As promised, this is the second article for this week. I have to say, I feel pretty good about the article I put out on Friday because the two decks I covered were the ones that did the best. Greninja also saw a surprising amount of success and Buzzwole Garbodor seems to have come back into the scene as well. This is a short piece … Continue reading Observations on Madison Regionals & Countering BuzzRoc

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, … Continue reading Buzzwole Lycanroc & Zoroark Lycanroc for Madison Regionals

In attempt to build a deck that I actually had the cards for, I ended up building Zoroark Garbodor. After playing my first 10 games with the deck and winning all of them, I was pretty interested in the deck. I later realized this deck was a lot like Zoroark Eggs because it can do the same thing Hex does every turn while still Trading … Continue reading Zoroark Garbodor

In this piece I am not going to talk about the cards that I don’t think are good becuase I see no point in doing so. Instead, I am only going to focus on the cards that I think actually have potential to be top tier and what I think they can combine with. This piece also has multiple lists for the potential top-tier archetypes. … Continue reading New Archetypes and Updated Decks with Forbidden Light!

Zoroark is the clear best deck in the format and there are very few decks that do a good job of countering it, meaning we should give a lot of attention to the ones that legitimately do. So, what are those decks? The more recent option that players seem to be favoring is Greninja and for good reason. In testing so far it does seem … Continue reading Utah Regionals – Final Opinions and Lists

In this piece I judge Golisopod Zoroark, Gardevoir Zoroark, and Lycanroc Zoroark, giving brief matchup descrptions. This is an article made to help the reader decide which Zoroark variant is best for them. Each of those three options have lists in this piece of course. In order to analyze each deck, it’s important to look at what the meta wil have. I’ve paid close attention … Continue reading Analysis of the Zoroark variants

As I have explained in a couple articles, my top two picks for Brazil are BuzzRoc and ZoroRoc. Plenty of detail has been given about Fighting Zoroark variants on Cut or Tap, but I have not given BuzzRoc as much attention as I would like. This piece explains BuzzRoc’s matchups, my list, and what can be changed about the list. For the non-Stage 2 subs, … Continue reading Buzzwole Lycanroc – Matchups and lists

Hello reader, Phinn here with Michael Perez and we are discussing my Zoroark Lycanroc list that both Michael and I won league cups with, followed by detail about Toad Garb. Other than our wins with ZoroRoc, Michael and I both topped an Expanded cup with Toad Garb as well; I was able to win it. If you are not a Stage 2 Subscriber you can … Continue reading League Cups Winning Decks – ZoroRoc & Toad Garb

The current problem we run into with Expanded is that there are few decks that beat Zoroark consistently, and decks like Glaceon and Toad Garb that do beat Zoroark end up having a negative matchup against many other archetypes. You could make the argument that Garbodor does have a decent matchup spread with a decent Zoroark matchup, but Zoroark is going to be playing two … Continue reading The Expanded Predicament – A Quick Look At Seismitoad Garbodor & Zoroark Eggs

Gardevoir with Order Pad seems to be the new hot deck so I figured I would give it some coverage with my version of the list and talk about its Pros and Cons. Gardevoir has clearly been a powerhouse with an Intercontinentals win and a Worlds win, but over the last month it seems to have fallen out of favor with a lot of players. … Continue reading Order Pad Gardevoir – Is it viable?

After Portland, I realized that the deck I used has way more potential than other people seems to realize. I played an auto-loss (Attacking Hoopa) in my ‘win & in’ round which stopped me from getting to day two, but with a couple tweaks that matchup has become positive. My other loss was to BuzzRoc with Lucario and Elixirs, but again I have tweaked the list … Continue reading Two Great Options for Cups: Lycanroc Lucario Zoroark & Espeon Garbodor

Portland is coming up pretty soon…Tomorrow in fact! Deck lists for the following archetypes are in this piece: Buzzwole Lycanroc Buzzwole Garbodor (Trashalanche) Zoroark Lycanroc Lucario Lycanroc Zoroark Lucario Zoroark Can Lycanroc Zoroark keep up with Lucario Zoroark? We discussed this a little bit in a discussion on Seagrove’s channel. If you’re interested in that video, you can watch it here. Rukan and Caleb believe … Continue reading “Fording the Standard River:” Options for Portland Regionals

Through the last couple months I have taken a very meta oriented approach to Pokemon. For Dallas Regionals I played the same deck that won San Jose Regionals, and for Costa Mesa Regionals I played the deck that won Dallas Regionals. The conclusion I have come to is that these decks that win Regionals are rarely countable in any reasonable way and that the counters … Continue reading Golisopod Zoroark & Lycanroc Zoroark

This past weekend I was lucky enough to make finals out of 512 players, using a deck that I can only describe as ridiculous. I will not be giving a tournament report but I will be explaining matchups in detail, using examples from the event and evidence from my rounds. If you’d like to hear about how my rounds went, I recently did an interview … Continue reading Costa Mesa Regionals 2nd Place Zoroark Eggs – How to play the deck

Costa Mesa is in just two days and the list of options I have has diminished heavily. Decks like Giratina Siesmitoad, Darkrai GX, Dusknoir Koko and Toad Garbodor were on my radar and dropped for different reasons, while other decks had to take some serious editing in order to stay viable options. Garbodor with the new Magical Swap Tapu Lele is an idea I had … Continue reading Final Options for Costa Mesa – Garbodor Magical Swap, Zoroark Eggs, and Night March

It is my premature prediction that Zoroark, Garbodor and either Glaceon or Fighting/stuff will be the top three decks for Costa Mesa. This article is predicated on that prediction and is here to give meta options for the event. All four of these seem great to me thus far, which is unusual because I normally can find at least one top-tier deck that I dislike. Playing … Continue reading Costa Mesa – Garbodor Sudowoodo, Glaceon and Zoroark

There’s a new set out and that means it is time to update the common archetypes to fit the new cards, and time to make some new decklists for the new options. In this piece I have four decks I cover, including Empoleon, Buzzwole Lycaroc, Magnezone Dusk Mane Necrozma, and Espeon Garbodor. It’s worth noting that I think Greninja has a lot of potential now that Cynthia … Continue reading Standard Options – BuzzRoc, Magnezone Stuff, Espeon, and Empoleon

Through my Expanded testing, I have come to the concerning conclusion that Glaceon GX is extremely strong. In Standard, the deck certainly can run into issues with all the new metal support, that will certainly create at least one top-tier archetype, but in Expanded metal is much less of an issue and as a result, Glaceon is free to provide a strong lock at very … Continue reading Expanded Quad Glaceon GX