One Hit KO

Trust me, the banana thing works.

Greetings OHKO!

I guess I’m going to start with a brief introduction. My name is Calvin Chang and I started playing Pokémon competitively halfway through the 2011-2012 season. I actually started playing Pokémon casually when I first investigated it for a high school composition class (yeah… long story). It was fun, the people were nice and I thoroughly enjoyed the game. Then I graduated from high school, moved onto the college campus at the University of Minnesota and took a hiatus from Pokémon since I had no car and no way to continue going to league. When January rolled around, some of the guys at Pokémon asked me if I wanted to compete at Midwest Regionals in the Dells. I figured it would be fun, grabbed a Magnerock deck from some friends and started playing competitively, all the way through Nationals. I wasn’t good but at least I went positive at all the events I played in and eventually finished 10^th best player in Minnesota based off ELO points. Since then, I’ve been getting more and more into the competitive environment though still doing mediocre as always.

A week before Minnesota states, I went down to La Crosse with the other guys from league. I had no idea what I was going to play, as mid-terms just finished up and I didn’t have a chance to thoroughly test my options so Joey, Lukas, Michael, Curtis and I stayed up until about 1 in the morning so that I could figure out a deck to play. I didn’t.
Continue reading "Zekrom/Eelektrik (ZekEels): Calvin’s MN State Championship 2012"

I really thought that I wasn’t going to make it to States this year. Part of me thought that I should make a strong effort to defend my title, and part of me thought that the effort would be wasted if I couldn’t attend anyway. I had it in the back of my mind that I might make it to the tourney, so all along I had been putting together a CMT deck. I really actually wanted to play a straight Celebi/Mewtwo deck (without Tornadus or any techs), but I didn’t want to go out of my way to buy a bunch of Mewtwo if I might not even use them.

I did end up scraping together all the pieces for a CMT minus the 2 Mewtwo EX. When I decided to try opening the OneHitKO Store, I bought 3 boxes of Next Destinies. I figured that if I did end up able to attend MN States, then I could just borrow a couple Mewtwo from the store for the day. Well, that idea fell apart rather quickly when I opened 3 boxes and saw a total of ZERO Mewtwo EX.

The weekend before the tournament, my wife went to the hospital 3 times with pregnancy issues, and I thought that each time we might have an extended stay there while delivering our new child. Nothing came of that, and on the Monday before States, I ended up emailing TAndrewT and talking about all of this. I told him essentially the same thing I just told you, still unsure that the pregnancy would last through the following weekend of MN States. I also added that I had considered Durant and straight 4-Terrakion deck.

I didn’t know if I even cared to build a deck at this point. Pokemon wasn’t a pressing issue, and I had barely played since Cities. Andy replied with, “Well, if you need Terrakions I have plenty for you to borrow.” and I thought that this sounded like the only plan I was going to come up with on late notice.

I netdecked a list, and I threw together the deck proxying the Terrakion (I had all the rest except for 1 old style Revive in place of the new one). There’s a guy here at work that I’ve been playing against over lunch sometimes. He has a Zekrom/Eelektrik deck (which I figured would be popular), so I challenged him to a match. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the deck with him, so he played an old Emboar/Reshiram deck of mine. The first game went very quickly as I lost due to not getting more than 1 Terrakion out. I think the deck wasn’t very shuffled yet, and 2 Terrakion were prized. The next game was a real match, and I think I ultimately won when he decked out. This one game turned out to be my only real tourney prep, though. Other than that, I never played the deck until the day of the tourney. At the tourney, a junior (another co-worker’s kid) challenged me to a game, and I ran though his Pokemon very quickly. Going into the tournament, I had only played one real and it was against a non-metagame deck.

Continue reading "Quad Terrakion Deck – MN State Championship 2012"

A big hello to all you OHKOers out there.  This is Pikkdogs here with a Pre-Release tournament report.  I usually wouldn’t write you a PR report, but it could provide a nice break for me while I write my next article, which may take a little while.  Why don’t we take this time to welcome my extra-dimensionary sidekick Pedro.  How was your weekend Pedro?

Pretty good, a nice sports weekend.  We had the Pro Bowl, the NHL All Star Game, the finals of the Australian Open, the Royal Rumble, and even some Free UFC on Fox. 

I watched that UFC on Saturday.  There is no doubt that it takes a man much tougher than me to step into the Octagon, but on Saturday it seemed like UFC is just an excuse for two dudes to cuddle in the corner of a cage.

Those are big men, I wouldn’t be calling them gay. 

I didn’t call them gay, I implied it.  Plus, they always wear those bright T-shirts, you can’t wear that many pastel colors without some questions.  Let’s get onto the article before I say more things that I will regret.

The Introduction

I did not plan on …

A big hello to all you OHKOers out there.  This is Pikkdogs here with a tournament report that covers 2 City Championships.

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 closely what a good …

Happy Monday to all you OneHitKO readers, Joel here with a report and a half from this weekend’s battle road events. I say report and a half for because I only took notes on half my matches from Saturday, mainly because I did so bad and I was getting so frustrated I just stopped taking notes. I did a lot better on Sunday, but nowhere near cut but at least it was a major improvement from Saturday. It was also a horrible weekend for sports as well. The Detroit Lions undefeated streak came to an end, the Detroit Tigers got eliminated, and Michigan lost to Michigan State. The Red Wings won their game however, so it wasn’t too bad. I will start the article with Saturday’s Battle Road, which took place in Ann Arbor, MI. I was happy to see an event in Ann Arbor, only because I live 15 minutes outside of A-squared and it is arguably the greatest city in Michigan. The event was held at my favorite store down there, Get Your Game On. The only downside was the venue was very small, so small it was cramped and people actually got turned away because we went …

I forgot to bring my camera for both days this past weekend, so I don’t have my usual slew of unfocused pictures. Because of that, I thought that I wouldn’t write much, so I didn’t take any notes. This is all from (my poor) memory.

Here’s a micro report from The Source Comics and Games on Oct. 15th. I knew that there was another tourney the next day, so I thought that if Ava was done playing, I might drop. I didn’t want to drop if there was a chance I could still win, but in the back of my mind, I almost hoped I’d hit that 2 loss mark early. We had a party to attend as a family, so it would be good to get home a bit earlier.

Juniors had 8 players. Aiden wasn’t there with his Beartic deck which has beaten Ava’s Donphan deck in the 2 previous events. Unfortunately, Paul decided that Beartic was the clear best deck (as it had won the previous 2 events) and decided to play it. I think Ava lost to Paul and forgot about Exoskeleton to lose another one. In the end, she snuck in at 4th place and got her third top-4 in 3 events.

Continue reading "Battle Roads Double Header Weekend in Minnesota"

So I know you OHKO’ers are knee-deep in Battle Roads right now, battling against all sorts of decks—not just the Reshiram/Typhlosions, Yanmega/Magnezones and Stage 1’s you’ve become familiar with since Worlds, but brand new decks too, like Zekrom/Tornadus, toolboxy Mew decks, Yanmega/Cincinno/Weavile, Gothitelle, Beartic/Vileplume/whatever—all kinds of builds you hadn’t thought of, but yearn to try. But how can you? I mean, you can’t just call up the guys every other day, asking to get together to test out your crazy Wobbuffet-donk deck whenever you please, right? We all have lives—school and college just started up, we’re all working hard to make financial ends meet, and Dancing with the Stars has reclaimed our Monday and Tuesday nights. Personally, it took me like 2 whole weeks to set a series of forest fires in northern Minnesota with the goal of sending a blinding cloud of smoke at Pikkdogs’ Michigan apartment. Let’s face it—we don’t always have the time to playtest like we should.

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 set of players to the game. But it has its glitches, and its drawbacks. Pikkdogs wrote a brief introduction to PTCGO’s initial release, back when it was just a single-player game with old cards and set decks. Now, in its open beta, PTCGO has many of the features Pokémon players would want: two-player online games, owning and trading of virtual cards, a fully functional deck-builder, and a multiplayer matchmaker. In this article, I hope to bring you up to speed on what has changed with the service since Pikk’s article, and to help you decide whether investing time and money into PTCGO is worth it for you. I’ll also tell you about my own effort to use PTCGO to get ready for my first tournament of the Battle Roads season: the October 9th BR in Coon Rapids, MN.

Continue reading "TAndrewTesting: Pokémon TCG Online"

Last weekend, I played Yanmega Magnezone with a Jirachi, but no Kingdra. It was a weird list. It worked, though it probably shouldn’t have. I didn’t test it much either. This time, I didn’t even touch the deck, and had it built for me. It was Yanmega Magnezone with Jirachi, but this time, I ran a 2-1-2 Kingdra line. Here’s the report. I remember some and some I don’t. It was a looooong day.

Round 1: VS Mike Juhl playing Whirlipede(I think that’s what it was)/Roserade

The deck was all about poisoning, but he just couldn’t get set up. Multiple Yanmegas allowed for a swarm he couldn’t seem to overcome, as I catchered his basics and one-shot them with Sonicboom. Relatively easy. GG man.

1-0

Continue reading "Using Insight, you can succeed."

Fall Battle Roads at Outpost 2000 and Beyond

You mean you didn’t totally scrub out, misplay for a game loss, try to blame it on the judge, and barely make 50/50 on the day?

What the? Who let Pedro in here?

Continue reading "Battle Roads #2, Victory Cup #2"