Playing with fire at the Michigan State championship, 2011

Thursday, March 17th, 2011

Following the fun I had playing a rogue SP based deck at Cities this Fall, I decided to try something similar for States. This time my deck is based around the synergy between Blaziken FB Lv.X and Blaziken PL. My Cities deck had a 1 – 1 tech line of Blaziken FB and I found it was very powerful and could get KOs when you need them. I decided to use Blaze as the basis of my deck. A full deck writeup is forthcoming so I won’t go into the details here. This article is primarily to report my day and the games that I played.

This year the event is in Lansing and we have a good turn out; 74 players in the Masters age division. This means 7 rounds in swiss with a top-cut of 16. I’m at the venue just before registration opens and find a Jimmy Johns nearby and buy my lunch. I’ve learned from experience to be prepared for long rounds and no breaks, so having food on-hand makes that one less thing to worry about. This year my buddy ‘Pinch’ decided to play and we meet up in line to register, do a quick deck check and sit down to a warm up game.

All my PokeFriends are rolling in; Pikkdogs, Evan, Collan, Cody, Ryan and the rest of Team Warp Point, Ryan, Ryan, Joel, Hunter and some folks that I always talk to but don’t know on a first name basis. It’s great to see everyone and to see the anticipation of good tournament on their faces.

The judges call the room to attention, lay out the rules and all of the announcements then give us the go ahead for round 1; the day is underway!

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TOSSED Variants Featuring Dialga G, Blaziken FB, Garchomp C, and Shuppet

Wednesday, October 13th, 2010

“Dialga TOSSED” / BR #1: Sept. 18, 2010

Pokemon: 17
3 – Uxie – LA 43
1 – Uxie Lv. X – LA 146
2 – Crobat G – PL 47
1 – Shuppet – PL 92
1 – Dunsparce – HS 41
1 – Toxicroak G – DP 41
2 – Garchomp C – SV 60
2 – Garchomp C Lv. X – DP 46
1 – Unown Q – MD 49
1 – Dialga G – PL 7
1 – Dialga G Lv. X – PL 122
1 – Regice – LA 36
Trainers: 25
4 – Poke Turn
4 – Poke Drawer+
4 – Plus Power
2 – Expert Belt
1 – Luxury Ball
3 – Energy Gain
2 – SP Radar
1 – Premier Ball
1 – Power Spray
3 – Warp Point
Supporters: 10
4 – Cyrus’s Conspiracy
3 – Pokemon Collector
2 – Bebe’s Search
1 – Aaron’s Collection
Energy: 8
2 – Psychic Energy
4 – Double Colorless
1 – Metal Energy (Basic)
1 – Cyclone Energy


It turns out that I feel like this “Dialga TOSSED” build was the best running version of the TOSSED decks I’ve played.  I went undefeated in my first 3 matches.  The next two were losses, but both could have easily been won if the luck rolled slightly in my favor.  You can read the Dialga TOSSED mini report here.

Essentially, the techs here come down to getting around Vileplume and Spiritomb.  Regice can screw with your opponent’s Spiritomb, and it can work well in the SP matchup.  Dialga G Lv. X shuts off both Spiritomb and Vileplume’s traier lock.  Warp Point is essential here, because it helps you bench both Regice and Dialga when they are active (which is necessary to LvX Dialga).  Warp Point is also an offensive weapon, because most of your attacks come off the bench.  If you don’t want to attack their active, you can Cyclone Energy or Warp Point it away.

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A Tale Of 2 Roads (The Battle Type)

Sunday, October 3rd, 2010

Blaziken FBEh, there’s not much to say, but I figure that I ought to write something up. This weekend, there were 2 BRs in the area. Ava, Abdi, and I went to the first one. Abdi played Machamp, I played “Hot TOSSED” (as it was dubbed), and Ava played Donphan. Ava and Abdi couldn’t make Sunday’s tourney, so Gyarados and his pals accompanied me.

We had a higher than normal turnout at both events, thanks in part to a group of guys that road tripped it from South Dakota. It seems that the Sioux Falls league is poorly run, and they never receive their proper promos or prerelease swag at the events there. Someone ought to do something about that, because if these guys are that into the game attending a mismanaged league, just think how well things could be going (and how many people they could get into the game) if league and other events were run properly.

Well, on to the reports.
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Speed Blaziken FB Deck (Should this info be public?)

Monday, January 4th, 2010

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 …

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