This weeks bit of news comes from the field we are most qualified in, politics.  Well this past week in Iowa they held the Iowa Caucuses, to help determine the Republican candidate for the Presidential elections that will be held later this year.  And we have to talk about it just so I can say the word “Caucus”.

Who won the Caucus?

That was Mitt Romney.  You know Pikkdogs, I once won a Caucus?

Is ”won a caucus” code for amorus homosexual activity?

Maybe.

I have a feeling we should just go onto the article. 

One of the coolest decks to come out of the later Cities season was a new version of Mew Lock.

The basic build of Mewlock goes back to the Mew/Gengar deck that uses Mew Prime to attack with Vileplume on the bench.  A little later, Gengar was taken out of this deck and Muk and Yanmega were added.  Now both of these cards are…

This past Saturday I went down about 40 miles south of my apartment to Toledo, Oh for a City Championship.

I decided that I had enough of sucking with Donphan and Dragons, so I decided to go and suck with another deck.  On the Friday before the tournament I asked my Facebook friends what I should run, and the first suggestion was 6 Corners.  If you don’t know, 6 Corners is a hodgepodge deck of a bunch of Legendary Pokemon.  The goal of the deck is to run a lot of different Pokemon so that you always have weakness over your opponent.  It is a deck that is fairly fast and versatile enough to have a great chance against any deck in the format.  After throwing it together Friday night, I decided that this wouldn’t be the worst deck choice, so I decided to run it.

Here is a list that is similar to my deck, it is not the exact list that I ran that day, but it is close and reflects more…

But Joel, aren’t all of your decks stupid? 

What the…… Who let Pedro in here? Anyway, I would like to discuss a deck that I have been playing on the Pokemon Trading Card Game Online program. The deck revolves around Accelgor and Cinccino, and has a very fast setup. Now before I share the list, I would like to remind you that I’m not Pooka, therefore I don’t have all the good cards at my disposal like he does.

And that also makes you less interesting as well. 

Wow, I really need to talk to Pikkdogs about this, anyway, here is my deck.

Pokemon:
4 Shelmet
4 Accelgor
3 Minccino
3 Cinccino
1 Cleffa
2 Karrablast
Trainers/Supporters
3 Junk Arm
3 PlusPower
3 Pokegear 3.0
2 Pokemon Catcher
3 Pokemon Communication
2 Super Rod
1 Switch
2 Cheren
2 N
3 Pokemon Collector
2 Professor Juniper
3 Professor Oak’s New Theory
2 Twins
Energy
3 Double Colorless
2 Rescue
7 Grass

The main…

Hi Pedro

Really, we did that joke?  We must be hitting the bottom of the barrel, that’s like a 1st grader joke.

Yep.

Anyway, Pedro why don’t you tell people about Ed’s Onehitko.com challenge.

Okay.  Well you guys have probably been reading the articles about Ed trying to come up with a deck made by you guys, the Onehitko.com community.  What happens is people send him some of their spare cards (usually more rogue cards) and we all come together to help him make a deck that he will play at the City Championships.  Well, Cities are very close for Minnesota people like Ed, so there is not much time to get your cards into Ed.  He does need your help to get a good deck that we can all have an input on and grow as a community.  So if you have some rogue cards like Switch, Professor Elm’s Training Method, or some random Pokemon; please pass them on to Ed so we…

So, Regionals and Battle Roads are all over and Cities are well under way.  Football is winding down and basketball is starting up.  It seems that Fall has worked its way into Winter.

That’s usually the order. 

Yes it seems to be a pattern.  Do you like the Winter Pedro?

Oh Hell Yeah!  Love the winter. 

What’s your favorite part about winter?

Snowball fights.

How come every time I ask you about something the conversation ends up being about you wanting to fight with people?

Well I guess I’m just a confrontational person.  You know my dad…

Before we begin the article Pikkdogs, I gotta stop you and wish you a 25th Birthday. 

Well, Thank You Pedro.

Oh you’re welcome, we gotta celebrate your birthday, 25 years is a big milestone for a guy as big as you.

You mean penis wise?

No, I don’t.  I mean a 300 Lb guy doesn’t get too many birthdays, we could be looking at the halfway point for you. 

Well, Thank You Pedro I appreciate the care you show.

You’re welcome, now finish up the article before your heart fails. 

Strategy

The Durant deck has one main Pokemon, any one care to guess?

Jigglypuff?

No, Pedro.  The Durant deck features Durant.  Durant is a 70 HP basic Metal Pokemon with a fire weakness and a 1 retreat cost.  His attack, called “Devour”, allows you to mill 1 card from your opponent’s deck for every Durant you have in play.

So the deck strategy is simple, get lots of Durants out on turn 1 and then keep them in…

The Pokémon Company International has just created a new platform—Pokémon TCG Online, or PTCGO—that could make it much easier for us players to build and test decks. It also promises to attract a whole new…

Why I would be happy to.  Stage 1 decks can be traced to U.S. Nationals 2011.  Kyle “Pooka” Suceveich, among others, did very well with a deck that featured Donphan Prime, Zoroark, and Yanmega Prime.  While Pikkdogs did not do so well with Donphan/Samurott.

What does that have to do with the article?

Nothing, I just thought I would mention it while we were on the topic.  As I was saying, the deck was refered to as Stage 1 Rush, because  every important  Pokemon was a stage 1 Pokemon.  It also emphasized the fact that this deck was both hard hitting and fast since it didn’t have to use Rare Candy, or just rely on puny basic Pokemon.  The deck itself was very fast and could counter almost any deck.  It is almost like a tool box in that it has so many options on what it wants to run.

Fast forward to the end of the summer when Emerging…

Biography

Allow me to briefly introduce myself, My name is Mark McDonald. I am a native of Detroit, Mi. I am a member of the Michigan based Team Warp Point, and friend of the well known Pikkdogs. I’m relatively new to the card game. Nationals 2010 was my first tournament ever. I hadn’t even seen a battle roads, and there i was in the largest tournament of pokemon history. I ended 6-3 with dialgachomp (that i learned how to play a week prior) missing top cut in 75th place of my flight. In 2011, nationals saw me  ending with a  5-4 record with zekrom. But that’s enough about me. Today’s topic is lilligant!

The Idea:

On the horizon of the 2012 tournament seasons start we all have been in search of the deck that will handle the various threats the current format pose. The obvious presence of Pokemon catcher is definitely not being overlooked and the hype of gothitelle is spreading like wildfire. The release of Emerging Powers brought some interesting cards into the format with the potential to stir up our competitive meta game and question…

The first post-catcher decklist I gave you was a Mew Prime deck.  It relied on Vileplume to lock trainers, Pidgeot to stall, and Jumpluff to attack (through Mew Prime of course).  Pedro, tell the nice people how to view the previous article.

If you were lucky enough to miss the last article about Mew Prime, and you for soe reason want to change your luck, you can view it here.

Thank You Pedro.  Since the last article my mind has changed about Mew Prime a couple times.  When I first tested it I thought it was one of the best decks in the post catcher era.  Than I did more testing, built other decks, and played matches against other people.  The final straw with my Mew deck was when Ed’s deck took apart my Mew deck.

If Ed beats you that bad, it indeed is a bad sign.

I agree Pedro.  So after that match I decided to try to find a different deck.  I…

As a bit of personal introduction, I’ve been playing Pokémon TCG for just a year, and 2010′s Fall Battle Roads was my very first tournament. In fact, my very first tournament opponent was Radu Ciocan, who posted an OHKO article on MewPlume just last month. (Yes, I lost that first game.) Since then, I’ve been splitting my Pokémon time between playing, judging, and volunteering at league and tournaments. With that short a resumé, I’m not sure how OHKO’ers will feel about my authority on Pokémon strategy or about my very first article on this site. The new format rotation has completely changed the competitive landscape and made us all take fresh looks at many new deck concepts, so even if you’ve played for years longer than I have, I hope…

I had realized a couple days ago that this website has not had a Reshiphlosion list on it.  So I thought I would change that.  I will be happy when this article is published because people always come up to me and shout, “Hey,when are you going to write a Reshiphlosion article? and stop staring down my shirt!”  Sometimes even girls say this.

Anyway, The deck was popularized at U.S. Nationals.  It seemed like everybody was going to play Reshiboar, and then everyone showed up with Reshiphlosion.  The deck is really powerful and really consistent because it can manipulate energies very well.  Just about every energy that you draw will be used and re-used thanks to Typhlosion Prime.  Its that energy manipulation that makes Reshiphlosion really good.

If you do not know the deck I will try my best to explain it.  The first goal…

I’m going to give you a really quick recap of some of the decks I’ve played over the past two years and then discuss my current deck that I’ll be playing for Worlds this year.

My love affair with rogue decks started last year at Regional’s.  Jumpluff had just come out and I decided that I wanted to play it. There were a lot of other people playing Jumpluff at regional’s, but most of these were JumpLux variants relying on Luxray G. Lv. X. My list played a heavy Sunflora line,…

Hey guys. Today’s article starts off with an apology from Jay. You need to realize that Jay is now at Worlds. I got this from him via email so late on Friday night that I didn’t even see it until Sat morning. Jay has better things to be concerned with at this point, yet he was up writing this article for you and I. I think, in his mind, he agreed to write something, and he wasn’t going to go back on his word. In that case, he could have just gotten behind and just gave it half an effort. Nope. He gave us a great retrospective and then apologized that he wanted to give us more but couldn’t. Thanks Jay! We hope you’re killin’ it at Worlds!

- Ed

So first an apology.   Originally I had intended this to be a very detailed look back on the formats of the past.  I always enjoyed looking back at some of the different formats and seeing what was competitive, what people liked to play, etc. and I was hoping you guys would to. I ran into two major problems when I was writing this article though.

First, I told Ed I

…

This article has two main points.  First, it will provide some insight into the Mew/Muk Jumpluff/Vileplume archetype.  Second, it will showcase some of my thoughts about the deckbuiling process highlighting what I did wrong with this deck.  Right now. I’m going to share the list I played and explain my reasoning behind my choices. Also, let me state that this list is not just my own. Emmanuel Divens is also a co-creator of this build and a lot of the ideas behind this list can be attributed to him.

This deck is all about hand disruption.  The goal is to have Ambipom attacking and disrupting, while Weavile is on the bench knocking out helpful cards from your opponent’s hand, and Slowking is on the bench making sure your opponent does not draw anything good.

Ambipom is a stage 1 that has two attacks.  His first attack, “Astonish” lets you do 20 damage and then choose 2 random cards from your opponent’s hand and have them shuffled back in the deck.  The second attack, Tail Spank (is that code?) does 60 damage and you must discard 2 cards.  60 might not sound like a not of damage, but it can be enough…

The subject of this article will be a deck that features Magnezone Prime and Floatzel.  One of the most popular decks going into Battle Roads will be Prime Time (Magnezone Prime and Yanmega Prime), this deck is a little different.  I consider this deck to be the spirtual successor to Mangeboar.  I am unsure if this a tier 2 deck or a fun league deck, maybe you can help decide.

Since Pokemon Catcher will make it more difficult to run a deck with bench sitting Pokemon, I decided to try a deck that had energy acceleration and free retreat from the bench sitters.  Now, you can still run Magneboar but in the Post Catcher (PC) format, the deck that started out a little shakey is about to get even shakier.

The decks main goal is to use Magnezone Prime’s “Lost Burn” attack to get a One Hit Knock Out each turn.  To get more energies on the field, Floatzel is used.  His “Water Acceleration” Poke-Power lets you attach a water energy to each Floatzel you have…

Pokemon Catcher is a trainer card that lets you pick a Pokemon on your opponent’s bench and switch it with the active.  The last time this card was released, as a card named Gust of Wind, it was the best card in the format.  It ushered in an era of dominance for a very fast deck with all basic Pokemon.  The question was will Pokemon Catcher have the same format changing effect as Gust of Wind did?  To answer these questions I decided to test multiple decks in the PC (Post Catcher) format.  The testing yielded some surprising results.  To start this article off I…

First of all, I’d like to point out that I think that there really is (at the moment) multiple ways to build a Reshiram deck. To me, any deck that focuses on using Reshiram as the main attacker can be lumped together. The main 2 Reshiram decks now are Reshiram/Emboar and Reshiram/Typhlosion. Both decks strive to achieve the same main goal, but they go about it slightly differently.

When I built my deck, I was of the opinion that Typhlosion was unnecessary, and I was concerned that there would be many others running Reshiram,…

Before we get to that, lets talk about Nationals.  It’s looking like me and the team omar crew will be going to Indy.  I would love to be able to meet some of you guys at Indy.  If you wanna get in touch with me, the best way to do it would be to send me a tweet.  My handle is “pikkdogs”, just tweet me.  And for those of you who are wanting to keep up on national news at home, I will be sure to tweet what I see.  You can either follow me now, or I will try to make my tweets public before the event.

Also, we should talk about the National tournament in the magical land of Can-a-da.  Those Canadians took a break from watching hockey and drinking maple syrup to play a couple games of Pokemon.  The popular card in Canada was Yanmega Prime.  The free attacking made the card very quick and…