Diversity!
We’re about halfway through Cities and looking over what has been doing well, the meta seems to be pretty wide open. In his last article Josh gave a pretty good run down of what has been winning. I counted 11 different decks taking home a title, and I believe he only included decks that have won more than 1 City.
While it’s nice to see so much diversity, an open meta can be very good and very bad at the same time. It is nice to have a lot of choice in what you want to play and not feel like your forced to choose between losing or playing just 1 or 2 decks. It also makes it more interesting when you don’t have to sit across from the same deck every round.
At the same time though with an open meta you can never account for everything or every matchup meaning, which means you’ll probably have a bad match up against something in the meta no matter how you build your deck.
A good portion of this article I’m going to devote to talking about what I feel to be one of the most well rounded decks in this format: Typhlosion/Reshiram. Some players feel the deck is past its prime while others think it just needs to be updated to deal with all of the new threats that Noble Victories has brought us.
Regardless of which side of the fence you fall something I will promise you is Typhlosion is not a deck you want to underestimate. After Regionals, we have 3 very different variations of the deck - Typhlosion/Reshiram/Ninetales, Typhlosion/Reshiram/Magnezone, and Typhlosion/Reshiram/Kingdra - so I’ll talk about all 3 variations and the pros and cons of each, as well as what I feel to be the best variant.
I know we have a lot of strong Typhlosion/Reshiram supporters that have very high standards whenever we talk about the deck, so I’ve put a lot of effort into this article and hopefully we’ll also get a good discussion going on the message boards. I also want to hit some other tangents about Cities, playing, and general stuff. I’ll cut myself off here so I don’t ramble, and just say on to the article.
“N” – How does it affect our format, and how many copies should my deck run?
Every so often we will get a format-defining card, and N is certainly one of those cards. I interpret a formatting defining card as any card that changes how a player builds their deck. N is also something that we desperately needed for the current format, previously we never had any real “come from behind cards” – nothing that really punished a player for taking a prize lead with the exception of Twins.
N can easily put you back in a game that you were down 2, 3 or even 4 prizes. This pretty much requires that any deck is able to “live” off the field to some degree. What I mean by this is decks that are able to function without a hand have a huge advantage in this format.
Typhlosion variants are prime examples of this since once you begin to set up Typhlosion Primes, the game become simplified to a state of “Afterburners” and “Blue Flares” with the occasional “Flare Destroyer” for good measure. Most of my main deck choices for cities are able to live off the field to some extent, and it’s something important to think about when you are deciding on what deck to play.
I think all too often people just slap N in their decks without think about the card or how it affects their deck. At the start of the game N can be a very weak play because if I go first, I’m going to play down all of the resources I can. Probably a Pokémon Collector or another Supporter, get my energy attachment for the turn, etc.
When it comes to your turn you’ll probably do the same thing before playing N. Now at this point not only are you a turn behind me, but a Supporter behind as well. We both played down a lot of our resources and then your Supporter just got me a fresh hand to play off of next turn.
Going first and dropping N isn’t as bad for you, but you’re just as likely to N your opponent into a Pokémon Collector as you are to N them out of one. This is why most of my decks don’t play 4 N, I’ve tried playing 4 in some heavy control (Mew Prime/Vileplume UD/Yanmega Prime aka the Jason Klaczynski deck for example) variants, but they still really struggle with Typhlosion Prime and other decks that are hard to lock.
However, I really do like 3-4 in Magnezone Prime variants (Magnezone/Yanmega in particular). It allows for some amazing come backs late game, and for Yanmega variants it also consistently insures their opponent’s hand size is below that magical number of 6. I find the higher N count in this deck plays better not because I’m necessarily trying to control the game (1-3 would serve this purpose), but rather I’m trying to create a certain game state (getting their hand size to a level that I can match).
