Coming into State Championships this year, I did a lot of testing, and a lot more thinking. Up until the very end of City Championships, I felt like I wasn’t at the commanding position to make an easy slide into Worlds that I predicted.
While coming off of a win at the very end was nice, I had to face reality—my season wasn’t nearly Underground Writer material. This is sort of evident in my self-reflective “Everything I Know” article, and I definitely had a lot of regrets. I wanted to do what I could to turn my season around, and prove myself as a player.
I was frustrated with my poor performances with Luxchomp in the past because it had performed so well for me in testing. There was no matchup on paper that I didn’t fear, and everything was going so well. The Dialga covered your Vileplume and Gengar Prime issues.
Running the Metal energy fueled Lucario GL’s “Combo Throw” against random fighting-weak decks like Regigigas and Tyranitar. Lightning was an obvious counter to Gyarados. A Dark attacker like Weavile G was working wonders against both kinds of Gengar as well. Twins was running pretty slick in the mirror. I liked everything about it.
However, I couldn’t help but feel that in an actual tournament setting, something would go wrong at the expense of my weaker experience with Luxchomp. Some complicated scenario in the SP mirror could lead to an easy misplay. Even though I was testing with better and better players at a constant pace with Luxchomp, occasionally things just felt. . . “off”.
The main source of this “off”ness was that I told my friends to never let me play Luxchomp ever again. Coming off of my City Championships win, I told them that I had to play Sablock week 1 at least. Even after my constant testing with the format’s best deck, I couldn’t help but feel like I had some sort of moral obligation to fulfill in playing Sablock.
Maybe it’s because it won me a Regional. Or that I couldn’t seem to win anything else without it. While I hated to admit that I used the deck as a crutch to cover my lack of experience with other decks, I really needed to snap back to reality and face the facts.
Here was my full tournament resume up to the end of Cities:
Battle Roads:
- 2-3 w/ Luxchomp
- Lost in swiss to: Luxchomp, Kingdra/Machamp, Luxchomp
- 5-0 w/ Sablock + Blaziken FB (Win)
City Championships:
- 4-2 w/ Gyarados (lost in top 8 to Uxie Donk)
- Lost in Swiss to: Kingdra
- 2-3 w/ Luxchomp + Entei/Raikou LEGEND
- Lost in Swiss to: Vilegar, Luxchomp, Luxchomp
- 4-1 w/ Sablock + Blaziken FB (Whiff top cut)
- Lost in Swiss to: Gyarados
- 2-2 w/ Luxchomp
- Lost in Swiss to: Gyarados, Gyarados
- 3-2 w/ Gyarados (donked both losses without getting to draw a card)
- Lost in Swiss to: Sablock, Gyarados
- 4-2 w/ Sablock + Blaziken FB (Whiff top cut)
- Lost in Swiss to: Vilegar, Luxchomp (donk)
- 7-2 w/ Sablock + Blaziken FB (Win)
- Lost in Swiss to: Gyarados, Vilegar
Sometimes, being self-reflective is a fantastic exercise—not only does it tell you your greatest weaknesses over the past, but also your greatest strengths.
With a combined 6-8 with Luxchomp, wasting 3 of my tournaments this season, I don’t know why on earth I even tested with the thing in the first place. While it might seem like common sense to you guys that you should keep playing with a deck you do well with, I obviously hadn’t been listening.
Why did I find myself needing to switch back to Luxchomp after going 4-1 with Sablock? And then why didn’t I try Sablock the week after that? These are questions I’ll never have an answer to—all I know is that they were just a few of the many factors that lead me to my meager 1687 “top 150 in North America” rating.
I still had a long way to climb before a Worlds invite would even be remotely possible, and I knew the only way that I could personally make a move forward was by keeping Sablock.
All the Luxchomp testing didn’t go to waste, though. A lot of the things I learned still applied back to Sablock. I still found that 3 Poke Turn was a fine number. I also still found Twins to be an excellent card in the SP mirror. I also found that having extra insurance against the “tank decks” like Gigas and T-Tar was nice, and decided to cut a few corners to fit Toxicroak G in.
I also found Ambipom G to be serving me less and less every game, so he got the axe pretty quickly. After doing some deck surgery on my City Championship deck, here’s what remained:
