I was both thrilled and annoyed about seeing that Night March won Toronto Regionals. On one hand, I was vindicated in my picks for the event since I had posted a Night March Order Pad list saying it was likely the best play, but that reason is pretty superficial. The much more hindering side of Night March’s success is that I had been working hard on Night March and now the deck is a far worse play with all the techs that will probably be played at Greensboro. Trevenant is not the easiest match up either, although I do consider it slightly favorable for Night March. Now it is starting to look like ZoroGarb is a great play again considering it can deal with Trevenant and needs only one tech to beat Night March every time. Fighting decks are also bottoming out in play because of the Trevenant and Night March in the meta. Don’t forget that Pumpkaboo hits for weakness on a lot of these fighting types and only give up one prize.

I would be lying if I said anything other than ZoroGarb is my top pick. Usually there are one to two other archetype vying with ZoroGarb to be the BDIF, but it seems right now that the stars are aligning too perfectly for anything else to be in the same tier. With that being said, I still consider a few other decks. This piece goes over ZoroGarb, BuzzShrine, and Archie’s Wails. Before I get into the decks, I talk about a few things a deck needs in order to be a legitimate option for this meta; similar to the intro in my last standard article.

What does a deck need for Greensboro?

At least a 50/50 against ZoroGarb

The polls and conversations on HeyFonte lead to the conclusion that most players both think ZoroGarb is a very strong play (or the strongest play) and that it will be the most popularly played deck. This is not a situation where we have a few decks that are about equally important to beat, it is one where there is one deck that we need to beat and two others that we should also be fairly prepared for.  The first thing a deck needs in this meta is a legitimate 50/50 against ZoroGarb. Players can be overconfident about their match ups, so make sure you are acutely aware of what your chances of winning against ZoroGarb actually are. In the polls talking about techs, Sudowoodo had the third highest number of votes. This tells me players may not be as concerned about Zoroark as they should be.

But here’s the catch…

Though it is not obvious at first, Fighting decks were popular at Toronto. If we add up all of the different players using Fighting variants it was almost 100 players, which is close to one-third of the entire meta. If this trend continues, ZoroGarb could have a hard time. With my conclusion that ZoroGarb is the best deck, there is an underlying assumption that players will adapt to the meta shift quickly and switch it up for Toronto. If we see many of the same players that were at Toronto also playing in Greensboro, there’s a good chance these players do not switch archetypes and continue playing Fighting variants. One week is not ample time to test a different archetype for most people.

Consistency on par with Zoroark and Night March

If we look at what did well in Toronto, there is pretty much nothing in top 8 without a lot of consistency. I bring this up specifically because some players might lean towards a Buzz Shrine list that is prepared for Trevenant, or an Archie list heavily teched, or maybe even Groudon. I would definitely suggest not taking this route because overall we can see a trend of these sort of lists seeing less success than more consistent options. Even for Russell’s top 8 list, I think he would have had the best chance of winning the event if he had one more Order Pad, a second Lele, and a Keldeo. This consistency is what I had in mind when I working on the Buzz Shrine list in this piece. Buzz Shrine has an inherent inconsistency to it that should be corrected if possible. If it is not possible to do so, the deck is a bad call in my book. Speaking of Buzz…

Buzz Shrine 

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