One Hit KO

For this article, I’m going to focus on the play of the “vanilla” version of TOSSED.  It was built to be a Shuppet replacement, so I play it a lot like I would play Shuppet.  You may want to read about how the deck came to be before you continue this article.  If so, head over to the “TOSSED: A Rogue Ahead” article at www.SixPrizes.com.  Before we get into the play of the deck, I’ll give you a list of what the deck might look like.

Here’s my report from the master’s division at this year’s Nationals.

First, a little about the event. My daughter and I have been planning to attend Nationals this year ever since we failed to go last year. We knew we were golden when we convinced my wife to come along and treat it like a family vacation. The drive from Michigan was easy, about 5 hours, and we made it with plenty of time to get the early registration t-shirts. We didn’t really grasp the scale of the event until Friday morning though.

The venue was gigantic, easily the biggest single room I have been in for a long time (in fact I am having difficulty recalling another time when I was in a room this size.) There are tons of people milling about. There are people in line for the Video Game Tournament. There are side rooms with vendors, open playing, and just hanging out. In the main room there are separate sections for each of the age groups, one for league play and side events, one for eating with tables and one for the video game stuff too.

Throughout the weekend we see people we know from Michigan …

I’m going to keep this short. Maybe Omar will add his report, and mine won’t be as interesting. In fact, mine probably isn’t that great, but since it’s the first time I’ve played in top cut, I figured I’d better add something for the archives.

The details will be a bit blurry and maybe inaccurate. I didn’t take any notes, and I didn’t have my camera.

Game 1: Mark – Eevee
Mark goes first and attaches a call energy to his 50HP basic. He calls for Eevee and something else. On my turn, I KO his Eevee. He goes again, and doesn’t do a whole lot. I think I may have had Mr. Mime active. On my turn, I KO something else. Mark scoops.
1-0

Game 2: (different) Mark – Jumpluff
Mark starts with active Azelf (IIRC). I donk.
2-0

Continue reading "Battle Roads Report: The Source, St. Paul, MN"

Hey everyone, Cheffords here with a few hard learned lessons from my first Battle Roads this spring.

First off let me say that I had an abysmal day, only getting 1 win out of 5 matches! It is because of this poor showing that I decided to write this article, because you have to look for the silver lining no matter what. So, even if you have a losing day, you can reflect on what you’ve learned and apply that to your next outing.

Continue reading "What I (re)learned at Battle Roads – Okemos, MI"

Following my good showing at the Michigan State Championship (we won’t mention my meltdown in top-cut), I knew for sure that I would be taking the same deck to Regionals. The problem I had was I wanted to do a little tweaking but wasn’t able to do any play testing at my local league. Fortunately I have a group of friends at work that like to play during our lunch. I built Pikkdog’s Flyperior deck and a typical CurseGar to play against. I figured out a nice tactic against the Flyperior deck, but wasn’t realy consistant in winning. Testing against CurseGar was really tough on me (I don’t think I won a single game) and it taught me a lot about how that deck works.

Based on my testing, I decided on the following tweaks to my deck:

-2 great ball
-1 pokedex
+1 Copycat
+1 Unown G
+1 Cyclone energy

I didn’t get to test these tweaks, but I printed my deck list, packed my bags, and hoped for the best in the morning. We live in Michigan and the event was held in Indiana, this meant we were in for a drive that Google Maps says is 2 hours long. This of course didn’t count the construction underway on our route, so make it 2 hours and 30 minutes.

We arrive, get registered and wait for the day to get underway. Age division rosters get posted and masters has 146 players, 8 rounds of swiss parings with a top cut of 32. I planned on taking notes throughout the day and did pretty well, but as the day wore on I got more and more disctracted so the details of my later matches aren’t as strong as my earlier ones. Here’s how my day played out:

Continue reading "Pokemon Regional Championship, Angola, Indiana"

Hey there, Cheffords here. This is my first tournament report, and first post to TeamOmar.com. I hope you get something out of this, because I know I do when I read other people’s reports.

A little about myself: this is my second season playing the Pokemon card game. I got into the game when my daughter asked if she could start collecting the cards and I said yes but we had to learn the game too. Since then she and I have been going to league and tournaments together pretty regularly. My first season was a huge learning opportunity and it took me a long time to get enough knowledge of the cards and various strategies to feel like I was able to compete. Things changed this year during the very first City Championship when I ran a vanilla Shuppet deck and won first place. My daughter has been running Kingdra since Legends Awakened came out and she took third place at the same city’s.

Continue reading "2010 Michigan State Pokemon Championship – Okemos Convention Center"

Last month, I posted talking about my Shuppet Donk Deck. The lists posted there didn’t take any of the HeartGold SoulSilver cards into account. To be honest, there isn’t a whole lot that HGSS brings to the deck. There is only one real big thing that HGSS allows this deck to do, but it’s enough to keep the deck alive and not fade out.

Oh, speaking of fade out, there’s a Pokemon in HGSS that has an attack named “fade out.” Isn’t that what Shuppet’s main attack is? Let’s take a closer look.

Dunsparce (from the GS set) is a 50HP basic Pokemon that can do 20 damage and return itself (and all attached cards) to your hand. Shuppet’s main attack does 30, so why would we want to sacrifice 10 damage in a donk deck? I can think of a few reasons: weakness, resistance, and attack cost.

When I say weakness and resistance, I’m not talking about Dunsparce’s (or Shuppet’s). If you play the deck well, they will never be attacked. I’m talking about the defending Pokemon’s weakness and resistance. In the past, if you played Shuppet against a Psy resistant foe, you might be in …

I don’t have a great article to go with this. I wanted to post these decklists mainly for archival reasons, but if you are someone that’s stumbled upon these, please feel free to leave any questions in the comment section. I’d be happy to elaborate on how the decks play.

First off, I want to present what I feel like is the basic T1 Shuppet Donk decklist. This doesn’t have any specific tech in it. That would be left up to the player to tweak. All this deck does is aim for a T1 double-donk. When it misses that mark, it will almost always get a single OHKO on its first trainer turn. Your first trainer turn will be maddening for your opponent as you cycle through the majority of your deck looking for Expert Belt, 4 Plus Powers, Shuppet, and an energy. On the way there, you will, no doubt, be dropping Crobat G for damage, Poke Turning him for more damage, Poke Blowering for damage, and Super Scooping for damage (or for Uxie’s Set Up Poke Power).

The draw engine is powerful enough to deck yourself on the first turn, but with Shuppet you don’t need to do …

I brought my/Ava’s Shuppet Donk deck to test with Team Omar last night. I know that some people just hate the idea of Spiritomb AR in a Shuppet deck, but I wanted to see if it could help against SP. I think I played 4 matches, and 3 of them were against different SP decks. If I recall correctly, I only won 1 game. Even that one was questionable, because (for testing purposes) we replayed an early risk I took that would have resulted in a loss for me.

The funny thing is that I found all my matchups to be fairly positive. I feel like Shuppet should get completely owned by SP, but with the right Spiritomb start, I can stall the opponent enough to get a few early KOs. If one of them happens to be a Dialga G, it might just win me the game. As it was, I only did well against the fighting-heavy SP mainly due to weakness. I did pretty well against Abdi’s SP deck, too, until he realized exactly how my deck worked. Then Dialga shut me down. I had a really close and odd match with Omar (who reminded me multiple …

Well, we went to the Rapid City Pokemon League on Saturday. It was the morning after a pretty good snow storm (and Christmas), so they didn’t get a good turnout. They said that they’d usually get around 20 players, but they got 3 (besides Ava, my two brother-in-laws, and myself). I was hoping to earn some Claydols, but they didn’t have any. I ended up with a new Uxie and a Snorlax. The guys there were cool, and they taught me how to play 2-vs-2. I accidentally won our first 2-on-2 match when I double-donked each of their only Pokemon for the win. The second game was much longer.

Ava wouldn’t play at league. She did play around and one of the guys played her Next Quest TFG with her, so that was cool. After league, though, I was getting convinced that Ava would not play in the City Champ on the 10th. I asked her if she still wanted to, and she said she did. I told her that she’d have to practice with me every day, and she agreed.

Sunday evening, I got her to play against me. I used VERY suboptimal green deck (Beautifly) against her, and …