Hey all, long time since I’ve had an article here I feel like. I’m going to be trying to go over some of the national metagame this week as well as giving you a rundown of the rogue deck that I played at my first week of states. Let’s start off with some metagame analysis though!
Metagame Analysis
Coming out of Cities, Luxchomp was far and away the best deck, with the most wins, the most top cuts, the most everything. Vilegar and Gyarados were distant seconds, but still very formidable decks. Dialga was played sparingly but had some success nonetheless. Machamp, the final of the “Big 5” underperformed and was written off as generally a mediocre deck.
The only real big deck introduced from Call of Legends is the infamous Lostgar, which had mixed expectations going into week one of States. Everyone was preparing for it, but it seemed not that many people were going to play it. Looking at the results, it seems as if this was exactly the case.
If we take a look at the results, Luxchomp is still by far the most popular and successful deck in the format. Surprise surprise! Not really. Everyone here on SixPrizes has been talking about how Luxchomp is still the strongest deck and the most versatile and the most able to steal games and etc etc etc, you’ve all heard this 1000 times.
More interestingly, in my opinion, is the significance of some of the other decks out there right now. Dialga definitely saw a spike in play, personally I played against two Dialga variants in my tournament and saw multiple others running around.
On the national scale, we have two winning Dialga lists (one coming from the insanely talented, Dialga-man Kyle “Pooka” Sucevich) as well as a number of top four and top eight finishers with the deck.
Vilegar has settled down a bit, but is still pretty popular and successful, coming in with three wins so far, along with multiple other higher placings. Gyarados is around the same, with two wins and a similar amount of good places in the top cut.
Fish out of water? Maybe not!
These results aren’t too too surprising, but I am a little shocked to see Gyarados doing so well. Although I knew it was still going to be a solid play for States, I assumed many people had given up on the deck in light of Lostgar.
Apparently not!
Even former World Champion Stephen Silvestro piloted the deck, and though I’m not sure, I’ve heard he went X-1 in swiss, losing only one round on the first turn, and then missed the cut (only a T4?). So, Gyarados is still a force.
My personal opinion is that it can’t compete with Luxchomp if it runs Expert Belt and Vilegar is still its hardest matchup, especially the Gyarados builds that I’ve seen running around. The one Gyarados I played against this weekend, my Vileplume completely stopped him: he didn’t play more than one card a turn once Vileplume hit the field.
Although I didn’t compile the data by region like I did for Cities, if we look at the Gym for information we can see what is what by region pretty easily, but we also have to realize that, for the most part, it’s the same everywhere: SP dominates with Vilegar and Gyarados taking some spots, different areas have more focus on one or the other, and then there are a bunch of random decks that are popular in one area and not so much in another.
