Hey Prof-It! Underground Fans Members! This week’s episode article is going to be about my new favorite deck, hard-to-specifically-name lock. For the sake of crediting the originator and saving syllables, I’m just going to call it “chenlock”. I know that Fulop just posted his report on the same deck recently, but our lists are a total of 12 cards different, and I think that’s enough to warrant at least some discussion on the deck differences.
For those of you who don’t know, here’s a brief history of the marriage of Blaziken FB with Sablock.
Jason Chen made it.
I said brief, right? Well, maybe I can talk a LITTLE more about it. Basically, Jason Chen wanted another strong attacker in his sablock. He also wanted to pull Claydols up and burn them and laugh at his opponents. Blaziken FB fit the bill. Chen took the deck to top 32 at US nationals, losing a close series of 3 to the eventual winner, Con Le. Despite only climbing to the top 32, Chen’s “chenlock” was one of just two decks with no duplicates, so it interested us (the other was Manetric/entei-raikou. . . which didn’t really grab any hype at all… poor guy… ). Chenlock went on to see at least a handful of decent runs at Worlds, but it didn’t really come into full swing until now.
Why now? Well, on the downside, we’ve lost Blaziken’s favorite “Luring Flame” target, claydol. But on the upside, his favorite “jet Shoot” target, Dialga G LV.X, has seen a huge spike in play due to Komatsuda’s world winning list and the emergence of Vilegar. Blaziken alone makes for a nice Dialga counter, and the option to Luring Flame high retreat nuisances like Vileplume UD is still a great option, too.
So what does Aziz Al-Yami bring to the list? I’ll be honest, I haven’t had a single conversation with him before aside from maybe both of us commenting on the same thing on Facebook, but revealed to me an innovation that I really REALLY like. It’s the…
