What’s up, Cut or Tap readers! I hope y’all are doing well as we begin to close out the 2025 season. Today I am going to be writing about my run at the Portland Regional Championships a little over a week ago. I’ll be going over the Dragapult/Dusknoir deck I played to get 10th place (losing in Asymmetrical Top Cut), analyzing my run in-depth, and then finally going over how I feel about PultNoir moving forward into the Destined Rivals format for NAIC.
Before I get into the report, I want to give a quick shout-out to our extremely talented roster that really showed up in Portland. We had Michael Davidson winning the event, Caleb getting 4th, Piper getting 5th, myself getting 10th, and Jackson getting 15th. So glad to see us all find success!
Portland Regionals this season had a lot riding on it for me. To start, I haven’t had the strongest season this year; certainly not a bad year by any means, but definitely not up to the standard and expectations I have for myself. Rounding out the Regionals season with a deep run would’ve been a great way to fix this. On a different note, I won the Portland Regional Championships last season, so getting the back-to-back win would’ve been awesome. Alas, I suppose we settle on a loss in Asymmetrical Cut.
Anyways, going into Portland, I knew I wanted to play PultNoir, as I had played it to success at the other majors I had attended in the format (Top 32 at Atlanta and Top 16 at Milwaukee). There was a brief moment where I thought I wanted to play Gardevoir (the same version that Michael Davidson and Henry Chao got 1st and 2nd with respectively; guess I should’ve gone with it), but the list wasn’t where we wanted it to be at the time of me considering it, and I didn’t have enough games played with it.
PultNoir has been genuinely one of my favorite decks to play in a long while, so I had no complaints running it back – here’s the list that I went with:
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