Buzzwole Lycanroc & Zoroark Lycanroc for Madison Regionals

Madison Regionals is tomorrow and I wanted to get two options out before the event for anybody considering BuzzRoc or ZoroRoc. Psychic Necrozma Malamar has seen a lot of coverage from players and overall is a pretty easy deck to play. I felt like it needed less attention than the other top options. Ultra Necrozma would have been a good deck to cover as well, but unfortunately I do not feel like I have tested with it enough yet. I’ll probably come out with a piece covering it next week.

This is a short piece, but it will be accompanied by another article this Sunday. Like I said, I just wanted to release this one tonight so people could play either of these tomorrow. However, if you can play Zoroark Garbodor well, I would still suggest that deck over anything else for Madison. It’s just a very hard deck to pilot well and I doubt many people are experienced with it yet. There’s an updated list for it at the end of this piece.

BuzzRoc

Matchups at a glace

The matchups for BuzzRoc are solid, as usual. Any of the Zoroark variants can be beaten with consistency, except possibly Zoroark Garbodor. Ultra Necrozma Malamar is a favorable matchup, not by a lot, but still favorable. And as we all probably know, the Psychic Necrozma Malamar matchup is poor. The list bellow also has a favorable mirror because it will hit Elixirs more than other lists and can use the one-prize Buzzwole more efficiently.

The glaring flaw

The issue I have with BuzzRoc now, is the same one I’ve had with past lists: I simply dead draw too often. I had, maybe eight games yesterday where the deck ran fine. I dead drew rarely, got what I needed a lot of the time and overall felt like the deck was running smoothly. Today, however, I bricked five times over the course of six games and lost all of them except for one as a result! It seems this will eternally be my issue with BuzzRoc, the fact that I never really know when I will be drawing well.

This flaw is contrasted by the unique ability to can pick off low HP Pokemon easily with very little investment. If there is one deck in Standard that has an easier time dead drawing, it certainly is BuzzRoc. In the past I have had several games where I am not getting supporters or other draw, but still win only because of the heavy pressure of Jet Punch and the deck’s ability to thrive with just Pokemon and attachments. I’m less confident in the deck’s ability to do this against decks like Malamar, but it certainly still can against Zoroark variants.

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