Hello guys! I was only able to make it to one Battle Road on the first week, mainly due to conflicting schedules with my soccer games but oh well; at least I got some games in. I decided to use Flygon Lock for this tournament, mainly because I had used it a lot before Worlds, but I hadn’t used it at a real tournament before. I knew time would be an issue eventually, so I tried playing as fast as I could, but I can’t play for my opponents and the one round it mattered, the judge didn’t allow for the time extension I asked for so I lost being 4 cards away from decking my opponent.
I used the exact list that I had previously analyzed in the Flygon Lock article, except I used a 1-1 Machamp line instead of the Mewtwo LV.X, only because I do not own one.
The tournament was filled with alot of tried and true decks, and both Garchomp C and Blaziken FB made up a very small portion of the 60+ players field from what I saw. Beedrill I believe was the most predominant deck, along with a lot of Machamp variants including Gengar / Machamp and Machamp / Dusknoir.
The Top 4 of the first Autumn Battle Road in Mexico were the following decks:
- 1st – Gyarados SF / Palkia LV.X
- 2nd – Machamp SF / Rampardos PL
- 3rd – Beedrill RR & GE / Shaymin LV.X (Land Forme)
- 4th – Dusknoir DP & SF / Machamp SF / Mewtwo LV.X LA
I consider the Gyarados SF
Machamp SF paired with Rampardos PL is not a very common sight, but the deck seemed to add a lot of early game pressure against any deck, and Rampardos definitely serves as a nice big hitter to use as back up against Pokemon that have an Unown G attached.
Beedrill was of course to be expected, but from the ones I saw played, all of them were using either Shaymin LV.X Land Forme or Sky Forme. Both have their perks, and I faced two of them during the rounds that were using the Land Form Shaymin, and killing even Weedles was hard as they had 90 HP. I managed to deck one of those Beedrills, but the one that beat me on time, the guy played slow all game, which I guess doesn’t count as stalling, but he knew the type of deck I was playing, and he looked at his discard pile every single turn which was lame but oh well, it’s good this was a Battle Road and not a bigger event.
The final deck in the Top 4, was another very interesting choice, and the smartest one for the day in my opinion. It combined three Pokemon that countered the low energy attacks and basic Pokemon filled metagame very good, but maybe it was trying to accomplish too much at the same time. Dusknoir SF definitely has potential in this format due to the favored low energy attacks. The player managed to slow down alot of decks by using Dusknoir SF’s “Night Spin” to mess with the energy drops of the opponent’s Pokemon, but since it requires 3 total energy to attack makes it hard to use effectively, as you can’t abuse Upper Energy with it either due to the 2 Psychic Energy cost in the attack.
I definitely think I could’ve beat any of those decks in 1 hour timed matches in the Top Cut by decking them, but alas I ended up with a 4-2 record and 9th place.
Finally after the tournament, I played 2 friendly matches against one of my buddies using Palkia Lock with Staraptor FB LV.X and let me tell you the Staraptor FB really made a difference in the games we played. Despite me beating him 2-0, both games were definitely close and Flint’s Willpower caught me off guard in the first game, specially the 2nd one as he pulled off two consecutive Hydro Shots, but in the end decking got to him.
I will post lists of what I remember of each deck from the tournament if people are interested in the general aspects of the lists. I’m not sure what I will be playing for next weekend, but I’m thinking I’m going to give a merry go round to Beedrill or Gengar
If you have any questions on the decks or why I chose Flygon Lock, don’t be afraid to ask. Thanks for reading!
