Hello and welcome to the 2nd to last Battle of Wittz article of the 2011 year (the last one will be on New Years Day!). Today’s article is about the archetype that contains our most-successful deck of the 2011-2012 City Championships season: Eelektrik.
My Status Right Now
Right now we’re about exactly halfway through the start of the City Championships season, with most of the largest marathons kicking up soon (including my own in Illinois). The metagame has had enough time to reach a near-complete development, and the bar for entry into Worlds this year has been raised considerably (my last check in the rankings for Masters showed a point split of around 20 to 35 points held by the top 40 points earners — very likely the standards for qualifying in North America this year). Things are starting to get intense!
And strangely enough, I am not quite there yet. Like I was explaining in a late post asking for any article suggestions, I’m a little behind the curve as far as experience (both in and out of tournament). Finals preparation for school was especially hard for me because of all the changes I’ve been going through in changing my major this year, and the amount of free time I had to do the things I like has diminished considerably (anybody who watches Prof-It! has probably noticed this).
The little free time I have been given has been split between slowly getting back into strong Pokémon shape for the City Championship season, and preparing for an eventual career. There’s a lot of exciting stuff I’m working on for my future that I’m happy to tell you guys when the time is right, but for now let’s get back to Pokémon business.
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to attend a single City Championship so far, which is really odd. It’s about 80 percent because of the impending Illinois marathon, but it still feels weird. What’s most upsetting is two of the easiest City Championship events (Champaign and Rantoul — both 15 minutes from school) were out of my reach because of the way my finals schedule lined up. Aside from that, there just haven’t been any events in my area to attend.
This past week, I’ve been playing like crazy on any form of testing that I can to get back into shape (online, in person, etc.), and I’m slowly feeling like City Championships will be successful as soon as I actually get to attend some! Even before the deck had even performed at all at events, I was a big fan of Magnezone/Eelektrik; Now that I’ve had some decent testing with it, it’s likely going to be my go-to deck for the rest of the CC Season.
Bigger isn’t always Better
One thing I’ve noticed so far in observation of City Championships is that our new ratings system is still far from perfect. I’m not going to dwell on it all day, but it is important to know — smaller events reward you more. I know that seems counter-intuitive because larger events award kicker points, but smaller events offer a much higher chance of receiving points.
Because City Championships are without a doubt the most rewarding tournament series — people with access to multiple small City Championships are going to have a huge advantage in this year’s race for Worlds. In the past, more rounds meant more time to grind out high scores with multiple wins.
Now, with top cut as your only entry into points, tiny events with attendances below 20 are your best bet. If you’re familiar with areas that are sparsely populated, you might be better off hitting a small event rather than a large one if they take place on the same day.
For example, an event with only 15 Masters will give points to the top 4 players still, or just over 25%. However, at a 50 player City Championship, just 16% would get the points extended through the top 8. While these percentages change based on the number of participants, it’s generally more rewarding to play in a small tournament if possible.
However, with only the Illinois marathon and a small handful of other City Championships, I won’t be having this luxury. I’m going to have to perform well in multiple high-attendance events, and it’s going to be a pain. If I’m still alive by the 31st to tell the tale I will for my next article (I should still actually be mid-marathon at this point), but until then I have a lot of work to do.
I’m not going to pretend like I’ve ever been to a “marathon” style week of tournaments before, and Kettler already covered that topic pretty well. Instead, I want to take you guys through the one deck archetype that I’ve been working with recently.
The City Championships Metagame
For starters, I’ve been spending almost all of my free time learning the ins and outs of our established metagame, and how different decks are reacting to each other. To my surprise, there have been a ton of shifts in our metagame so far, with much heavier involvement of new Noble Victories decks. Typically, the first week or two we’ll see new decks being played out as an experiment. Anything that survives and continues to succeed over the first month, however, is likely here to stay as a frontrunner for each tournament.
While I can’t say I’m a “master of the metagame” right now, I still have the same urge to at least make some decent sense of the statistics. Below is my modified “What Won City Championships” list. As I’m sure you know by now, I can never seem to stand how the results threads on PokeGym ends up being compiled, and I try my best to de-complicate things. For the following list, I did the following:
- Only included decks with more than 2 wins and more than 4 “top 4” placements.
- Grouped all “high HP Basic Pokemon” combinations together.
- Grouped all Vileplume/Reuniclus decks as “Truth/Ross” variants.
Hopefully this clean list will give you what a “what won” list is supposed to — a nice picture of how the metagame has shaped as a whole, rather than what exact combinations of cards happened to win here or there. Here’s what I ended up with:
What Won City Championships (as of the December 18th Weekend)
1st Place
18 Zone/Eel
14 ZPST
9 Truth Variants (Vileplume + Reuniclus + high HP attackers)
8 Chandelure (Mostly w/ Vileplume)
5 Kyurem/Coballion/Electrode (aka CaKE/CoKE)
5 Six Corners/Dragons/”High HP Basics” Decks
5 Lanturn/Eel
5 Donphan/Dragons
4 Yanmega/Magnezone
4 Reshiram/Typhlosion
3 Durant Variants
Top 4 appearances
52 Zone/Eel
45 ZPST
40 Reshiphlosion
27 Chandelure
25 Six Corners/Dragons/Big Basics decks
24 Kyurem/Coballion/Electrode
22 Durant Variants
21 Truth Variants
15 Zekrom/Eel
13 Yanmega/Magnezone
10 Donphan/Dragons
9 Lanturn/Eel
7 Vaniluxe/Victini/Vileplume
6 Gothitelle
5 Kyurem/Feraligatr
What can we make of these results? A lot of things, actually!
