I took my beloved pet deck Flareon to Pleasanton Regionals two weeks
ago in California (I'm an SF native so it wasn't very far) The looming
threats of BART striking the whole weekend plus having barely two to
three hours of sleep AND being sick made my performance more lackluster
than I had wished.
However,as far as I knew, I think I
was the only one playing it. I switched back last minute to running
Fighting energy, a Landy EX and Stunfisk and stuck another Leafeon for
the Blastoise match-up.
I'm surprised I managed to play even
slightly coherently and did better than I normally do at tournaments. I
did end up dropping after round 4 because I nearly lost my lunch during
the match (though the poor fellow didn't know it). I managed to make the
day better by having James Good sign a Ducklett Card, meeting Aaron
Zheng aka Cybertron, the founder of Nugget Bridge and Alakapimp.
Seeing
the results of this Regionals and Arizona's, straight Darkrai with a
few choice tech's is definitely the play. However, in a swiss format
like this, you are more likely to run against your bad match-ups as I
did in mine. Rouge is always harder to pilot in an uncertain meta and I
didn't mind blowing the 20 buck to get a glimpse before the new rule
changes-which is why I'm not sad I didn't go to "the Dark side" last
minute as I always loved Darkrai as a meta deck.
I
won't go over specific rounds, but I had such a diverse set of rounds
that you'd be hard-presed to do well with a rouge in such an untested
environment.
Round 1-Toolbox
Round 2-Genesect/Virizion w/ Balloons and Lugia
Round 3-Plasma w/Absol
Round 4-Darkrai/Garbo (this round I was deathly ill at this point and dropped with a 1-3-1 record
I'll
be shelving Flareon for now until I see what X/Y brings to the table,
but I think that with the oncoming Yveltal EX, I'll feel more strongly
about going back to Darkrai. I don't have much in the way of writing
material as I'm currently being slammed by school but I'll definitely
pick things up again when the next set comes out in November.
Bicycle Away!
Kalyst
