Hello there again Underground, I hope you had a great X-mas and happy New Year!
Today I’m going to discuss various strategies on how to consistently achieve great results in the top cut, or if you’re a European player who plays 2/3 games the entire tournament. Some ideas may be more apparent than others, but I hope that everyone can take something away from this article.
1. Choosing & Building the Right Deck for the Cut
On the tournament scene at the moment, a lot of players are neglecting the capability of a deck in best two out of three games with the recent rule changes. With the new sudden death ruling, faster, more offensive decks such as Luxchomp and donk decks have a better chance to do well in the top cut.
With only 1 prize card needing to be taken in order for a game to count, you made have played out a solid first game in 50 minutes, only to lose game 2 on time to a faster deck and have to go to sudden death. Decks such as Regigigas, Magnezone, Vilegar and to a lesser extent Gyarados, although perform very strongly in the late game, have a weak early game set up.
This results in faster decks with T1/T2 KO options (i.e. Luxchomp, Donphan, Machamp and Kingdra) generally doing better under these sudden death conditions.
