San Diego Synopsis — Checking out the Results and Moving On
The San Diego, California Regionals has finished and a somewhat “new” rogue deck won the event – a Garchomp and Giratina-GX Toolbox deck, the evolution of Gustavo Wada’s Top 8 list from the Latin America International Championships. This was not expected and my testing circle didn’t even have it on our “list of decks” in the metagame. It served Justin Bokhari well, giving him plenty of different options to win games in creative ways and he got his first Regionals win; huge congrats to him! In the finals, he was joined by another rogue deck, a Lucario and Melmetal-GX build with Welder for Energy acceleration. This deck saw a spark back at Tennessee Regionals in October but wasn’t seen again until now. Its pilot went as far to call it the “best deck in the format”. While I’m not too sure about that, it’s certainly a strong deck. Here are all the decks that made Day 2.
San Diego Regionals Review
Day 2 metagame
- 12 Mewtwo and Mew-GX Toolbox
- 8 Arceus and Dialga and Palkia-GX
- 5 Malamar Toolbox
- 4 Pidgeotto Control
- 4 Gardevoir and Sylveon-GX
- 3 Welder Toolbox
- 3 Persian-GX Toolbox
- 3 Blacephalon / Pidgeotto
- 2 Lucario and Melmetal-GX
- 2 Garchomp and Giratina-GX Toolbox
- 2 Florges Control
- 2 Blacephalon-GX / Naganadel
- 1 Welder / Green's Exploration
- 1 Quagsire / Silvally-GX
- 1 Pikachu and Zekrom-GX
- 1 Pheromosa and Buzzwole-GX / Trevenant and Dusknoir-GX
- 1 Alolan Persian-GX / Spiritomb
From this we got the following in Top 8:
- 1. Garchomp and Giratina-GX Toolbox
- 2. Lucario and Melmetal-GX
- 3. Arceus and Dialga and Palkia-GX
- 4. Arceus and Dialga and Palkia-GX
- 5. Malamar Toolbox
- 6. Malamar Toolbox
- 7. Arceus and Dialga and Palkia-GX
- 8. Blacephalon / Pidgeotto
The finals decks were the biggest surprises at this event. Additionally, there was the Persian-GX Toolbox that missed Top 8. Using Roxie to spread damage with Koffing and Weezing, you can one-shot many different Pokemon with Persian-GX eventually and if not you can spread damage around with Tapu Lele. Naganadel-GX is played to use Stinger GX against Tag Team Pokemon-GX decks to win the game the turn after using it.
Quick interlude, the new Sword and Shield set for the Pokemon TCG comes out on February 7, that means it’ll be legal for the Oceania International Championships but nothing earlier. From now until then, the next American Regionals is Expanded in Texas, but for pretty much everything else we’ll be using the same Standard format as in California. There’s little reason to do a bigger breakdown of conversion rates, deck popularity and more with this format coming to a close in a few months, but it is useful to garner some more knowledge about some of these lesser known decks.
This concludes the public portion of this article.
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