One Hit KO

Christina Ricci as Gothitelle

For Pokémon players, Labor Day week means the beginning of a new competitive season and preparing for Battle Roads. (And not wearing white pants, if you have any.) We now know that the Battle Roads season will start on September 17th, in just under two weeks (!), so it’s a great time to start thinking about what you’ll bring to BRs that first weekend.

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 this article contains some new perspective you can use in your upcoming Battle Roads play.

The Emerging Powers set gave us a brand new deck archetype—Gothitelle/Reuniclus—and this article will explore that deck. The real focus of the deck is Gothitelle, a Stage 2 cross between Christina Ricci and Mary Poppins. Gothitelle has an Ability, “Magic Room”, which prevents your opponent from playing Trainer-Items, but not you. Although this may sound like an unfair upgrade to Vileplume’s item-lock, Gothitelle’s Ability comes with a catch: she has to be active for the Ability to take effect. Now, with 130HP and a convenient weakness to Psychic (not a popular type in the current format), Gothitelle can certainly hold her own in the active spot. But her attack, Madkinesis, costs three colorless energy, and does just 30 damage, plus 20 damage for each Psychic energy attached to Gothitelle. Ideally, all three of the required energy will be Psychic, so that Gothitelle will initially do 90 for 3—okay, but not great, and attaching all those energies one-by-one will take time.

Continue reading "TAndrewTesting: Gothitelle/Reuniclus"

A big hello to all you OHKOers out there.  This is Pikkdogs here with kind of a strategy article. 

 It may seem like the fourth of July was just a week or two ago, but the summer is now coming to an end.  With the end of summer comes some of my favorite things: cooler weather, cool colored trees, American Football, and Battle Roads.  Although I feel like writing an entire article about fall and how its the best time of the year (except bikini waxing day), I think we should get to the Battle Roads.

Setting the Stage

If you were not able to make it to Nationals, you must feel really out of the loop.  The last time you played you were looking at Garchomp C’s and stuff like that, Battle Roads will be a whole nother animal.  Those of us who made it to nationals, and those that went to world’s, basically know the format.  Stage 1 Rush is good along with decks like Reshiphlosion, Reshiboar, ZPS, and Primetime (Yanmega Prime and Magnezone Prime).  But, thanks to the release of Emerging Powers, Battle Roads will be a little different.  So before you start getting your deck …

Hey all you OHKOers!  Yes, it is finally time for Pikkdogs to release his list of the top 10 impactful cards of the next set.

Emerging Powers is your 2nd Black and White Set.  It is made up of cards that were in the Japanese Black and White sets, along with cards from the “Battle Strength Decks” and random Promotional cards.  A lot of people are a little upset about this set because the current Japanese set seems to be a lot better than our Emerging Powers set.  But, there are some good and impactful cards in this set. It is not one of the better sets we have seen in a while, but at least it’s better than Call of Legends.  The thing I hate most about this set is that there is that it has another rare Unfezant that is useless.  It seems like I pulled just about all of the BW Unfeazants, and now I feel like I’m about to get 150 more crappy Unfezants.  But enough about my hatred of Unfeazant, let’s take a closer look at the set to get at the best cards.

Honorable Mention (#12) Thundurus

Our first honorable mention of the countdown …