OneHitKO.com Challenge: Wrap-Up with Budget Engine

Tuesday, January 24th, 2012

Well, I’ve discussed much of this already, but I thought I should give a bit of a wrap-up to finalize this season’s OneHitKO.com Challenge.  Yeah, I said “this season’s” implying that there may be others on the horizon.  That’s a bit of an open-ended question at the moment, but we can discuss that later.  Let’s first get to the positives and negatives of this challenge.

Negatives

When I first dreamed up this crazy plan, I had several goals.  My overarching number one goal was to build community around this project.  Have we succeeded in that?  Well, I think it’s been mostly a unmet goal.  Looking at webserver statistics, it seems that the site is getting slightly more views now. I can’t be sure if that has anything to do with the challenge, just the fact that there have been more articles lately, or just the fact that City Championships were in full swing. Since I can’t undoubtedly attribute it to the challenge, I won’t.

What I originally hoped for (and expected) was that many people would come together and each donate maybe 4-8 cards.  I would have a bunch of random “junk” to sift through and build from.  Making a deck out of this card pool would be my challenge while donating would be yours.  Unfortunately, that didn’t happen really at all.  I had only 3 real donators, and, of them, I already had a friendship with 2.  That means that only 1 person decided to go out on a limb and risk sending me cards in order to be part of something greater.

My losses outweighed my wins.  I had a goal to go better than 50/50 win/loss in any given tournament.  I missed one tournament and had to drop one round early from another (both events I see as negatives in their own right).  I did go exactly 50/50 in 2 of 3 tourneys, but I never achieved greater than that.  This makes me feel as if I misused the generous donations and failed on my end of the bargain (even though it was always a goal and never a promise).
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The Triumphant Return Of Scizor/Cherrim

Wednesday, November 17th, 2010

Scizor SFI’d almost want to call this a stupid deck idea, but it really doesn’t fit the definition we’ve worked with in the past.  This is a proven deck (albeit not top-tier) that had been fairly crippled by the recent rotation.

We’ve covered Scizor/Cherrim decks in the past, but I figured we could revisit this now that Triumphant has given it some new home in the way of Junk Arm.

In the past, the main idea of the deck was to use Scizor’s Pound Down attack for massive damage.  Whenever possible, you would want to finish off the defender with Scizor’s Accelerate attack.

Pound Down is a brutal attack that does 70 damage whenever your field is without Poke Powers.  This means that you can’t afford to run Pokemon like Uxie or Crobat G that might otherwise make their way into a deck such as this.

Accerlerate is Scizor’s other attack.  It only does 30 damage, but if it KO’s the defending Pokemon, Scizor can’t be affected by attacks on the opponent’s next turn.

Those two attacks are really the basis of the deck.  Sure, Scizor has a PokeBody that can prevent damage (if he already has 6 counters on him), but it rarely comes into play.  Let’s take a look at the list, and then we’ll get into the finer points of how it works nowadays.
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