January 2010

Spiritomb Porygon

porygon2-geI’d like to use the new Spiritomb AoA to annoy opponents for fun and profit, but I really don’t want to play that Glistomb lock. It just seems mean. Omar recently supplied me with a Porygon deck, and I was wondering how Spiritomb might work with Porygon.

Porygon2 GE allows you to “play” an extra supporter each turn. While running such a deck, you’d use lots of supporters available to abuse this power. Of course, Spiritomb can rain on your own parade, because you’d also run trainers (like lots of TMs and VS Seekers). What I’m curious about, though, is if Spiritomb can stall the opponent enough so that, when you are ready to attack, the opponent isn’t sufficiently prepared.

Spiritomb ARTo do this, you’d want to start with Spiritomb. This stops the opponent from playing trainers. It also stops you, but you can stick to supporters until you’re ready to retreat the Tomb. Having Tomb active really isn’t bad either, because his free Darkness Grace attack helps you evolve your benched Porygons. Ultimately, you’d want to play an early Roseanne’s to get a benched Porygon (and Baltoy, Unown Q/G, Energy, a second Porygon, Uxie, etc.) and then Darkness Grace in a Porygon2/Claydol. When you’re ready to rock, get yourself an Unown Q (or an energy) to allow you to easily retreat the Tomb, play all your trainers/TMs, and attack for big damage.

I’m also curious if Staraptor FB LvX would help this strategy by potentially getting extra supporters. The big drawback here is that it’d have to be active to level up. Porygon-Z’s free Learning attack can level it up on the bench, but once you have an active Porygon-Z, I think you’d want to be using the Overload attack instead. It is worth mentioning that Staraptor has a free retreat, so it’s not horrible if you can Warp Point him up, LvX him, and retreat him (or something like that).

All this being said, though, I’m still not convinced that this Porygon/Spiritomb combo can be really any better than Porygon without Tomb. I mean, you can always stall for a turn or two with Mr. Mime, but that doesn’t hinder the opponent from setting up. The question here is whether or not Spiritomb would sufficiently hinder your opponent while allowing you to set up, and (if it does) whether it makes the deck better, worse, or just different.

Speed Blaziken FB Deck (Should this info be public?)

Now that Team Omar’s website has been blasting off for a while, we are starting to get some content. I think we should talk a bit about what we want to do with the site. I think that the main issue is whether or not we want our conversations public. Right now, people can find this site via Google. I keep track of some stats. They are in no way large at the moment, but you never know what it might grow to be. I think that maybe 2 or 3 people that we don’t know have stumbled onto the site. For example, I saw that one person found us by searching for “speed blaziken fb deck” on Google.

If we start mentioning specific things like what deck we’re playing at a specific location/tourney, then people might end up searching for that and knowing what we’re planning. This may not be a bad thing, but it might not be the best. The other side of things is that if we talk freely here, then we might get new people from around the world coming to read and discuss topics here. Who knows.

I think we should at least discuss how to proceed. I can make the website only viewable to members (people that can log in), or we can keep it public. What do you think?