Preface
“Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”
…Or so the old saying goes. Similar to how anything imaginable is possible, anything that can go awry will do so, and in dramatic fashion. The Pokémon Trading Card Game is no exception, since in any given season, you will hear of at least one instance of “name” players in an event crashing and burning.
What if I were to tell you, though, that most crash-and-burn performances – even those from successful players – are completely avoidable?
Be it due to poor metagame calls, one misstep in the deck-building process, or something else, Murphy’s Law can be torn apart. We can learn how everything went wrong at an event, and assure that future results will never mirror that catastrophe ever again.
You don’t have to be a “name” player to have a bad day; on the contrary, there is an incorrect assumption that past success begets future success, and that how you did in the yesteryear should shape how you do in the next season.
Through my own recent performance at Regional Championships, we will dissect the process: how even good ideas can be bad decisions; how testing does not always account for every possibility; and what plans you should make to ultimately preserve your chances at a large event.
Pre-Tournament Planning
After my Article
As many of you may have guessed from my recent Autumn Leaves article, I decided that my deck choice for the St. Louis Regional tournament would be Zekrom/Pachirisu/Shaymin/Tornadus.
Its consistency was virtually unmatched, and it had the ability to stomp down almost every single “surprise” deck that may have shown up (e.g., Yanmega/Mew, Mew/Tornadus, Cinccino/Kingdra, Mew Lock). I believe all of this to be true even now, when we are on the cusp of a new City Championship format.
However, even with a consistent list sporting maximum Pokégear 3.0, I encountered several problems during testing:
- Its Item Lock matchup was horrendous. Granted, many players were able to skirt past this issue by virtue of Gothitelle/The Truth lists and players not all being up to part during Battle Roads. At Regionals, however, successful players of one or both were plentiful.
- Its Typhlosion/Reshiram matchup could become a nail-biter far too often. If you keep two Typhlosions off of the board, then life becomes tolerable. But when they both show up…Expect an uphill battle, for sure.
- Starting with Shaymin or Pachirisu was always a pain. Even though the odds of this happening in my Autumn Leaves list are roughly one in five, it still made for an extremely awkward game, constraining my options significantly.
I felt that Item Lock hurt too much, Typhlosion/Reshiram needed to be pushed beyond 50/50 territory, and my poor start situations needed to be fixed. Thus, I tried to fix all of the above by making the list into the following…
