One Hit KO

Hello OneHitKO!  This article is a little later than intended, but I did get around to it and did not forget!  Some very big changes are in the works and have been announced by Pokemon International recently, and we certainly need to talk about them as they affect us come November 8^th.

First off, the player going first can no longer attack on their first turn.  This absolutely takes away all advantages big basic decks had in the past over evolution decks by going first.  If the big basic player goes first and cannot put pressure on the field, this is huge for anything on your field that needs to evolve.  Also, now when a player playing an evolution deck goes first, they get a turn to get their basics out that need a turn to evolve and also abuse Tropical Beach.

 

Now I know that this could cause some problems as not many people have access to Tropical Beach, mainly because the card is easily reaching prices over $150 right now and will continue to rise in price.  However, most players who take this game seriously will find the resources to gain access to these …

Hello One Hit Ko community!

My name is Eric, and I am a new writer for One Hit KO. I write every Sunday, so expect an article on that day!

Here is my article, and please add suggestions in the comment section below.

This article is supposed to be about an old deck that pretty much everyone forgot about. That’s right, ReshiBoar.

Today on this fine Sunday, I will show you Reshiboar, the deck most of us hate. Let’s get started, shall we?

As you see, this deck is a little out of place, especially Hypnotoxic Laser. Let’s review, shall we?
Continue reading "Some Old Deck We All Used to Know: Emboar/Reshiram"

What’s up everyone!

I hope everyone is as stoked for X & Y as I am. They’ve really been slow-rolling the final evolutions of the starters in particular, and I for one am anxious to see what they look like so I can finally figure out which one I want to use (at the moment I am leaning towards Fennekin, like many others, but I am still undecided).

Anyways, we’re back, this time with a new rogue strategy article for you to ingest! Much like my second article (http://www.onehitko.com/2013/09/06/unveiling-b-side-plasma/), I will be delving into my thought processes as I was developing the deck, as well as giving you a card-for-card list with detailed explanations, and an in-depth matchup guide to boot. We’re closing in on Regionals season, so preparedness is of the utmost importance, regardless of what deck you’re looking to play!

The Discovery

Much like the Plasma alternative I spoke of in my second article, my quest to create this deck began during my testing of the Virizion/Genesect archetype, not long after the Plasma Blast set was released. Players have a tendency to evaluate strategies found in the Japanese metagame and compare them to our …

That’s Me On The Right

Hi there, Onehitko readers, my name is Ethan Cooke and I will be writing a weekly deck analysis for this website every Wednesday. Before I begin this week’s analysis, I would like to introduce myself as far as the world of Pokemon is concerned. I’ve been a fan of everything related to Pokemon ever since I can remember, and my first premier TCG event I attended was the State Championships in Texas as a Master during the HS-NXD format with my girlfriend, Samantha.

We had no idea what the format was or even what was legal in the first place, and, consequently, our decks dated back to DP Base set. Luckily, we found a professor that goes by “Master Professor Birch” who was nice enough to give us each theme decks and sign our decklists thus eliminating the need to wait in line. We were so new to the world of Pokemon that we assumed it was played in Single Elimination as opposed to Swiss, and we went home after losing the first round.

Fast forward a bit to the BLW-BCR format, and I know a lot more about playing the TCG than I did at my first event; I got 2nd place at Tyler City Championships with my rogue deck, Registeel EX/Blissey DEX. Fast forward to BLW-PLF, and I took home a 2nd place victory cup with Rayeels. Here are a few other things you may want to know. I’ve never had an official local league so I do a great deal of testing online.  I tend to never play the same deck at 2 different premier events, and I recently passed my Professor Exam (the week after my 18th birthday, actually).

And finally on to the analysis!

The deck I have chosen to analyze today is a deck that has been around for quite some time now and that deck is Darkrai EX/Hydreigon. I feel like this deck is potentially one of the funnest decks around and can be more competitive than some would think. The goal of the deck is a simple one: use dark trance to alternate between attackers, heal attackers with the aid of Max Potion and even give all Pokemon free retreat with the aid of Darkrai’s Dark Cloak. It’s pretty easy to see how this deck can succeed in the right metagame but also easy to see how Max Potion can be a dead draw in some matchups including Blastoise, TDK, and even Virizion/ Genesect.

This is what I feel to be a pretty solid list for this deck:
Continue reading "Darkrai EX / Hydreigon In the New Format"

Hello readers!  I am back with another article for your reading pleasure!  This time we get back on track with the current modified format and talk a little bit about what many others including myself consider the top 4 decks at the moment

 Darkrai EX/Garbodor

 Blastoise/Keldeo EX/Black Kyurem EX

 Genesect/Drifblim/Virizion

 Plasma Variants

But before we go into that, let’s take a look at what changes plasma lists have undergone to combat this new proposed tier 1 of decks that contain a lot of Plasma hate.

Continue reading "Updated Plasma and Thoughts on the Four “Tier 1” Decks"

Just A Funny Pic

What’s up guys!

To anyone who checked back last Friday expecting a new article from yours truly, I’d like to take this moment to apologize; I was halfway through writing it, but then my sweet laptop decided to crash on me. I lost everything I had written at that point (remember, CTRL+S is your friend). No matter though, because we are back this week and better than ever!

If you can recall my first article (http://www.onehitko.com/2013/08/30/thoughts-on-the-early-days-of-the-new-format/) I took a detailed look at the five strategies I felt were the ones to beat going into the new format. While this may go without saying, it is of the utmost importance that we have a strong understanding of what these decks are trying to do and how to best combat them. What is equally important, however, is that we keep a close eye on the decks that lurk in the shadows known as tier two, waiting for the perfect time to strike and spike the tournament; if you are not weary, you could find yourself in the losing bracket, regardless of how prepared you were for the big dogs.

So, today’s article will be a similar layout to my first article, but I will instead be taking a close look at the ‘tier 2’ strategies to expect going into Regionals and the like. I will also explain the environments each strategy needs in order to prosper, in an attempt to best prepare you for what you should expect at any given event. Let’s get started!

Continue reading "Strategies in the Shadows"

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:

Continue reading "No EX tournament and My Outlook On the Upcoming Season!"

Greetings readers of OneHitKO, my name is Mike Lesky (or Choncey as some people may know me ).   I am 21 years old and graduated from Culinary School last winter.  I am also a veteran of the Pokemon TCG and have had quite a bit of success in the game since 2003.  I have never written anything for a website before so this is a whole new experience for me, and I am very grateful that Ed is letting me do this.  I have always wanted to be a role model for players of the Pokemon TCG ever since I started helping locals in my area build decks, understand strategy, and win tournaments.  I am a very competitive player when it comes to this game so I tend to take it very seriously.

I have been following OneHitKO.com for quite a while now and have always kind of thought of it as a more casual Pokemon website because of the lack of “Big Names” writing for it.  As everyone has probably noticed the best way to get traffic nowadays is to put some big flashy titles and names on things to spark interest and draw in new crowds.  So some of you are probably wondering, who is this guy and how do we know that he knows what he is talking about?

I’m not some big name like 3 time world champion Jason Klaczynski or consistent nationals player and worlds qualifier Kyle “Pooka” Sucevich, but I do feel that I am a strong contender at any tournament I go to no matter who is there.   Some of my top accomplishments are:

2x Minnesota State Champion
1x Iowa State Champion
3^rd Place 2007 Midwest Regionals
2^nd Place 2007 Mississippi Valley Regionals
9-10^th Place x3 Midwest Regionals 2010 2011 2012
23^rd Place World Championships 2012
2x Top 128 National Championships 2012 and 2013
11x Battle Road Champion
6x City Champion

So it isn’t the most impressive list of accomplishments, but I do like to think that I know what I’m doing.

So anyways, the whole point of why I am here is to bring the competitive scene back to OneHitKO.  I feel that this is the best way to bring traffic back to the site.  I think this is the best way to go if we want to ensure the future of this community.  And to get it started, I want to go over my experience I had this past weekend (8/30/13) at the Klaczynski Open!

Continue reading "Introduction, A New Path, and The Klaczynski Open!"

What’s up everyone!

First off, I’d like to thank everyone who took the time to read my debut article from last week. I’m sure this much is obvious by now, but I am very passionate about Pokemon and writing alike, so it means a lot to me that people would stop what they are doing to read what I have to say. Hopefully in time, as more articles are posted, more and more people will discover this website and what we have to offer to the community. Of course, you can help with that too; if you read our articles and dig what you see, don’t hesitate to tell your friends about us! Word of mouth really does go a long way, and every single person who shares us helps us out a tremendous amount.

(In case you didn’t catch my last article, you can view it via the link directly below.)

http://www.onehitko.com/2013/08/30/thoughts-on-the-early-days-of-the-new-format

While I am pretty confident with my predictions in last week’s article, only time will tell what archetypes truly prove themselves to be the cream of the crop. Trying to qualify for Worlds having not played in over two years is going to be a major challenge for me, and if I want to succeed, I have to make sure to make the right meta calls from the very first event. When determining what deck is an optimal play in the early days of a format, there are always a few factors I like to consider, the first of which being that since there are little-to-no results for us to analyze and learn from, everyone who turns in their deck registration sheet at that very first event is going off of theory, raw testing results and not much else.

Because of this, we can deduce that the decks that will perform the best throughout the early stages of a season are generally going to be more proactive than reactive, meaning they are more concerned with ‘asking a question’ than ‘providing an answer’; without an adequate amount of tournament results to go by, the reactive decks simply don’t know what questions they need to answer (or how to best address them, for that matter). Proactive decks, however, don’t need to know all the right answers, because, well, they are the question! This logic also applies to techs somewhat; there is nothing wrong with adding a card or two to counter what you predict you will be facing, but a fully teched-out deck is generally going to be less favored in a beginning-of-the-format tournament when compared to a consistent, streamlined one.

Take TDK for example- what is probably the biggest ‘question deck’ of this new format. The question TDK asks its opponent is this: ‘How are you going to deal with a consistent flurry of Kyurem backed by Team Plasma support?’. As we all know good and well, this is not an easy question to answer effectively, which is what makes TDK the consensus strongest strategy right now. See, TDK isn’t worried about attacking specific strategies it may or may not face; regardless of what you’re playing, TDK just wants to Blizzard Burn for obscene amounts of damage as early as possible until all six prizes are taken. This is what it means to be a proactive strategy.

Continue reading "Unveiling B-Side Plasma"

Hello everyone!

I don’t believe I’ve ever met any of you, so allow me a brief moment to introduce myself. My name is Tyler Lindsey (for those of you who didn’t catch that already). I’m a 21 year old lifelong gamer, hailing from the humid plains of southeast Alabama. Currently, I am making a return to the Pokemon TCG community after playing Magic: the Gathering competitively for two years. Magic was both fun and rewarding, but it was also very time consuming, and the nostalgia vibes given off by my favorite childhood game always keep me coming back! My primary goal for this season is to successfully reach the 400CP required to compete in Worlds 2014 in Washington DC, while writing resourceful and insightful strategy articles along the way. Hopefully I can deliver in both aspects!

Of course, if one wants to have a truly successful season, they must hit the ground running from day one, and I intend to do just that. The weeks after Worlds, where old season transfers into new, is definitely one of the best times to get reacquainted with the game; there is ample time to playtest, and everyone is starting with a clean slate as far as deck building goes. Fortunately, I have used this moment’s reprieve in competitive play to my advantage, and as a result, I feel I have a very good grip on what the format will shape up to in the months to come. In this article, I will delve into the five ‘main’ strategies I feel are the most noteworthy going into this new terrain, so allow me to share some of my findings with you.

(Bear in mind these archetypes are in no particular order.)

1.) TDK (and other similar flavors of Plasma)

So let’s get right to it and start with the obvious: TDK is still public enemy number one. It lost little to nothing from rotation (if you could even call it a rotation), and even gained a new toy from Plasma Blast in the form of Silver Bangle. Kyurem (PLF) continues to be one of the most efficient attackers in the format, and is still backed by all of the powerful support cards Team Plasma boasts. While Lugia-centered Plasma builds also stand to become a powerful force in the metagame, make no mistake- Kyurem is the undisputed king that all decks must answer to if they wish to excel post-rotation.

Continue reading "Thoughts on the Early Days of the New Format"