One Hit KO

Hello once again readers of OneHitKO, I’m back for my second article with an interesting experience for everyone to read about.  This previous weekend (9/14/13), I got the opportunity to play in a BW-on tournament that was single-game Swiss rounds.  The only different rule was, you couldn’t play any EX Pokemon!  I actually only found out I was going to this tournament about a week in advance, so I was limited on how much I could prepare.

At first I thought the Tool-Drop deck (Trubish/Sigilyph/Masqurain) would be the best choice, but it was very inconsistent and didn’t do as well against non-EX Pokemon.  Absol seemed strong, but was also easy to play around if that was the only focus of the deck.  Zoroark was promising, but just didn’t hold up to some of the stage 2 decks.  I wanted to play Gothitelle/Accelgor/Dusknoir but I no longer had any Gothitelle, so I decided to play Garchomp/Altaria.  It was consistent, had a good damage output (100-140) without too much effort, and was easy to play.  After testing a game or two and doing some theorizing, here is the list I came up with:

The event took place in Des Moines, Iowa during an anime convention at Drake University.  It was roughly a 4 hour drive and started at 11 a.m. so the drive shouldn’t have been too bad, but for some reason we left at 4 a.m. and just didn’t sleep the night before.  Although we didn’t get much sleep, it was a blast and I would make the same decision again.

I’m not going to go into too much about the rounds, but I will say that I started 4-0 and then lost the last round to go 4-1 after I prized 3 Gible, an Altaria, and a Garchomp against my friend Gothitelle/Accelgor/Dusknoir.  I ended up losing to the deck I wanted to play which was a little disappointing, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.  I ended up in second place and received 7 plasma blast packs along with $10 of in store credit at a local shop.

This tournament was a great experience, I really enjoyed a break from the super luck based and power-creep game that everyone has come to know.  I encourage others to try out this format at their local league when you guys are looking for something to do between tournaments this year.

This year Pokemon announced that the requirement for an invite to the 2014 Pokemon World Championships is 500 championship points, up from 400 last year.  Personally I think this number is quite high, and there will only be around 30-50 players from North America in the Masters division that actually pull off this feat.  450 CP would be a better number, but Pokemon is trying to make worlds a little more exclusive this year.

I believe this season will be one of the last experimental seasons for the game as far as tournament structure goes (Cities/States/Regionals/etc.).  Unless Pokemon goes bankrupt, this season should be what most players have been asking for in past years as far as prize support goes and will not change for a while.  The only things I could see them changing is the amount of CP required for Worlds and maybe some sort of qualification for Nationals.

I honestly am looking forward to this year, even though a Worlds invite will be as hard as ever to get.  I will still play competitively, but I need to be realistic about traveling as will many others.  I am going to try to get out an article every Monday or Tuesday from now on, so keep an eye out.  Thanks for reading guys!