One Hit KO

I don’t know where I get these titles. I’m sure you can make a cheaper deck, but this will beat it (unless it’s Fighting type). Also, $35 is just the Troll ‘n’ Toad price divided by 2. I dunno if you can get the cards for that price, but I’m pretty sure you could get close.

I’ve been working on this deck lately, and I think this is the best route to take it. I have now added 4 Rescue Energy. They really help the deck recover, and the deck just has to be doing 120+ damage every turn. If you miss a turn of damage, you’re on track to lose.

To assist with this recovery, I experimented with DCE, but it just doesn’t cut it. The problem is that the deck usually needs a 1st turn Ascension. Ascension requires darkness energy. If you have 4 Rescue and 4 DCE, you’re diluting the dark energy pool too much. Sometimes you can get away without the Ascension, like if you draw into Zoroark right away, but it’s usually key.

After adding the 4 Rescue, I also ended up dropping the Special Dark energy. The deck started life running 4 Special Dark and 4 Plus Power (on top of the Dark Claw). This early build could often do 150+ damage right off the bat. Well, if you can do 120 damage, you can still usually 2shot anything even Eviolited. It is a bit sad that you will now miss the OHKOs on Eviolited 130HP basics, but the deck just has to have a semi-consistent way of getting 2 energy in a turn. I already discussed why I think DCE can’t make the list, so Dark Patch is our alternative. To fuel Dark Patch, you need basic dark, and you have to discard them early to make it work.

Continue reading "Budget Zoroark: Cheapest Pokemon Deck At $35"

Yeah, you read that title right.  This deck was undefeated.  You might think that means I won a Victory Cup, but the operative word in the sentence is “WAS.”

So, if you’re following along, I built this deck for my daughter.  Then, I decided it would be a good OneHitKO.com Budget Challenge deck.  She wasn’t ready to play it, so I slightly tweaked it for myself and decided to take it to Battle Roads.

Here’s the list I ran.  I’ll go over my matches, and then discuss how the deck can be improved.

Continue reading "Budget Zoroark: Undefeated"

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).
Continue reading "OneHitKO.com Challenge: Wrap-Up with Budget Engine"