Article time!!!
Hey there everyone, guess what time it is? If you guessed article time, you would be correct! Ok, I guess I really need to work on creating better hooks for my writing. That one was embarrassing even by my standards. Nonetheless, we have a lot to talk about now!
In my last article, I wrote about testing a “new deck” and while it isn’t quite tested/perfected to the point of really breaking the format, I have had some pretty good results with it! I actually have a number of new decks to run by everyone this week.
Let’s address ZPS as a deck first. ZPS has been a very popular deck for the Battle Road season thus far. Despite this, I’ve seen a number of different approaches towards how to build the deck. The one major thing I noticed is that the deck has (or should have, I know a lot of players have not quite caught up to this yet) become more of a TPS deck.
Tornadus is a vastly superior card to Zekrom in this deck. I guess that is a tough statement to make. The two cards oddly serve different purposes. I feel that Tornadus is the best opening attacker, and that the goal of the deck should be to transition to Zekrom in the latter stages of the game. Zekrom is a bit harder to get powered in the opening turns, and a lot of times, if an opponent has a solid game going too, it can be dealt with, and then you are left with no energy in play.
It is a harder to pull off “all in” opening. Zekrom REQUIRES Pachirisu and Shaymin to get a real attack off turn 2. Tornadus can do it manually with a basic energy and a DCE.
The biggest issue that ZPS faces is that it has a really bad game against Gothitelle. I’m not sold on its games vs Reshiphlosion, or Magneboar either, but Gothitelle is by far its hardest game, and there isn’t a lot the deck can do to deal with this, because if you cannot OHKO Gothitelle, you are in for a very difficult matchup if you ever let them set up.
Unfortunately, in this format, there are very few ways to prevent this, so you are just stuck accepting they should set up, and well, you see where that leads.
The best “answer” to Gothitelle, and the one which has been popping up everywhere now in the Michigan and Ohio metagame is Mew Prime. At first I felt it would be crazy to include Mew in a ZPS list, as it had primarily been used in Vileplume builds and Stage 1 toolbox lists, but the more I played with it, the better it actually started to perform.
“Fluffing” the deck with additional free retreat, non 30 HP basics actually helped the decks performance immensely as well. Now, I’ll be the first to admit: I am doing a lot of concession just to make the deck have game vs one deck. I wouldn’t make the effort if I were not concerned with Gothitelle in my region. Unfortunately, Gothitelle is a huge threat, so making this concession is not that unreasonable.
I’ll start by giving two different ZPS lists. One with Mew, and the other without. One thing you’ll notice is the great reduction in Collector in the builds. I liked them at first, but embarrassingly enough, have switched over to Dual Balls, even if I always do end up getting tails regardless.
Without the Pokemon Collectors, I cut the PokeGear 3.0 which I had previously been a fan of in the deck. I loved Gear, but without Collector it loses value. Gear also was a bit of a concession to keeping your Junk Arms live post Judge, but Judge has seen a sharp decline in play once players decided to play less Yanmega Magnezone.
