My name is Dakota Streck and I have been playing Pokemon for 10 years. Some of you may know me from my Card of the Days or How to School the Competition articles, or you may not, it’s all the same.
For my first Underground article, I deliberated for a long time over what the focus of it all should be. I desperate for “that” idea. You know what I’m talking about, when an idea pops into your head and you just know that it’s a really great one.
After much thought I had a come up with a few ideas, but nothing that really got me excited. When I’m really into what I’m writing and really believe that it’s good, helpful information, the finished piece can usually be held to a much higher standard.
I received an email from Adam saying (among other things) “The point of Underground is to help players do better at tournaments.” Even though I already knew this, I guess just hearing it again helped jog my memory. I decided to take the statement literally; I was going to write a full-blown article to help you succeed at States. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover, so we best get started!
Goals
Do you remember taking Guidance or Health classes in Middle School? One thing that is brought up quite often are goals. Setting a goal means to pick something you want to achieve, set the time limit in which you want to achieve it, then make it happen. Just like Goals are important in real life, they’re in Pokemon as well.
Whether we know it or not, most of us have set a goal for the season. For some, its to win their first Battle Road while others want a Worlds Invite. Granted your goal is appropriately based on your skill level (meaning Chris Fulop’s goal for the season shouldn’t be top cutting at only one Battle Road Event), it will take a lot of hard work.
For a new player, winning their first Cities event is just as special to them as Tom Hall winning Nationals (okay, maybe not quite as special, but pretty close).
Even if your goal isn’t to earn an invite to Worlds, I’m sure you’d still be happy to receive one (even if you don’t go, just for the bragging rights alone). Now, there are three ways to earn an invite; Premier Rating, Top 4 at Nationals or going through the Grinder.
If you don’t want to travel potentially hundreds of miles for only a chance to get into Worlds (via the Last Chance Qualifier), that only leaves you with two ways to earn your invite. Betting everything on Nationals is risky, to say the least.
Last year, there were over 700 people in attendance at the US Nationals, so your odds of placing high enough to earn a Worlds invite is quite low. I’m not trying to discourage anyone from trying to win their respective National Championships, merely trying to steer you toward a less-risky way to attend Worlds: Premier Rating.
Not only is it the way that the most invites will be given out, but it also puts less pressure on you. Let’s say that you decided to try and win your invite by way of your National Championship. Since Nats is the last event (not counting Worlds) of the year, if you lose there, you’re out; there will be no second chances. On the other hand, if you bomb at a single City Championship, there will be plenty of other chances to make up those points.
The next event in the 2010-2011 Tournament season are the State Championships. For those of you who’s Premier Rating isn’t as high as you would like it to be, your performance at the State Championship(s) you attend will be crucial.
Metagame
Cities and States are very different, most notably because of the scale. City Championships are much smaller that State events and thus are much more vulnerable to local influence. What I mean by local influence is, in some City events, as little as 16 people will show up. The turnout for States could never be anywhere near this low (maybe if there was a blizzard or Judgement Day or something).
I’ll use the small City Championship event with 16 players as a good example. Let’s say that four of those players are brothers. Sitting at home a week before one says “Hey, let’s all play Jumpluff decks at Cities next week!” Because of this impulse those brothers had, your meta could easily look like this:
4 LuxChomp
4 Jumpluff
2 DialgaChomp
2 LostGar
2 Sablelock
2 Other Random Decks.
If this was the only Cities event you went to and used this information to try and predict what would be used at States, you’ll be pretty far off the mark. Preparing for 25% of the meta to be Jumpluff lists will mean running a lot of bad tech choices in place of ones needed to combat the actual metagame.
On the other hand, if those four brothers were to go to States running Jumpluff, it would hardly have any effect at all. With that said, I do think the general meta from Cities will carry over to States but with the addition of any new decks made possible with Call of Legend’s release.
While I’m on the topic of new cards, I would also like to discuss something that I call a “ripple effect”. To help me better explain things, I’ll use a great example. Very recently, Lost World was released, which immediately became a key card in LostGar.
