I just wanted to take a moment and say that I wanted to bring you a very in depth look at the Nationals meta, decks, techs, etc. I also wanted to get this information out as soon as possible, while a majority of this article is first hand information, some of it is second hand information as well. I’ve done my best to fact check second hand information, but this wasn’t always possible. I apologize if any minor details are inaccurate.
The Decision To Sit Out
So in the end, Chris Fulop and I decided to sit out with the Worlds invite while Josh went 2-1 to ensure he kept his. I know people have a lot of different viewpoints on sitting out/dropping major events to preserve rankings. My thinking was that the Masters division would probably have over 800 players while only the top 8 would receive scholarships with the top 4 getting the paid invite.
I also didn’t like how many coin flips I knew games would come down to. My decision to sit out had nothing to do with a lack of faith in myself or other remarks I have heard, I just felt that the risk vs. reward ratio was too high to risk playing.
After the weekend I don’t really regret not playing either, Worlds is always the ultimate goal for me and right now I know at least two people that were safely above the cut off that might have lost their Worlds invites by deciding to play. On top of this, two-time World Champion Jason Klaczynski got donked a total of 3 times in 9 rounds.
On the upside, sitting out took all the pressure off the weekend and really allowed me to enjoy it. I also had a lot more opportunities to walk around, hang out, and talk with people and really get a good feel for the meta and different takes on decks. It felt weird to “cover” an event rather than play in it but it did allow me to get a lot of good information and bring everyone a really solid article about everything that went down.
The Format of Flip
If I had to summarize the whole weekend up in two words it would be “coin flips.” Going in I think everyone knew how many games would be decided by coin flips but it was still disheartening to really see it happen so many times.
The Masters final was a sad example of this. Game 1 started off with Kyle Sucevich hitting a majority of his Pokémon Reversal flips to take a relatively decisive game 1. Game 2 was neck and neck with Justin Sanchez leading for a majority of it, but Kyle pulls it back in the end to tie it up 1-1 and misses two game winning Reversal flips.
Game 3 Kyle goes first with Zorua and thanks to Junk Arm plays two PlusPowers. He follows that up with a Professor Oak’s New Theory hoping to get either a Double Colorless Energy to bring the game to a coin flip or some way to get a Tyrogue to win the game out right.
He hits the Double Colorless and misses his third straight flip thereby losing the United States National Championship. The game remains quite close but in the end, the game came down to yes once again “coin flips.” Both players have an active Tyrogue asleep they both stay asleep at the end of Justin’s turn, leaving Kyle no option but to pass.
In between turns both Tyrogues wake up, allowing Justin’s to take out Kyle’s. Not taking anything away from Justin at all because he played very well, but it was really sad to see 3 days and the entire National Tournament come down to coin flip after coin flip.
The three big coin flips are: the flip to go first, baby flips, and Pokémon Reversal flips. To be perfectly honest there is not a whole lot of advice I can give you on how to deal with flips either, because they are just a part of our format right now. The best thing I can tell you is be aware of how big of an impact they have and do your best to plan accordingly.
Make sure in play testing you’re going second half of the time so you can get used to that playing from behind feeling. Mid to late game, assume your opponent has that Pokémon Reversal and that he will flip heads and plan accordingly. Later on I’ll talk about some alternatives for Baby Pokémon as well. Mikey made the comment that he was looking forward to Pokémon Catcher because he didn’t like how luck-based Pokémon Reversal was.
At first I disagreed completely with him, but after seeing numerous games come down to hitting or missing Reversal flips, I think he might be right. At least with Catcher both players are on an “even footing” and not who can hit heads/tails more often.
