In the spirit of making the best pre-Cities article possible, I decided that I should find out what the subscribers most wanted!
From the moment I got back from Regionals, City Championships have been on my mind, meaning that through extension, so has Noble Victories. This works out quite nicely with my chosen prompt for today, as most of your questions were actually specific ones about the nitty-gritty of NVI. From reimagining the decks of yester-month, to breaking decks for this weekend, I have been all over this set.
My first batch of questions will pertain to “reinventing the wheel” of pre-Cities archetypes, while my second batch will deal with exclusively new developments out of Noble Victories. I will then conclude the article with a nice mix of miscellaneous questions about life, the universe, and Pokemon.
Reinventing the Wheel
Contrary to the beliefs of some, Noble Victories is not going to completely disrupt the current landscape – that honor belongs only to a select few sets throughout the game’s history (Neo Genesis, Ruby/Sapphire, Secret Wonders, etc). Rather, what will most likely occur is that our current tournament climate will keep the same old contenders, and welcome just a few new ones into the fold.
Even if it were the case that Noble Victories-exclusive decks would define the metagame, we would still need to know how archetypes will change for the first few weeks of City tournaments!
By far, the most asked question on my Underground forum thread was “how does Noble Victories impact current decks in the metagame?” This is not without good reason: most of our members came to the same conclusion I did, and are naturally posing a concern resultant from that conclusion. To solve this issue, I will go over all of the new cards that could help the current field.
N: Where Does He Belong?!
New and old players alike cheered at the announcement of N, spiritual successor to the legendary Team Rocket’s Admin. In a format where an early lead means the world, N is a balance to scenarios where players get way too far ahead in the game, and can turn board control upside-down in the process.
Oftentimes, however, N can wreck your own consistency – especially if you run an aggressive deck with little in the way of reliable draw. Let’s look at which archetypes could use N to great success…
- Any player running a deck with Magnezone Prime should automatically consider N. Emboar/Magnezone, Typhlosion/Magnezone, Yanmega/Magnezone, or even straight Magnezone…They could all benefit heavily from it. I am not inclined to say that it is a requirement yet, since some of these decks are more setup-oriented than others.
Ultimately, Embzone and Typhlozone should probably focus on consistency before disruption, whereas Primetime and Magnezone would do well to run at least 2-3 N.
- Ninetales engine decks (traditional Typhlosion, Emboar/Reshiram) should seriously consider not running N if the lists are too teched. If they are more mainstream builds, then consider running two as opposed to the shuffle draw you would have otherwise been running.
- Engine-less decks (Stage Ones, YMCA, ZPST) should usually not run N, no matter how sparingly beneficial it might be. These decks tend to go up in prizes right away, and are oftentimes the ones on the receiving end of a bad N. For this reason, your main focus should be to just keep your lists as immune from N/Judge as possible.
- Reuniclus-based decks LOVE N, and would generally be well-suited to run two or three of it. However, there is one major conflict: most of these also run Tropical Beach, which your opponent can use to break out of the lock you’ve just placed.
So how should this issue be resolved? One solution is to just keep Tropical Beach and omit N; another is to try running an alternate draw engine to replace Tropical Beach’s absence. Here is an example of an experimental list I’ve designed to tackle this concern:
