When I was deciding what I wanted to write about for this article, I began to realize just how awkward of a spot the 15th was going to be. I’m not going to get back from Regionals till late Sunday evening and the article is due on Monday the 14th. I do plan on spending some of this article talking about my Regionals experience, but I have to have a majority of it written before I leave.
I know people are going to be interested in what did well at Regionals, what we learned, and how to adapt it for the new format. I’ll probably have some pretty good information about what went down in St. Louis, but the day after Regionals is also a Monday so a majority of people are probably going to be at school, work, or still asleep. This means a lot of quality information won’t start surfacing till later in the week, which makes it hard to give a good and accurate write-up.
So instead I’ll go through how I approached Regionals, decided on a deck, what I played, along with my other top choices. I also want to share a few Kyurem lists that I’ve been working on; the card has a lot of hype right now, but I feel like it also has a lot of potential.
Deck Building in General
“The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.” I took the quote from a James Bond film (apparently they took it from Bruce Feirstein), where it was spoken by one of the many forgettable Bond villains. Ironically though the quote actually has a lot of important meaning when it comes to choosing a deck for a tournament or with deck building in general.
Thinking outside of the box and playing “your deck” are always two of the biggest things I stress. The only difference between a tech or a deck choice being a great play or a stupid mistake is measured only by your performance.
I feel like many players come up with great ideas but are just too scared to try them in a major tournament because it “isn’t standard” or “can’t be good” because other people haven’t done it. On the other side of this I feel some players try so hard to be original that they play bad techs or subpar decks.
When I head into a tournament like Regionals with a large number of participants, I’m always looking for something to give me an edge over the competition sometimes this means playing a non mainstream deck, other times this means playing a mainstream deck teched for the meta.
Sometimes again this mean playing a less teched out version of a mainstream deck when I feel my consistency will give me an edge rather than my techs. At the same time though, I balance all of this with common sense. I won’t play a something different just for the sake of being different. Before I play any off the wall techs, I always ask myself the following questions.
- Why am I playing it?
- What matchups does it benefit?
- How common are these matchups going to be?
- How consistently is it going to impact these matchups?
- How much does it help this matchup?
- Does it hurt any of my other matchups?
- Is it essential to win the matchup or is it just a “win more” card.
By asking myself these questions, I am able to directly explain why I’m playing the card/s. It also forces me to think of the impact they will have on my deck and in my games, both good and bad. If you have trouble answering any of these questions, you might want to reevaluate how important your tech is.
How I Decided on a Deck for Regionals
The best way to choose a deck would be to take it and play a few hundred games with it against various opponents, decks, and techs and repeat this process with every deck in the format. This approach still wouldn’t include testing against rogue type decks and it’s just too time consuming to be plausible for anyone. This makes it so important to get the most out of the time you do have to test regardless of how much time that might be.
