It’s been a long timeeeee
In case you guys didn’t see my message on the board, my area in Pennsylvania got rocked hard by the snowstorm and my whole campus has been out of power since last Saturday. We just got it back on Wednesday night, so I apologize for the delay of this article. With that said, I don’t like to waste time and space soooo:
I was thinking about doing a Mike on the Metagame thing for this, but as I sat down to start writing about it, I realized a couple of things: First, Battle Roads are not extremely informative. Even with the added importance of them, there are so many of them all over the country that there is bound to be lots of information lost in translation, considering the split of Regionals and only having a handful.
Second, also because of this last fact, Kettler mentioned it as well, each Regional will likely more resemble the national or “internet” metagame, rather than any local metagame. Definitely there will be some taste of local metagames, but it won’t be nearly as extreme as in the past.
Lastly, with Regionals in the fall for the first time and with this split, who actually knows how our predictions will turn out! They could be completely wrong, or right, who knows yet, because we have never experienced these tournaments before.
With that said, I am going to offer some of my thoughts on the metagame and other random thoughts about decks and gameplay in this format, and then go into my top two decks for Regionals, and my third choice which is a bit more of a fun deck and more untested than the first two. Okay so random thoughts!
Every Regional will have Typhlosion and Zekrom
And not just because they are the cheapest/easiest to build/easiest to play/[insert cliché about these decks]. No, it is mostly because they are actually really, really good! Zekrom has a legitimate shot to win every single game it plays if it gets going on the first turn, which is often.
Similarly, Typhlosion is extremely fast (many people underestimate its speed with a nice list) and can win a lot of games from sheer early pressure. The benefit, obviously, is that you can maintain your strategy the entire game and rarely lose steam, like Zekrom does.
Both decks suffer from the same weakness, though, and that is lack of versatility. Neither deck packs any “surprise” or backup strategy you can fall back on in certain matchups. Okay, I guess Typhlosion has Flare Destroy (Typhlosion’s attack). But…that’s about it. Some people, as many of the other writers have said, have tried putting in cards like Magby TM (I did see this used pretty effectively, actually, in Typhlosion), Bellsprout TM, Black Belt, etc. but they are only “soft counters” to each of these decks handicap.
More extreme options would be things like Kingdra Prime, Venomoth TM, or Mew Prime, for example. I don’t have much experience with most of these techs, soft or more extreme, so I can’t really comment on the effectiveness of any one of them in particular. I think collectively as a whole they are not so efficient and your space is better off just making what you do, better.
My favorite Typhlosion and Zekrom lists revolve around just getting their game plan off and hoping you can beat your losses before they can get set up. As someone who has been trying a lot of different ideas to combat the format, I can definitely say that it is the hardest thing in the world to come back from a T1 or T2 kill (especially going 2nd) against Zekrom or Typhlosion, as they can just steamroll you from the get-go.
