“R.S.V.P.” —The Easiest Way to Get a Worlds Invite!

Good morning, good evening, and goodnight everybody! With Worlds right around the corner, it’s a bittersweet moment for a lot of players — the conclusion of a season, followed by the rebirth of another. It’s a different feeling that varies from person to person, but overall no matter what, everybody grows as a player. I’m personally excited for this World Championships as it’ll be my first day one ever! It’s exciting to have to fight my way through the grassroots in order to obtain my admission to the hot ticket: day two. If you crack day three, that’s how you know you’re in the real money, though!

With the new set of Celestial Storm releasing, there’s too many cards to pick from that emerge from it. As players, we have to make educated decisions as to what to play, but what if I told you that you didn’t have to? What if I told you that your decision was already made for you for basically every tournament? This article essentially has two major sections.

• The Easiest Way to Get Your Invite
• The Easiest Way Into Day Two of Worlds

These are both “click-baitey” titles, but I promise that they’re both researched statements. The reason why they work? They’re developed on the same premise: playing the odds. If we play the odds to be in our favour, then we’ll have no problems! As a player, this may mean that we take some L’s here and there, but our win percentage will far outweigh the cons in our plan.

The Easiest Way to Get Your Invite

You might be reading this as a player who is looking in from a glass window — you just whiffed your invite going into Worlds, or you didn’t put in enough effort because you burned out too early in the season. You tried, tried, and tried some more, but in the end it wasn’t enough in order to secure 400 CP. So what do you do next? I think the easiest way to address the following is by talking about the adverse side of things, the hardest way to get your invite. Here are some factors that make it difficult to get your invite:

• Don’t practice
• Don’t do your research
• Give up

This sounds too obvious right? Let’s talk about the flip-side.

Step 1: Exclusively Play the Best Deck Available

So you’re at a point in the season where you’re about to go into a Regionals, and you have no clue what to play. 99% of the time, you can just play the best deck! This is the biggest trick ever to getting your invite, and it works every single time. When you enter a Regionals with 700 – 1000 players in your division, you have to be able to handle all sorts of scenarios, and in most cases, the best deck currently can handle those. Let’s take for example, Buzzwole-GX  / Lycanroc-GX (BuzzRoc). BuzzRoc was so successful because it was able to take down every single deck in the format with its brute strength, and even go 50-50 in most cases against its most popular counter, Malamar! This is an example of a BDIF being in the upper-crust of all decks in the history of Pokemon — the only thing that can take it down is its own consistency. Here’s an example of a story from a Regional Championships that occurred this season.

I was working a lot in the middle of the season, and was very busy with a co-op for my semester — I needed a deck that was going to net me CP, but I also wanted to win the tournament. Going against my own morals, I knew these were two very adverse goals, and with my lack of judgement, I almost played Greninja! This is something that I’d advise against going into any tournament if you’re trying to get your invite, because Greninja is very high-risk/high-reward when it comes to CP. One day before the Toronto Regional Championships, I was on my way to work when I came downstairs to see a very sleepy Jimmy Pendarvis on my couch. He had stayed over the previous night with Igor because my brother Zach had just come back from a tournament the previous day. Upon Jimmy waking up, I asked him what he’d play if he was in my case: somebody who just needed CP in order to stay in the run for a Worlds invite. In his sleepy somber without hesitation, he said: “BuzzRoc”. At the time, this was the indisputable BDIF, so when I asked him why, he looked taken aback. He replied with the statement that is the backbone for this article:

“Why would you not play the BDIF at all tournaments? If you don’t, you put yourself behind the curve, and at an automatic disadvantage.”

Now, by no means am I saying that if you play any deck that isn’t the socially valued “BDIF”, that you’ll instantly lose — but you’ll statistically be more likely to earn a lesser placing than those playing the BDIF (whether that is marginally or not). Those who play the BDIF in tournament sometimes have an off day where they all bomb, and those are notorious for people celebrating (i.e. no BuzzRoc in the Top 8 of NAIC), however that celebration is warranted because it is so unlikely!

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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