“My Eye on Anaheim: Top 16 Masters Report with Decidueye/Vileplume”
Today’s tournament report is written with players of all skill levels in mind, as well as lay people who know nothing about Pokémon cards! Whether you’re here for the story or the strategy, I hope all of you who take the time to read this report enjoy it very much. Most of all, I hope it all makes sense!
Table of Contents:
–Part 1–
1. A (Re)introduction
2. A Sorta-Kinda Comeback, and Where We're at Today
3. The Importance of Anaheim
4. The Reasoning Behind Decidueye
5. The List: Analysis and Explanations
1. A (Re)introduction
My name is John Kettler, and I’m a life-long fan of the Pokémon Trading Card Game. I’ve been playing since this game first came out wayyyyy back in my childhood (“something-something you know you’re a 90’s kid when…”). I then became inspired by the online community to become competitive in 2003, when I made a name for myself as a player of unique, strange, and fun decks ,most of which I made on my own or with close teammates. Extended to our complete network, there were around two-three dozen of us spending the better part of 2003-2007 monopolizing the scholarship and travel awards available.
Later I began college, and as such saw a slight but insignificant slip in my results. But while I stopped dominating events the way I once did, I stayed relevant through founding the site you’re now reading: HeyTrainer.org. Founded on the ideals of free speech and free dumb, HeyTrainer.org was a reaction to a community with very few good spaces for the adult players – ironic, since at least 70% of the people who play Pokémon cards competitively are adults! Henceforth, I became less known for the playing, and better known as “Mr. HeyTrainer.”
However, we’re all three-dimensional people, so naturally our passions extend beyond any one particular thing. One such other great passion of mine is law – specifically areas with cutting-edge political questions such as immigration and family law. Finally (and most importantly), I’ve found myself in a serious relationship of three years! Thus, I balance a lot of things these days, and some of those things take priority over others. As much as I love Pokémon, I want to advance my career more than I want to play this game; and because we’re long distance, I will easily choose spending time with my girlfriend over playing Pokémon any day of the week.
The result was an erosion in my obsession for the game. Rather than stay well ahead of the curve as I once did, I began to lose my touch in both playing and deck building. Unlike older name players who aged like fine wine, I looked more like Casey at the Bat, putting up wildly inconsistent performances from 2012-2014. Some of this can be chalked up to the change of invitational structure, which emphasizes lots of tournament success over a few hot runs, but ultimately, not winning a National or World Championship falls squarely under your shoulders. I also neglected my poor brainchild HeyTrainer.org, which – although inspiring countless of the major Facebook groups which exist today – is now a Rocky Balboa in the Face(book) of countless Apollo Creeds.
2. A “Sorta-Kinda” Comeback, and Where We’re at Today
Starting with the middle of 2014 and continuing today, my tournament performances improved substantially. I started earning invites again, learned how to stress out less, became more honest with myself as a player, and found inspiration all over again. Johnny got his jam back, but there was one thing missing: a revived HeyTrainer!
Although I came dangerously close to closing this site for good, I decided that the forum once famous for its “anything goes” mindset needed to keep on existing for a new generation of players sick of the Facebook groups. I also saw a drop in quality of a lot of the “premium article” websites: places which charge players money to read articles meant to improve their performances at tournaments. Although notable exceptions exist for both, including but not limited to the HeyFonte Facebook page and the Pokebeach premium article program, I determined that our community has a void which desperately needs to be filled.
Therefore, the principal focus here is pretty simple: an increase in high-quality, free content for players, coupled with an unstoppable passion for this quirky card game of ours!
3. The Importance of Anaheim
Starting with the current season, the official organizing body for Pokémon tournaments – Play! Pokémon – increased the prize support of Regional Championships: prestigious events which represented the populations of several states or provinces. What once saw a prize of just a few boxes now sees a first place cash award of $5,000, as well as greater implications for multiple free trips across the world year-round! Unfortunately, all good things have a tradeoff, and the tradeoff this season was a severe cut in local tournaments, including individual State Championship event. The end result is that you now have a very hard time pursuing a competitive season outside of a few hours’ distance; otherwise, you won’t get the achievement points (Championship points) necessary to get free stuff. You also won’t have half a prayer to compete in the World Championships, the most prestigious and valuable tournament of the entire season!
Historically I love playing, but I also historically don’t like forking out tons of money to travel all over the world playing Pokémon. That’s why I have a harder time justifying tournament costs larger than the entry fee and a few bucks for gas.
A nice thing about living in Texas is that I never missed my local Regional Championship, meaning I had at least one good chance before the National and World Championships to test my mettle versus elite players in the real, non-online world. However, as mentioned earlier, I chose not to go to this year’s Regional Championship because it was scheduled the weekend of New Year’s. New Year’s was special for two reasons: it was my first time to celebrate a New Year in person with my girlfriend; and the First of January happens to be my mother’s birthday! For those reasons, it ultimately made more sense to skip the Regional entirely.
Don’t mistake prioritizing the important things in life for a lack of love for the game, though: I was still hungry for some good performances, and so the idea of flying to Anaheim for a Regional Championship came to be. I thought, “If I do well enough here, I can justify playing in more tournaments! If not, then let’s just roll the dice at the National Championship.”
4. The Reasoning Behind Decidueye
And thus, I decided that I should be perfectly willing to bet it on a new, risky concept out of Sun and Moon: Decidueye GX. The Pokémon Trading Card Game is mostly about getting Damage onto opposing Pokémon, and this card lets you put Damage in play…for free. You don’t even have to PAY anything!
Free and powerful…Sound familiar?
Well, other than that one little joke, I don’t need to spend much time telling you about the merits of Decidueye GX itself. That’s because I’ve already done it twice: once last week, and again the week before that. The purpose of this section, however, is to address why I risked my season on such an unconventional, new concept.
As mentioned above, this tournament was the bellwether for my entire season: If I did well, then I would play at more Regionals; if I did not do well, then I’d stake it all on Intercontinentals – a.k.a., the Artist Formerly Known as Nationals. So since my season’s path depended on this single Regional, I had much less pressure on me to play something safe. This freedom from safety in turn gave me the freedom to stick with what would otherwise be a very scary deck: After all, it’s a deck centered around getting at least two Stage Two Pokémon in play in a format full of Basics! How could that win games?!
Well, Basics can’t do nearly as much when all of their absurdly powerful Tools and Items aren’t there to assist them, right? Plus, the ability to deal Damage anywhere in the field combined with Item lock means you can even stick these powerful cards in unwinnable positions. Also, I uh…played a deck exactly like this at Nationals 2012, in an era even worse for Evolutions and better for Basics. And at that tournament I got 10th out of over a thousand people.
That memory suddenly put a lot more wind in my sail for Decidueye, so I knew it was an insane enough concept to work. All it needed was a good enough list…
5. The List: Analysis and Explanations
Here is the list I used, in all its crazy glory!
Does this look familiar? It should, because I spent a whole fourth of my last blog entry talking about Decidueye! As I mention in that article and in my Quick Search entry, my preferred way to run the list is Vileplume, and the changes to make the list I posted there to Vileplume were not that hard.
From the Vileplume-free list I posted, literally all you have to do is cut VS Seekers and Fighting Fury Belt. No giant mystery – just don’t run the stuff you either won’t use under Item lock, or won’t want to play before Item lock!
Let’s look at the choices in detail:
4-4-4 Decidueye GX line: Decidueye is your everything, so of course it makes sense to run a decent-sized line of it. However, I have multiple reasons for why I run a maximum count. First, the more pieces you run, the more likely you will get your free Damage faster and in numerous quantities. Second, Decidueye GX’s GX Attack, Hollow Hunt GX, is incredibly important in smoothing out every aspect of our deck, but you won’t be getting it out nearly as often and when you need it without four! Finally, I’m fairly convinced that without a 4-4-4 line, you don’t have nearly as many swarming options as needed to last a full game.
2-2-2 Vileplume line: At first I started with a 3-3-3 line, but was inspired by Andrew “Russian Charizard” Wamboldt’s Lurantis/Vileplume article to give 2-3-3 a try. I quickly became addicted to the greater space, so I then dropped it down all the way to 2-2-2, which was just the sweet spot needed in order to fit all the variety tech attackers I wanted, which will be discussed below.
1 Lugia EX: Of all the Big Basics you could pair with Decidueye GX, Lugia EX is the strongest. Its Aero Ball Attack puts immediate offensive pressure on your opponent in any situation, and Feather Arrows combined with its second Attack, Deep Hurricane, allows for incredibly high Damage caps to be reached. With some careful planning, it’s not unheard of to position a One-Hit Knockout against a Mega Pokémon through Deep Hurricane! Lugia EX was by far my favorite Basic tech of the weekend.
1 Tauros GX: While Lugia EX is a great offensive hitter, Tauros GX is great for revenge kills and defensive positioning. If the opponent attacks a Tauros GX with even a medium-sized attack, you’re suddenly putting nearly all of the format in range for a one-shot KO. While Tauros had its moments, I was longing for a second Lugia EX more often than not, especially in the Mega Mewtwo matchup.
1 Jirachi XY67: Jirachi made it in as the 60th card because of a theory process I went through on the airplane right to the event. Since I was torn between about half a dozen tech Attackers for only 2-4 spots total, I went down the line and considered exactly which matchup each helped out in the most. This theorizing led me to conclude that I had two blind spots: Mewtwo/Garbodor and Mega Rayquaza. To help alleviate both of those matchups, I decided to run promo Jirachi exclusively for its Stardust Attack. Not only do I discard their few-and-far-between Double Colorless Energies, but slow down a very fast, aggressive assault, buying me time to double my Feather Arrow output. Although Jirachi ultimately didn’t win me any of my four matches versus those decks in practice, I think it has the potential to turn both of those matchups in your favor. Perhaps the safer, cleaner play would be to run Meowth Fates Collide, which we’ll discuss in a bit.
3 Shaymin EX: Shaymin EX’s Set Up is the heart of nearly all draw power in the current format, and my deck is no exception. However, the difficult decision for me was whether I wanted to run three or four copies. A deck featuring Forest of Giant Plants for fast evolutions is about speed, so of course you would want a higher-than-average count of a card capable of getting your deck size below 30 on turn one. What I found in testing is that with the fourth Shaymin EX, I saw diminishing returns, to the point where its removal was hardly noticed.
4 Sycamore: I’ve seen many fast setup decks survive without a maximum count of Sycamore, but when you aren’t running any copies of VS Seeker to get them back, it’s essential to run as many as you can.
3 N: Hand replenishment is great, and hand disruption under Item lock is even better. What makes N particularly special in this deck however is its great synergy with Feather Arrow Knock outs. When your Opponent has a heavily damaged EX Pokémon with little health left, but is currently two prizes ahead of you, N lets you get the advantage of a bigger hand, score the Knock Out on the heavily damaged EX, and then maybe even score another KO with an Attack. This suddenly means that thanks to N, you get to create an even bigger comeback win than normal.
2 Lysandre: While I felt fine with the above Supporter counts, running only two Lysandre copies was one of the toughest decisions I had to make. Part of having a solid lock with Decidueye GX and Vileplume includes having the wherewithal to bring up a high Retreat Cost Benched Pokémon and snipe the actual threats. For that reason, I actually ran three copies through the majority of my testing. I finally decided to bring it down to two because I was confident in Hollow Hunt GX getting back the used Lysandre copies, as well as to keep my Set Up Abilities from yielding fewer cards.
4 Ultra Ball: Gets anything; thins your hand out for stronger Set Up Abilities.
4 Trainers’ Mail: Your games are often made or broken on how fast you can fetch a Forest of Giant Plants.
3 Level Ball: The count on Level Ball was one of the most contested aspects of my list, but rarely because it wasn’t useful. Rather, I thought about all the other possibilities that could be obtained at the expense of this quick, dirty way to fetch every one of your pre-evolution cards. I came down as low as one in order to fit a nifty little idea (more on that later), but when that idea was ruled out, three Level Ball became my final choice: enough to fetch your lines consistently, but not so many they detract from your deck’s versatility.
2 Revitalizer: Revitalizer is an incredible way to fix bad Professor Sycamore discards, make your explosive starts even more explosive, or just help you get around games with bad prizes. I actually started out with three Revitalizer but cut it to two due largely in part to the desire to keep my Set Up draws from being clogged, but also because I determined that really careful playing foregoes any need for the third copy. It’s a large reason why I took my typical prize-searching process much more seriously: because I knew that while I had some slack in case something was prized or discarded, I didn’t have much!
2 Float Stone: Due to my confidence in maintaining Feather Arrow aggression regardless of what my Active was, I actually spent much of testing with one or even zero Float Stone. That meant if a Vileplume got brought into the Active position by Lysandre, I was totally ready for that. However, I determined that not running enough Float Stone copies made splashing in tech Basic attackers completely unfeasible, so keeping space for that many copies became a necessity.
4 Forest of Giant Plants: Save the rainforests; fight climate change!
4 Double Colorless Energy: Nothing special here – 4 DCE is just really good for everything including attacking, retreating, and getting Shaymins out of play. Hypothetically you could run fewer than a maximum count if you were only running Decidueye and Vileplume, especially since you have Hollow Hunt GX to get them back. However, the inclusion of the tech attackers all but forces you to have this many.
4 Grass Energy: Unlike running two copies of Revitalizer and Lysandre, there are many things that can happen outside of your control if you ran any less than four Grass Energy in this deck. Not running VS Seekers means you will constantly want to have access to Hollow Hunt GX, Decidueye swarms, or even the ability to pay Vileplume’s hefty three Retreat cost. Running fewer than four also risks putting otherwise easy matchups in the tossup column, like Greninja and Waterbox. Grass Weakness doesn’t mean anything if you can’t ever attack with Razor Leaf, right?!
Other Possibilities
Meowth, FTC: It does a clean 50 damage to anything in play as long as it has Damage on it already – pretty neat, huh? Combined with Decidueye GX however, it becomes an immediate OHKO threat to any small Basic, most import of which is Trubbish BKP. Most lists running Garbodor BKP and its Ability-locking Garbotoxin have to wait a turn before evolving their Trubbish, so a Meowth strike can prevent what could otherwise be a very ugly board situation. I’ve actually switched it into my current list on the Pokémon Trading Card Game Online, and it’s working as well as I knew it could. The only downside is that I have nothing to tilt my Rayquaza matchup other than just getting set up first.
Trevenant EX, PRC: The only thing that can prevent locking a high Retreat cost Pokémon in the active position while you go to town on the rest of your opponent’s threats is a pesky Float Stone, or reduced Retreat cost via Float Stone. What better way to deal with both of those than a Pokémon which locks the active with Dark Forest, without any hope of Retreat beyond a Pokémon Ranger or Olympia? Trevenant EX is also great because it lets you work on killing two, possibly three different Pokémon all at once! That said, I think the list does a fine enough job keeping Pokémon locked as-is, and it’s not high up on the list of choices.
Beedrill EX, XY157: Beedrill EX, unlike Meowth, is an unconditional way to rid yourself of a Tooled-up Garbodor while Vileplume is also in play. I like it almost as much as Meowth, especially because its second Attack can risk big damage for only two Energy, but the Meowth and Jirachi are both much more versatile in shoring up even matchups. It’s also a very vulnerable EX to potentially leave Active with as much as a DCE and Grass on it.
M Beedrill EX, XY158: This is my garbage gimmick idea. By Mega Evolving an already-included Beedrill EX, you now create an even more frightening lock via auto paralysis and quadruple poison, thus accelerating anything you had in mind. The idea is 100% untested, and thus gets no more respect from me than “crazy-awful 11th hour idea,” but actually could be a really scary deck I you could somehow fit it.
1-1 Raticate EVO: Rattata is another decent way to deal with Float Stoned Trubbish. However, my favorite theory was to put opponents in horrible positions with Raticate’s Crunch, discarding all Energy while you Feather Arrowed from the safety of the Bench. Shadowy Bite is also an incredible way to punish decks with lots of Special Energy.
X number of Celebi, XY93: Celebi is cool because it can augment Decidueye’s Feather Arrow Damage targets while offering what could be on a good flip the deck’s best stall wall via Leap through Time. I ultimately determined that because of how common Silent Lab, Garbodor, and Hex Maniac are, the last thing I needed was a copy of a card that had no hope of significantly improving any matchup past Gyarados AOR (which you shouldn’t have a problem against anyways).
2-4 Reserved Ticket: One of the wildest versions of this list that appeared to have some success was running copies of Reserved Ticket. Much of this deck’s problem is not drawing cards, but getting a copy of Forest of Giant Plants out into play. One solution I settled on was to run copies of Reserved Ticket, which despite relying on a flip increases your odds of rigging the top card with Forest. I ultimately settled on not running this for two reasons: first, I put a lot of premium on deck space dedicated to actual attackers; second, I wasn’t too keen on playing an Item that doesn’t actually thin your deck.