against Zoroark until we figured out something strange: if Zoroark just played Hex Maniac from Turn 2-onwards, then, most of the time,…
When it’s drumming out rapid beats in battle, it gets so caught up in the rhythm that it won’t even notice that it’s already knocked out its opponent. (Thwackey)
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