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Fire Box Box and Zacian V/Lucario & Melmetal-GX, A More Well-Known Pair of Decks, Updated, to Compete with Tier 1 “You may not realize it, but Fire Box is the deck with the best placements in big tournaments this season. Since Worlds 2019, Fire Box placed Top 4 @ Worlds 2019 by Tord Reklev, 1st @ LAIC 2019 by Robin Schulz, 2nd @ OCIC 2020 by Zach Lesage, and 1st @ Limitless Q2 by Masato Shimada. The deck has been strong since the beginning of the season until now because it still has the best gust effect in the game, which is Nine Temptations. Ninetales TEU gusts Pokémon from the opponent’s Bench—without the use of a Supporter—and the deck still…
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…
Evaluating My PikaRom Play, Combo Blacephalon, Techy Dragapult, and General Thoughts from Playing in the Various Online Tournaments “Watch: I want to delve deeper into the second game from the Winners Finals match vs. Tord and provide an analysis as to why I in fact did not get “unlucky” to not draw the Electropower to basically seal the game. Instead, I actually didn’t play optimally the previous turn, and this will hopefully show why it’s so important to look back into what you could’ve done better in every match, rather than blame losses on luck. Here is the crucial turn where 1 Electropower off of this Dedechange hand would’ve allowed me to KO the Dragapult with Energy and…
Analyzing the Results of the Players Cup Kickoff Invitational and Limitless Invitational “While analyzing, it’s important to realize that the Players Cup Invitational actually happened two weeks before it was broadcast. This means that it was played with the mindset of Limitless Q4, which occurred on the same weekend. It’s possible that different decks/lists would have been chosen if the tournament was a few weeks later—namely Spiritomb. I’m only going to cover Spiritomb, Dragapult VMAX, and Zacian V in this article. Blacephalon UNB and PikaRom are the other two decks in the popular five, but nothing drastic changed from those decks since Limitless Q4 or even Q3. Their average placements across both…
Water Mew3 Box and Silvally-GX/Alolan Persian-GX, Two Crazy Decks to Compete with Tier 1 “If I had to list in order the best decks of the format, this would be my list: Dragapult VMAX PikaRom Zacian Combo Baby Blowns Spiritomb Dragapult VMAX is my favorite deck due to the extremely strong attack and high HP of Dragapult VMAX. If you get a Dragapult VMAX with two Energies on turn two, you don’t need anything else to play against most metagame decks. By focusing the deck on being consistent to do this, you already have enormous strength in your hands. The deck doesn’t need Crushing Hammer, Giant Bomb, Spell Tag, or any other techs, it…
Cunning and cautious, this Pokémon survives by stealing food from others. It erases its tracks with swipes of its tail as it makes off with its plunder. (Nickit)
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…
Blacephalon and Dragapult VMAX (My Two Favs to Grind With), Thoughts on PTCGO + the Players Cup, and Limitless Invitational Meta Musings “So far, my favorite decks to grind with have been Baby Blacephalon and Dragapult VMAX. Baby Blacephalon has been a new interest for me as I usually despised playing against it, and in general I felt like Welder decks were too hit-or-miss. Having played a lot with it recently though, with the mentality of “if you can’t beat them, join them,” I’ve enjoyed using it. Blacephalon really focuses on perfect sequencing and rewards optimal deck-thinning to put yourself in great spots where you’re basically guaranteed to not miss KOs, on top of trading extremely favorably against the big TAG TEAMs…
Highlighting Three of the Top Performing Decks from Limitless Q4, Including Zacian V/Combo, ADP/Spiritomb, and Spiritomb/Ultra Beasts “via: This combo is why the deck has combo in its name and is a force to be reckoned with, even against Fire-based decks like Blacephalon. To do the combo correctly, you have to: Use Oranguru SSH to place Jirachi Prism Star on top of your deck. Then use Mr. Mime DET to replace one of your Prize cards with the top card of your deck (i.e., Jirachi Prism Star). You will know exactly where Jirachi Prism Star is because you can put it wherever you like into your Prize cards. Once you take a Prize, you simply remember to…
An Introduction to Flygon/Torterra (aka Flyterra), the Missing Link of the 2010 DP–UL Format “Some Modified formats were better than others, and some of those formats have been more fondly remembered than the rest. What makes one format better than another is a topic for a different day, but I believe there is no denying that it is the case that some formats are just better and more fun to play. The allure of what made those formats so great has led to a growing movement within the Pokemon community to “go back in time” to play and revisit these formats. One of the most revered Modified formats of all time was DP–UL, which…
An In-Depth Look at Cinccino Mill in the UPR–RCL Format “Part of Mill’s strength as an archetype lies in its ability to adapt to the metagame and survive most shifts in the meta. An example of this is Mill’s adaptation to counter ADP-GX with Zacian V (ADPZ) during the UPR–SSH format. Initially, Mill ran 4 Crushing Hammer, which made the matchup fairly reliant on flipping heads on Crushing Hammers. At this point, Mill had two major questionable matchups: ADPZ and Mewtwo/Malamar. Fire Box was also a threat; however, Fire Box saw a huge fall-off in play as the format developed further. In an attempt to improve its ADPZ matchup, Mill…
It eats berries nonstop—a habit that has made it more resilient than it looks. It’ll show up on farms, searching for yet more berries. (Skwovet)
The Quiet Days and Second Wind of My Pokémon Career, Including the Most Unbalanced Decks I’ve Played, from 2013–2014 to Now “Ah, where were we? After 2013 Worlds, BLW, EPO, NVI, and DRV were rotated. Since the early Black & White sets started off slow, and because power creep really ramped up started at NXD, very few important cards were lost to this rotation. In addition, several of the powerful cards had already been reprinted: Terrakion got a secret rare in BCR; EPO Item powerhouses Pokemon Catcher and Max Potion got theirs in DEX and PLF; and the staple supporters Professor Juniper and N were spared too. The main exceptions were Eelektrik NVI and Crushing Hammer EPO. Virizion-EX/Genesect-EX PLB was the…
An In-Depth Look at the 2010 DP–UL Format, Part 2 “At the end of 2009, Pokemon announced that Worlds would be returning to Kona, Hawaii in 2010. Invites to the World Championships were given to the Top 4 of Worlds 2009, Top X of Nationals 2010 (the US was Top 4; most other countries got fewer invites—paid/unpaid—depending on size), and then the Top 40 in the Elo rating system. The last way to qualify was through the Last Chance Qualifier affectionately called “the grinders” by players. I went in depth on how the Elo system worked and my feelings about the system in my 2011 article. I’ll go ahead and…
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…
Sitting Out the Players Cup, Qualifying 101, My Personal Preparation Process, Trends from Limitless Q3, and Hybrid PikaRom for Q4 “To start, let’s go over the Players Cup and what I do and don’t like about it. The Players Cup is Pokemon’s attempt at bringing competitive tournaments with actual prizes—undoubtedly worth playing for—to your homes amidst this quarantine we are in. The fact that they are even doing this is immediately a plus in my mind. However, I do have some criticisms. For one, we all know about the Event Ticket situation right now. These tickets are essential to play in tournaments, but they are so scarce. Some lucky players have saved them up over all this time (since the…
Five Things I’ve Learned About the UPR–RCL Metagame, Format Favs (Fire Box, Mewtwo Welder, Inteleon VMAX/Frosmoth), the Players Cup, Playtesting, and Record Keeping “During this time, a lot of the community has come together to organize some of the best-run online events I’ve ever seen, including the Limitless Online Series. With the fourth and final qualifier this coming weekend, we have no idea what the meta will hold and who will be the final twelve competitors that advance into the Invitational tournament itself. Qualifier #3 showed us some interesting decks emerge with it being the first major event with Rebel Clash legal. What have we learned about the format so far? PikaRom is one of the most dominant decks in the format with the…
Common throughout the Galar region, this Pokémon has strong teeth and can chew through the toughest of berry shells. (Greedent)
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