How to Do Well at NAIC: Two Picks for Columbus

This is the article you want to read if you want to do well at the North American International Championships. The biggest tournament of all time in the western world is upon us, and it is time to get ready to compete in it.

What’s up, everyone! SmartTCG here, and I am stoked to be writing my most important article to date for Cut or Tap! Today, I am going to be making sure that you are prepared for the second biggest event of the year. So many of you are close to your invite, or want a respectable finish, and this article is dedicated to helping you reach your goals. Today we will dive into the NAIC metagame and how you should prepare for it. If you are looking for any cards in this article, make sure to check out deaddrawgaming.com – they have amazing prices on products and cards, and they’ll ship directly to your doorstep! 

NAIC Prep

Alright everyone, let’s figure out what the heck we are playing for this event. First off, I am going to go over a couple things that I am doing as I prepare for this event.

With an event of this size, how I deck-build is slightly different as opposed to a regular-size event. On top of this, I also change how I build my lists based on what time-point of the format we are in. Typically at the beginning of sets, I like to focus a lot more on consistency rather than teching. At Vancouver Regionals last year, it marked the final event of a very long Brilliant Stars format which saw Inteleon variants, Arceus VSTAR, and Mew VMAX dominate the Standard format. At that event, since the metagame was so predictable, I decided to play Malamar VMAX with Jolteon/ Memory Capsule. The deck in a vacuum was not actually very powerful; however, since the metagame was so predictable, I was able to tech specific cards into my deck, and focus on beating a very select few decks. 

Expect the Unexpected

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One thought on “How to Do Well at NAIC: Two Picks for Columbus

  1. Thank you for the article. I was wondering if you could talk more about a strategy for Gardevoir EX against Lost Box. I am finding it difficult come back from their early knock outs on my Ralts.

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