Whale of a Time — Jay’s Dallas Regional Championship Report

High tide, trainers! I’ve just returned from the Dallas Regional Championships, and let me tell you — I had a whale of a time! The tournament was full of surprises, including the winner, Riley Hulbert, sporting a single copy of Red Card in his winning list. He used this inclusion to overcome Isaiah’s onslaught of Exeggcute to fill up his Bench in the finals, and eventually brought home the trophy.

I designed my deck to beat the deck that eventually won the entire championship — it’s just a shame I couldn’t break through to day two in order to demonstrate that. I actually started off the tournament 6-0, and fell into some potholes a little later on. Today, I’ll go over my Wailord-EX list that I used to pilot to a 58th place finish, my matchups, what went wrong, and my final thoughts on things. Let’s swim to it!

The List

For those of you confused by this deck list, the concept is to take hits with Wailord-EX massive 250 HP, heal that damage off with Max Potion, AZ, or Acerola, then discard our opponent’s resources with a wide variety of disruptive options. The goal is to eventually drain our opponent of all of their resources and win by decking them out. This isn’t a common path to achieve victory in the Pokemon TCG, but in the case of Wailord it is very, very effective.

Card Choices

While this is seemingly standard for a Wailord list, there are a few unique features that you may have dismissed upon the initial look-over:

Hoopa and Xurkitree-GX

While these are common inclusions, they are rarely seen together in the same Wailord list. The reason why I play both is because they are unique singleton copy cards that can force the opponent to dedicate resources toward eliminating them. For example, if your opponent is playing an entirely GX-/EX-based deck, they will be forced to commit to Hex Maniac in order to OHKO a Hoopa because of its Scoundrel Guard Ability. The Xurkitree-GX poses a similar threat, but instead of GX/EX decks, it instead exposes the vulnerable points of decks centered around Special Energy (think Night March and most Zoroark-GX builds).

Note that while you don’t need to play both in every game, you want to use at least one in most games in order to spawn what is known as a “seven-Prize game”. By forcing our opponent to take out our Hoopa, they’ll still have five Prize cards left to take, after which we’ll feed them three hefty Wailord-EX which is technically seven total Prize cards. Xurkitree can also create a scenario like this by using Lighting GX to give our opponent an additional Prize card.

Both of these cards supplement the deck quite nicely by reminding us of Wailord’s grindy tactics: prolong the game as long as possible, and remove all of our opponent’s resources from play.

Four Tropical Beach

Most Wailord decks opted to play a single copy of Parallel City over the fourth copy of Tropical Beach — my deck list was entirely focused on finding outs to Tropical Beach. I figured that my deck could handle a plethora of scenarios if I was given the tools in my hand! This idea was initially spawned from my personal testing partner, William Wallace. To accompany the fourth Tropical Beach, I made sure to include a full suite of four Skyla as well as a copy of Computer Search. I found that, in most testing games, if my opponent was able to remove Tropical Beach from play while following up with a Ghetsis, I would lose most of the time if I didn’t have another copy in hand. By playing all of these cards to search my deck for Stadiums, I was able to overcome this hurdle and pilot my deck to its highest abilities.

Two Lusamine

Lusamine has been an awfully trendy card as of lately, mostly due to its ability to “chain” itself. If you have two copies of Lusamine in your deck, you have an infinite amount of Supporter cards at your disposal if you always opt to get back a Lusamine with your other Lusamine.

This is a unique card concept that can help decks that may have extra time on their hands; in this case, Wailord creates time by disrupting the opponent, so we have a ton of gaps to properly execute a Lusamine chain. I include two copies for this purpose, as well as to retrieve any Tropical Beach from my discard that may have been bumped out since Lusamine can’t be shuffled back into the deck with Ghetsis.

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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