The Road to Pittsburgh:
Previewing the Upcoming PTCG Regional
By: Corey Rausch
When I started this post, right after my worlds review, I was convinced I knew what this one was going to be about. And in a way, it still kind of is. I wanted to preview the Pittsburgh Regional Championship, the first US event of the new season. Ideally, this would come with me doing a matchup guide for the deck I had chosen to use. For a myriad of reasons, that last point is going to be a little difficult.
I was at a League Challenge during the weekend of Worlds, playing what I was convinced was going to be my deck for Pittsburgh: Joltik Box. I had been primarily playing this online for the better part of the last couple months and wanted to be very familiar with what I was going to play at the event. I said at the time, “the only thing that could sway my choice was something cool coming out of Worlds.” This led to a variety of next steps.
The League Challenge went well enough. I lost the mirror in round one and then beat Gholdengo ex and Dragapult ex Dusknoir. But I was bored. I felt like Joltik Box was good but lacked any sort of agency. Without a draw engine on board you were reliant on your top deck and hoping your board was enough. This is not usually my thing, so I wanted inspiration.
Worlds gave me some new options. Newer versions of Zoroark ex and Tera Box caught my eye. Gholdengo ex Joltik Box provided potential solutions to my issues with the original Joltik Box, so I decided to explore that too.
I had a League Cup to go to, and it took forever for my Zoroark exs to come in the mail, so I decided to take Tera Box to the event to try to make a more firm decision. Tera Box was great in testing and boasted a fascinating match up spread, but the event went rather poorly. Specifically, I lost to two Gardevoir ex decks where I was able to get turn 2 Torrential Pump. The issue here was I was no longer playing on PTCGL, where players would quickly concede after this. Instead my opponents were able to stabilize and my lack of experience maintaining the resources in the late game against Gardevoir came back to bite me.
To say I was down bad would be an understatement. I was considering things like my friend’s home brew of N’s Zoroark ex/Ethan’s Typhlosion. “Regular” Zoroark decks still held appeal, but I was so afraid of playing against everything that was not the top of the meta. For Worlds, Zoroark could rely on its good matchups into Dragapult ex variants and Gardevoir while teching heavily for Gholdengo to tilt things in their favor. Beyond that, the positive matchups were hard to find. In a wider field that a regional was likely to offer, this kind of matchup spread was noticeably less appealing to me.
I had one more League Challenge to play in before officially deciding, and here I decided to go back to Gholdengo Joltik Box. Jolting Charge and Amp You Very Much are really good attacks, and the consistency boost of Coin Bonus alleviated some of my previous concerns.
Again, the challenge went well enough. I ended up going 3-2, losing a game against Charizard ex where I did not see an energy of any sort for five turns and then a game against Raging Bolt ex where they were able to knock out my Pikachu ex on turn two with a combination of Slither Wing, Energy Switch, Professor Sada’s Vitality, and Prime Catcher. Thems the breaks sometimes. While the results with Joltik had been good enough, something still did not feel right.
This is where I have to reference regular conversations on my podcast, Ancient Wisdom. I have long acknowledged that I believed that Dragapult ex was the best deck in the format, with it occasionally vacillating between Dusknoir variants and more methodical, grindier versions. I never put much time into the deck because I did not find it terribly enjoyable to play online for fun when I was not preparing for an event, fully knowing that it provided a lot of things I enjoyed in a deck when I was going to an event. Given this, I felt like I was too far behind to catch up with people who had been playing Dragapult essentially non-stop for the last seven months or so.
But the more I chewed on that, the more I realized this was, to an extent, in my control. Was I going to fully catch up to the professional PTCG grinders? Certainly not. But could I commit enough time to close the gap against the rest? That was up to me. Furthermore, if I thought the gap between me and the rest was less than the gap between the ceiling of the decks I was testing and Dragapult, what was holding me back?
I bounced this logic off my co-host, DJ Keener, and he agreed it was worth giving some time to. I was familiar enough with Gholdengo Joltik that if I were to sink a few days into Dragapult, just to see, I would be fine if I ended up defaulting back to Joltik. So I proceeded to play 100 games online over the better part of three days.
Turns out, Dragapult ex is broken and I do like. Go figure. So I am likely playing that this weekend, taking inspiration from Tord Reklev’s and Kai Wainwright’s lists from Frankfurt Regionals. Which leads to my last topic for the week: what happened at the first events of the new season.
There were two events to kick off the season, the aforementioned Frankfurt Regional Championship as well as another regional in Monterrey. Between the two events the play rate data has somewhat shifted since the World Championships, as expected.
Monterrey (1620 players):
Day 2:
Gholdengo ex - 22.2%
Dragapult ex - 19.3%
Gardevoir ex - 14.2%
Raging Bolt ex/Teal Mask Ogerpon ex - 13.5%
Charizard ex - 6.9%
Tera Box - 5.8%
Top 8: 4 Gardevoir ex, 2 Tera Box, 1 Dragapult ex/Charizard ex, 1 Charizard ex
Frankfurt (2431 players):
Day 1:
Dragapult ex Dusknoir - 14.6%
Raging Bolt ex/Teal Mask Ogerpon ex - 12.2%
Gholdengo ex - 11.5%
Gardevoir ex - 10.2%
Charizard ex - 7.2%
Gholdengo Joltik Box - 6.9%
Day 2:
Dragapult ex Dusknoir - 14.9%
Raging Bolt ex/Teal Mask Ogerpon ex - 11.9%
Gardevoir ex - 10.7%
Gholdengo ex - 10.2%
Tera Box - 9.1%
Gholdengo ex Joltik Box - 8.4%
Top Cut: 3 Dragapult ex, 3 Tera Box, 2 Gardevoir ex, Joltik Box, Gholdengo ex, Greninja ex/Pidgeot ex
Please note, the data for Monterrey combines the Gholdengo variants and Dragapult variants while Frankfurt noticeably delineates. This is relevant, for instance, because Gholdengo goes from third to most played if you combine the two for Frankfurt. It also goes from negatively converting to positively converting from Day 1 to Day 2. This kind of information allows us to better prepare for an evolving format.
So the biggest story of the weekend has to be Gardevoir ex. Tell me if you have heard this before. The player base at large was starting to write off Gardevoir place in the meta game. Then, an elite testing group (usually involving Henry Chao) decides to play the deck and dominates.
There were 12 players using the same 60 card list to make the second phase of competition across both events, with three in the top four of Monterrey and claiming both top spots. This is astounding for a deck that continues to do this. The list does not stand out so much as anything terribly unique, but the consistency is clear. This is a format defining deck, as it has been since it was released all the way back in Scarlet and Violet base set and the dominance persists.
Beyond that, there was plenty of unique across the board. One of the top Dragapult variants from Frankfurt included a 2-1-2 Blaziken line as well as Pecharunt, Chi-Yu and Elgyem. Greninja ex topped this event. Conkeldur was in top 16. There is still clearly room for innovation in this format.
Tera Box, finally, proves the perseverance and volatility of any given format. Prior to Worlds, this deck had fallen off to a large extent. Then there was some hype about it being well positioned in a Black Bolt/White Flare world. Now it adds five top cuts to its’ resume, proving it is a force to be respected.
Pittsburgh is likely to be a bit different given the regional differences between Europe, Mexico, and the United States, but there is plenty we can glean from this. Dragapult ex, Gholdengo ex, Gardevoir ex, and Raging Bolt ex are the top dogs of the format. Tera Box, Pidgeot/Stage 2 ex decks, and Joltik decks are hot on their heels. But creativity abounds. It is going to be a really fun season.
Dr. Strange(love), or, How I learned to stop worrying and Love Magic
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