Hey everyone, I’m Michael Davidson, a writer for Cut or Tap currently ranked 5th in North America for the 2025 season. After playing Gardy for a majority of events this season (almost every event since Toronto), I was able to win the Portland Regional Championships in a same-60-card mirror against Henry Chao in the finals. Our Gardy list, which borrowed heavily from William Azevedo’s Santiago Regionals-winning list from the weekend before Portland, seemingly had favorable matchups into almost everything except Gholdengo with Jamming Tower, which we knew would be much less played than at previous events. In this article, I will explain how we built the list that Henry and I were able to place 1st and 2nd with, recap my tournament run, and discuss Gardevoir’s place in the NAIC metagame.
Refining the Brazilian List
Just over two weeks away from the event, Henry and I felt lost about what to play. We felt as if Brent’s Gardy list did not have the strong Dragapult matchups many claimed it did, and did not have positive feelings towards any other Gardevoir variants seeing play in the format. Thankfully for us, William Azevedo and Pedro Pertusi’s testing group saw a lot of success at the Santiago Regional in Chile, with a Gardevoir list that featured four Arvens, two Technical Machine Evolution, and a high count of draw Supporters. Part of the reason why we hadn’t really reconsidered Arven this format is because, under Budew, it is generally a very weak card. However, the format had slowed down a little from Dragapult Dusknoir’s early domination and the Straight Dragapult version had actually surpassed Dusknoir in popularity. These shifts in the metagame enabled Technical Machine Evolution to actually keep enough tempo within the format to be worth playing, but we didn’t feel like the list was quite right.
We still viewed Arven as a relatively weak Supporter, and wanted to play even more draw Supporters due to their increased utility throughout the game in different scenarios. We cut two Arven for a fourth Iono and a Morty’s Conviction, but eventually cut the Morty’s for a fourth Professor’s Research and never looked back. We still wanted to have pretty good chances of using Technical Machine Evolution on our first attacking turn, despite our lower Arven count, so we made the bold decision to cut Budew from our deck in exchange for a third copy of Evolution. It felt like almost every time we had the option to either use Evolution or attack with Budew, using Evolution to set up our board was usually correct. We kept the relatively low Ball search count exactly the same, as this build of Gardevoir (and Gardevoir in general, post rotation) does not need a particularly wide board in the early game. The only other serious innovation we made from William’s list was including the 1-1 Rabsca line, which likely ended up being the most valuable inclusion for both Henry and me.
After upgrading your membership, you will see the rest of the article, and an audio recording of this article, narrated by Andy Hyun: 
You must have a Premier Membership or greater to see the rest of this post. If you don't have a Premier account, you can Sign Up for one here.
You must have a Premier Membership or greater to see the rest of this post. If you don't have a Premier account, you can Sign Up for one here.